Eating and Climate Change

The course is winding down, but Tom just pointed me to a fascinating New York Times article on how eating habits contribute to global warming.

I can’t resist posting the link and an excerpt. In sum, the author convincingly argues against the often-repeated advice that the most effective way for individuals to cut their carbon footprint is by avoiding eating meat. Turns out that this rule of thumb is too simple.

Still, there are numerous reasonable ways to reduce our individual contributions to climate change through our food choices. Because it takes more resources to produce meat and dairy than, say, fresh locally grown carrots, it’s sensible to cut back on consumption of animal-based foods. More important, all eaters can lower their global warming contribution by following these simple rules: avoid processed foods and those from industrialized farms; reduce food waste; and buy local and in season.

 

DIY Carbon Mitigation

A recent study found that the US could cut carbon emissions by 7% using off-the-shelf technology and for little cost or payback for up-front  costs—and little in the way of lifestyle changes. There were 17 well-known actions included in the model, such as

• driving a fuel-efficient car
• insulating existing homes
• installing energy-saving lightbulbs
• installing low-flow showerheads
• changing furnace filters at the recommended time
• line-drying clothes when possible
• driving the speed limit
• carpooling when possible

According to the news report on this paper,

Until now, no study has calculated the total amount of carbon emissions that would be slashed via these measures, the likelihood that people will undertake them, and how many households have already implemented each item.

Even figuring widespread resistance to some of the advice–such as obeying speed limits and carpooling–these ordinary measures, if universally adopted, could trim U.S. carbon emissions by over 100 million metric tons–more than 7%–within a decade. Given that the United States contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than any other country except China, even this much change would be significant.

News stories

Story I

Tim sent me this link about the rape case in California, which happened a little over a week ago now.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/CRIME/10/28/california.gang.rape.bystander/index.html

He points out that this is linked to our discussion of the Genovese case. I brought this case up in relation to the article about famine by Peter Singer to point out that there can be moral culpability in doing nothing.

Warning: this case is difficult to hear about. The CNN article makes it abundantly clear that many people are both morally and legally at fault for the girl’s suffering. But I think the article struggles (as any of us would) to explain how it could have happened.

Story II

Daniel passed on this link to a method of cutting carbon emissions. He writes, “the simple task of having a white rooftop saves a substantial amount on the energy cost of cooling buildings. The US Energy Secretary Steven Chu says that white rooftops and roadways would have the same effect as removing the world’s cars for 11 years.”

3rd Argument Outline

ETHICS AND CLIMATE CHANGE

Due Monday, November 9.

Throughout his book The Ethics of Climate Change, James Garvey argues that climate change has ethical dimensions, and he claims that policy-makers and the public (in the UK and the US) are not taking these dimensions seriously enough.

 

Garvey’s arguments are wide-ranging, from the question of who has responsibility to the question of whether policy actions should focus on countries with high rates of per capita consumption or on countries with growing populations and growing energy use.

Frame one ethical issue and propose a way of working through it based on one of our four ethical frameworks. The moral problem you propose may be broad (e.g., that people living today have a moral responsibility not to ignore the problem of climate change) or it may be specific (e.g. that the U.S. should invest in reconfiguring the electrical grid in ways that encourage the development of renewable forms of energy). If you choose to  evaluate a very specific policy proposal, then please give a citation to a source of information about it. [Hint: narrower, more focused problems usually make for more successful arguments because there is less confusion about what the issue is.]

The ethical frameworks we have studied include deontology, utilitarianism, virtue ethics, and the justice framework. I encourage you to try to apply a framework that you have not used so far because working through this assignment is one way of preparing for the final exam.

This outline is different from previous ones in that you may use up to 5 sentences to describe the issue. Please continue to write concisely. You may find that you can describe the issue you are framing in only 1 sentence. That would be fine. But a very specific policy proposal may require more background.

You may perform additional internet research, but please cite your sources. Additional research is not required, but I do give credit for research that improves your work.

Picking a Climate Mitigation Strategy

In class and in comments, some of you have raised the question of whether the process of climate change is so far along that our attempts at mitigation are pointless. In particular, someone pointed out that it can take a century or more to capture or reduce the CO2 that has already been released into the atmosphere and tens of thousands of years for it to be permanently removed through geological processes.

