We have identified four recommended actions which we believe to be especially effective in reducing an individual's greenhouse gas emissions: having one fewer child, living car-free, avoiding airplane travel, and eating a plant-based diet. These suggestions contrast with other top recommendations found in the literature such as hang-drying clothing or driving a more fuel-efficient vehicle. Our results show that education and government documents do not focus on high-impact actions for reducing emissions, creating a mitigation gap between official recommendations and individuals willing to align their behaviour with climate targets. Focusing on high-impact actions (through providing accurate guidance and information, especially to 'catalytic' individuals such as adolescents) could be an important dimension of scaling bottom-up action to the transformative decarbonisation implied by the 2 °C climate target, and starting to close this gap.--Seth Wynes and Kimberly A Nicholas (2017) "The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions" , ,
A few years ago, because of the research of (my former BNI co-blogger) Ingrid Robeyns, I became aware of the fact that cutting edge climate science was putting demographic controls back on the political philosophical agenda. The previous sentence also reflects a bit of parochialism because there are places (e.g., China) where it never went away. But because (i) the Nazis had made eugenics disreputable, (ii) welfare states require a steady rise in working age populations (to pay for generous pensions, insurance, child-care, etc.), and (iii) economists quietly assumed that technological improvements would help solve any demographic problems (related, say, to Malthusian over-population), demographics were a subdued presence in the political philosophy of cold-war and thereafter liberalism.*
I wrote 'back' in the previous paragraph because the more I read, the more clear it is to me that for all the major theorists in the history of political philosophy and political economy through the middle of the twentieth century (recall this post on Berkeley's racialized eugenics), the control of populations is a crucial theoretical factor because (a) famines are very disruptive (and morally bad); (b) soldiers are needed for the military; (c) a growing, able population is good for the economy (and taken as a sign of proper functioning institutions); and (d) in the Platonic strain, desirable characteristics of the ruling elite ought to be bred for (in addition, to, of course, some mixture of (a-d)). One reason why Foucault's bio-politics made such a splash is that he revived the study of some of these characteristics from within the tradition.
Wynes & Nicholas base their claims about children on a 2009 article, "Reproduction and the carbon legacies of individuals," Paul A. Murtaugh and Michael G. Schlax. While there is plenty to say about the modeling done here, today I focus on how we can see the effects of the anxiety produced by (i-iii) in the rhetoric and policies of Wynes & Nicholas and Murtaugh & Schlax. In both articles, when it comes to population control, the focus is on "reproductive choice" of individuals which are treated as "individual lifestyle choice." Amazingly, neither article even mentions the various subsidies and tax credits that the governments of rich countries give to promote having some children (often within marriage). The only tax that Wynes & Nicholas mention is a "carbon tax on food commodities."
If one is skeptical about massive norm/life-style changes (no flying and changing diet) and one is interested in promoting policy, and one is convinced we're heading for environmental catastrophe absent such policy, then, when reading Wynes & Nicholas, population reduction and living car-free are the low hanging fruit. As it happens, the car-free universe is suddenly all the rage for three technological reasons: first, due to improvements in AI, self-driving cars are on the horizon, and these are going to be safer and operated more efficiently; second, cheap electric cars are now within planning reach; third, due to software developments, car sharing is becoming insanely easy and cheap. Because in most cities space is limited (and expensive), these will make car ownership suddenly very unattractive economically and life-style-wise. This is why futurologists are predicting that the value added hub of transportation will shift toward Silicon Valley away from traditional car-towns.
As an aside, Stephen Davies has been alerting me to the growing bubble in car-loans and securitisation of these. The risks of this bubble has been getting some media attention already (see here). What has not been fully grasped yet, I suspect, is that, even leaving aside that bubble, in light of the developments of the previous paragraph, at some tipping point the second-hand-car market will collapse in value. And this means that a whole segment of the financial sector's business plans and collatoral will be worthless. I have seen no evidence that the stress-testing that financial institutions have been doing includes a collapse of the car-loan market.
To return to the main argument, a car-free-world is within reach.** Of course, "until the emissions associated with desired services are reduced to zero, population will continue to be a multiplier of emissions." And here is where the trouble starts. For enviornmental do-gooders destroying liberal welfare states, which (recall) require growing populations, is politically unattractive for two connected reasons: the welfare state is popular and in line with moral (Rawlsian) commitments and cutting benefits is politically hard to achieve. As it happens, (as Malthus already noted), as a population becomes wealthier and women are educated fertility goes down; this is why (leaving aside immigration) population has been growing slowly or even stagnating in many wealthy countries. The combined effect can be quite dramatic (as Japan, where the population is shrinking, is revealing). But because women are very educated and not very fertile in rich countries (you can play around with the OECD data here), the environmentally desirable big population gains can only be had elsewhere (again, I only became aware of something like this argument since 2013 through unpublished work by Ingrid Robeyns--this paragraph and the next few are not intended to do justice to the details of her unpublished arguments, but the musings were inspired by them).
With cars taken care off, controlling the fertility of primarily poor (and if the latest hope of technocratic-liberalism, President Macron, is to be believed, uncivilized) women becomes the central policy relevant factor that can help prevent environmental catastrophe. One need not be a feminist or have some sense of how ordinarily imperialism plays out to recognize that this is a recipe for many moral disasters (e.g., forced sterilizations/abortions, murder, taxes on children, etc.).
Of course, as noted, education is another factor driving down fertility (there is also evidence of this in sub-sahara Africa). So, in the short run, expect a lot more activity and publicity surrounding programs promoting and lengthening girls's and women's education in poor places. This has the nice feature of fitting a lot of pre-existing (Enlightenment and Feminist) emancipatory doctrines. (While this reduces fertility, populations with better human capital also aids economic growth, so the effect will not be only pro-environment.) Have the affective (sic!) altruists gotten on board yet?
Yet, Spivak famously reminds us (in her criticism of Foucault and others), that our "standardizing benevolence" (90) is particularly dangerous for the 'subaltern' who we take to be aiding (from our enlightened self-interest). Not to mention (recall) that some of the worst, enduring cultural conflicts originate in hegemonic powers imposing their views of civilized gender relations on savage others. There are no risk-free choices here (if there ever are)....
*As evidence for (iii) one can see the reaction by mainstream economists to the theoretical foundations of The Club of Rome's (1972) The Limits to Growth, which did try to put Malthusian considerations back on the intellectual map.
**Obviously even electric, self-operated, shared electric cares will have some emissions, but it will still be a serious reduction in emissions (more than 50% if I understand Wynes &Nicholas' model properly).
+Thank you to Nomy Arpaly for correcting my English.
It seems like there are some things in tension here. For one, lowering population growth rates in poor countries will have little or no effect on "environmental catastrophe", because the very poor are not significant polluters. The per capita rates are more than an order of magnitude lower for most African countries than for richer nations. If women in such nations have greater access to education, and those countries become richer, their per capita rates will go up accordingly - and very quickly, as can be seen by China's example.
Further, if rich nations reduce population, and unless productivity sky rockets, they will get poorer. And that will make higher polluting, cheaper technologies more attractive.
Given this, and the obvious moral consequences associated with avoidable poverty, all our eggs are in the technology-will-save-everything basket.
PS, the car loan bubble is so much smaller than the housing bubble of 2008 that the risks are merely recession-causing, not financial meltdown.
Posted by: ajkreider | 07/17/2017 at 07:15 PM