The Emissions Pony
- Posted by ryan on July 21st, 2008 filed in Economics, Environment
Last week, I wrote about social costs and externalities and the fact that we typically don’t take them into account when we make personal decisions. John Schwenkler had this to say:
In slightly different contexts, such a combination of calls for government action with an unwillingness to take the first step oneself would of course be called hypocrisy, and not unreasonably so. Here, it seems clear that it’s the last observation - that Ryan’s individual choice (it is not clear how his “perspective” enters into the story) “has essentially no effect” on the climate - that’s meant to deflect this charge, but I don’t think that can be accomplished this easily. “Why should I?” Well, because it’s the right thing to do; or because saying that everyone else should do it creates something like a moral imperative that you do it first; or because a lifetime of singly inconsequential decisions can add up to a considerable result (compare: that one disposable diaper doesn’t make much waste, but making a habit of it leaves behind a ton - literally - of barely-decomposable trash over the course of a year); or because getting your own life in order might inspire or shame others to follow your lead or at least make the possibility of doing so seem to be more reasonably within reach. Ryan’s sweeping claims about the self-centeredness and inattention to social and ecological costs in what “we” say and do may do quite well at capturing a certain sort of mindset, but it’s surely not the only one. And deciding that you’re going to sit around and do your own thing until Uncle Sam comes and bends you into shape strikes me as choosing from among the very worst of these possible options.
It seems to me that in trying very hard to win the argument, he’s gone and missed the point. But let me first say that I’m not being hypocritical here; I live in a city and walk or take transit most of the places I go and turn off the lights when I leave a room and occasionally flirt with vegetarianism. Of course, were I to speak proudly of this and encourage others to do so, then I’d get scathing comments from the right about how I’m trying to get everyone else to live the idyllic liberal lifestyle. The first rule of urbanism is that you can’t tell folks to put the car keys down; do that and you’re an out of touch elitist. But of course I don’t particularly care whether anyone puts the car keys down; I just want them to pay the cost of their negative externalities. And I suspect that asking others nicely to do so might not get the job done.
It’s not up for debate whether folks really consider social costs when they make decisions–they don’t. It’s not about selfishness or inattention, but rationality. If John or anyone else wants to live their life under the assumption that everyone else acts to maximize societal, rather than individual, welfare, then that’s fine by me, but I suspect they’ll end up unhappy and flat broke. The entire point of economics is that humans are basically selfish, and that’s ok. Usually that makes us all better off, but not always, and this is one of those market failures.
John thinks that the encouragement of personal virtue should be the first policy choice here. That’s true only so long as one doesn’t care about efficacy or efficiency. Because me asking everyone to live like I do isn’t going to get society anywhere, but even if I could convince a critical mass of people to reduce their carbon footprints, chances are they wouldn’t have the slightest idea how best to go about it. On the other hand, if I get a critical mass of people to support carbon pricing, then emissions are reduced, and all anyone has to do to lower their carbon footprint is pay attention to price tags.
But the whole hypocrisy thing is just a bullshit gotcha point. I know reducing emissions is the right thing to do. That’s why I do it, and it’s also why I advocate a carbon price. If I had to choose between the two, I’d take the latter. Yes, it’s an imposition and libertarians hate that. It’s also an imposition for me to bug the hell out of everyone else to please not drive so much. But only one of those will actually and efficiently reduce carbon emissions and slow or halt climate change.
July 21st, 2008 at 1:11 pm
Ryan -
Thanks for the link and the criticisms. I really do sympathize with what you say here, though I still think that a nationwide tax on carbon isn’t the right mechanism to encourage healthier lifestyles, at least not right now. But all that I was objecting to in that post was the “Why should I?” question that you ended up by posing - and my point was just that virtue should be its own reward, and so that the question of whether one’s own decision to, e.g., take transit has a significant effect on the climate shouldn’t be what decides whether one goes in for such a thing. Perhaps you were just using yourself as a stand-in for the kind of (very narrow-minded but no doubt psychologically realistic) “rationality” that you’re describing here, in which case the charge of hypocrisy obviously doesn’t stick. (I’d say, though, that framing things in terms of considering “social costs” - which are definitely not on many people’s minds - as opposed to straightforward “morality” or something of the sort - which is, in fact, an issue for quite a lot of people - is a better rhetorical strategy.) I don’t, however, object to top-down “imposition” per se: the primary differences between us are over which such mechanisms - again, like carbon taxes, which I think are unjustifiably regressive - are the best ones.