Since that’s the case, how much of an impact will a slow implementation of alternatives to fossil fuels have?

I mentioned this article in the New York Times, which argues that one possibility is to focus on a major source of methane in the atmosphere. Methane is produced at lower levels than CO2, but it has strong effects. It says:

Unlike carbon dioxide, which can remain in the atmosphere a century or more once released, methane persists in the air for about 10 years. So aggressively reining in emissions now would mean that far less of the gas would be warming the earth in a decade or so.

Methane is also a valuable target because while it is far rarer and more fleeting than carbon dioxide, ton for ton, it traps 25 times as much heat, researchers say.

Yet while federal and international programs have encouraged companies to seek and curb methane emissions from gas and oil wells, pipelines and tanks, aggressive efforts are still far from the industry norm.

As a result, some three trillion cubic feet of methane leak into the air every year, with Russia and the United States the leading sources. (This amount has the warming power of emissions from over half the coal plants in the United States.) And government scientists and industry officials caution that the real figure is almost certainly higher.

Another contributor to global warming is black soot, and it has an even lower residence time than methane. Here’s another NYTimes article:

“In terms of climate change we’re driving fast toward a cliff, and this could buy us time,” said Dr. Ramanathan.

[D]ecreasing soot could have a rapid effect. Unlike carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for years, soot stays there for a few weeks. Converting to low-soot cookstoves would remove the warming effects of black carbon quickly, while shutting a coal plant takes years to substantially reduce global CO2 concentrations.

But the awareness of black carbon’s role in climate change has come so recently that it was not even mentioned as a warming agent in the 2007 summary report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that pronounced the evidence for global warming to be “unequivocal.” Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of environmental engineering at Stanford, said that the fact that black carbon was not included in international climate efforts was “bizarre,” but “partly reflects how new the idea is.” The United Nations is trying to figure out how to include black carbon in climate change programs, as is the federal government.

In last week’s Science magazine (the journal of the AAAS), an article evaluating climate change policy supports pursuing short-term and long-term climate mitigation efforts at the same time (and through two separate treaties).

Stacy C. Jackson writes

Thus, short- and medium-lived sources (black carbon, tropospheric ozone, and methane) must be regulated separately and dynamically. The long-term mitigation treaty should focus exclusively on steady reduction of long-lived pollutants. A separate treaty for short- and medium-lived sources should include standards that evolve based on periodic recommendations of an independent international scientific panel. The framework of “best available control technology” (strict) and “lowest achievable emissions rate” (stricter) from the U.S. Clean Air Act can be used as a model.

“Parallel Pursuit of Near-Term and Long-Term Climate Mitigation” Science 326 (Oct. 23 2009): 526-527.

I’ll post the article on MyCourses for anyone who’s interested in using it.

Fun with Paradoxes

In Chapter 3, Garvey relates the difficulty with assigning responsibility for the current climate change crisis to the sorites paradox, also called the paradox of the heap.

The general idea is that when something is made up of many, many little things, it’s difficult (if not logically impossible) to say that just one of those little things is what makes the big thing itself or, in another context, if very many minor actions cause something, then how causative is each of the little actions.

For example, if you have a few grains of sand, then it’s not a heap, but if you have millions of grains of sand, it’s definitely a heap. Say I take a heap of sand and start removing one grain at a time, at what point is the heap no longer a heap?

In the context of climate change, Garvey points out that what seems to absolve us individually from responsibility is that none of our individual actions is really contributing very much at all to the climate problem. In fact, this reason is sometimes given as a reason for inaction because if just one person stops adding to cumulative greenhouse gas emissions, their individual action won’t do much of anything to curb the problem. However, since the heap is made up of individuals, the only way to face up to the problem is to somehow address the collective.

Here’s a funny, if weird, comic about the sorites paradox. Or maybe it’s really about something else…

Source: Dinosaur Comics

And a Philosophical Film

Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

And so presumably the examined life is worth living, and the film Examined Life ought to be worth seeing! It’s a documentary about philosophers and received rave reviews.

The film features Peter Singer discussing the article we read last week, and Slavoj Zizek visiting a garbage dump to talk about environmental responsibility. Here’s the trailer:

 

Extra Credit: Films

We’ll watch a film in class on Wednesday about climate change.

There are many more films relevant to some of the topics that we’ve discussed in class than can possibly be shown in a quarter. But I do want to encourage you to broaden what you know, and film is a convenient medium for doing that.

I’ve given extra credit to various people for critiquing talks that they saw on campus or for taking extra steps to judge some of what we’ve read about, e.g. by extending the work we did on carbon footprints. There is a 5 point limit on extra credit, so it’s possible to do more than one small activity.

One option is to watch a film and write a short critique. The more you write, and the higher the quality, the more credit you receive. This would be an even more valuable activity (and therefore worth more credit), if you watched a film with friends and discussed it afterward.

Here is a list of documentary films on various environmental themes. Ethics is amenable to learning through the film medium because learning to think philosophically is not just about amassing knowledge but about identifying and thinking through problems and observing how others frame ethical problems. There are no doubt more films that I haven’t thought of. I’d love to hear your additional suggestions!

About our energy economy:
Who Killed the Electric Car?

About climate change:
An Inconvenient Truth

The 11th Hour

About food:
The Future of Food
Super Size Me
King Corn

Food, Inc.

About industrialization and natural environments:
Manufactured Landscapes
Koyaanisqatsi and Powaqqatsi

About the connection between natural and social environments:
Darwin’s Nightmare

Singer’s Postscript on Famine and Foreign Aid

Thanks, Chris, for the link to the article’s postscript.

Due to copyright restrictions (and your attention spans), I can’t reprint the whole thing, but here are excerpts that seem to address the objection that James and others raised in class. Peter Singer writes:

There are, however, some matters of emphasis that I might put differently if I were to rewrite the article, and the most important of these concerns the population problem. I still think that, as I wrote then, the view that famine relief merely postpones starvation unless something is done to check population growth is not an argument against aid, it is only an argument against the type of aid that should be given.

I would now, however, have given greater space to the discussion of the population problem; for I now think that there is a serious case for saying that if a country refuses to take any steps to slow the rate of its population growth, we should not give it aid. This is, of course, a very drastic step to take, and the choice it represents is a horrible choice to have to make; but if, after a dispassionate analysis of all the available information, we come to the conclusion that without population control we will not, in the long run, be able to prevent famine or other catastrophes, then it may be more humane in the long run to aid those countries that are prepared to take strong measures to reduce population growth, and to use our aid policy as a means of pressuring other countries to take similar steps.

I should also make it clear that the kind of aid that will slow population growth is not just assistance with the setting up of facilities for dispensing contraceptives and performing sterilizations. It is also necessary to create the conditions under which people do not wish to have so many children. This will involve, among other things, providing greater economic security for people, particularly in their old age, so that they do not need the security of a large family to provide for them.

One other matter that I should now put forward slightly differently is that my argument does, of course, apply to assistance with development, particularly agricultural development, as well as to direct famine relief. Indeed, I think the former is usually the better long-term investment. Although this was my view when I wrote the article, the fact that I started from a famine situation, where the need was for immediate food, has led some readers to suppose that the argument is only about giving food and not about other types of aid. This is quite mistaken, and my view is that the aid should be of whatever type is most effective.

One thing I think is particularly interesting is that this discussion translates so well from 1972 to 2009. Although the fortunes of particular countries have shifted, we remain concerned about famine and about population control, and if anything are more aware now of the limits of our global natural resources.

RIT Climate Change Awareness Week

The section of our syllabus that addresses the ethical problems raised by climate change does not begin until next week.

However, this week, there are plenty of educational and political activities on campus relevant to the topic. The event calendar is HERE, and the week starts off with opening remarks by President Destler today at 4 in the Innovation Center. Following those remarks will be a panel addressing the question “What can one person do?”

Any of these events is eligible for extra credit. To get extra credit, attend the event, then write a short summary saying what happened and what they point of the activity was, as well as a brief reaction. How does this issue relate to ethics? Was an ethical point communicated well? What do you think the event organizers were trying to achieve? Did they succeed? The more time you put into an extra credit activity, the more credit you can receive.