July 21st, 2008 at 1:33 pm
Well, for one thing, I don’t think it’s immoral to emit carbon; it’s damn near unavoidable. I simply think that people do too much of it because the social cost of carbon isn’t included in the decisions we make. Straight-forward problem, straight-forward solution.
I’d also say that framing things through the morality lens still doesn’t get you the necessary outcome. I imagine most Americans would agree that we have a moral responsibility to ensure that everyone has enough food to survive–and yet people still starve to death.
Finally, I hope you won’t mind me saying that the regressivity criticism is not, in my view, very compelling. For one thing, climate change itself is extremely regressive, and pricing is the most effective way to slow the process of warming. For another, it would be very easy to implement pricing such in a non-regressive fashion.
I know you criticized the CBO’s comments on a progressive carbon tax. I think you underestimate the effectiveness of the CBO’s policy options, and you also fail to take into account other potential options that the CBO didn’t mention. For instance, revenue could be used to invest in green infrastructure. The poor heavily use mass transit and would significantly benefit from an increase in the speed, reliability, and connectivity of such systems. This could have knock-on effects, as well, since there’s a whole set of economics literature on the effect of immobility and distance from job centers on the economic prospects of the poor.
And of course, the climate change status quo is hardly progressive. Just ask Louisianans.
July 21st, 2008 at 1:59 pm
Right on Ryan!
Painting environmental externalities as a purely or primarily moral issue has the pernicious effect of deterring serious collective political action to get prices right.
Global warming is the product of bad incentives, not insufficient personal virtue. The pretense that individual moral improvement–switching to CFCs, dialing back the thermostat, easing off on the gas pedal, etc–is a solution to the problem is simply wrong.
But to the extent that it diverts energy and attention from making critical institutional changes that give everyone better signals and more options, the morality argument is an obstacle to only solution that will ultimately work.
July 21st, 2008 at 3:46 pm
I agree entirely that emitting carbon isn’t per se immoral, but I do think that being a poor steward of the environment, and choosing courses of action with wasteful or destructive consequences when there are healthier ones available to you, clearly is. As to your more general point about putting these sorts of ideas forward in moral terms, I suppose I think it’s pretty much impossible for it to be the case that everyone has enough to eat, and so that example doesn’t do all that much - but clearly the phenomenon of charitable giving, not to mention the rise of ecological concern among Christians and other religious groups, clearly shows that appeals to personal morality can get you at least somewhere. And talk of “externalities” and “social costs” simply doesn’t mean anything to the average person: that’s not to say that something like a tax on emissions isn’t justifiable on those sorts of grounds, but only that that’s not the most politically advantageous way to put it forward. I imagine, though, that we don’t actually disagree on that last point.
As to the CBO proposals for mitigating the regressiveness the effects of a carbon tax, I am indeed very skeptical of them. But my point isn’t that nothing needs to be done about climate change, or that the government shouldn’t play a role in helping things along. Obviously using proceeds from a tax on carbon or a cap and trade program to fund infrastructure development is a good idea - but it seems to me that in many case (e.g. the case of mass transit in particular) those options would be more heavily focused on urban areas than rural ones, whereas it’s really the latter that are in the worst shape carbon-wise. I’m not saying that nothing can be done to help these people become less oil- and coal-dependent, though: it’s just that, given how difficult their financial situations already are, I think that such measures should precede taxes on emissions. Put differently, I think that measures designed to raise the cost of environmentally destructive practices should be targeted at those with the possibility of choosing alternatives. I know that this is more of a gradualist approach than you are inclined to go in for, but I just can’t see my way to endorsing the alternative.