Carbon footprints: Walking away from questions of value

In his New York Times editorial on "Some Doubts Upon Entering a New Carboniferous Era" (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/24/opinion/24tue4.html?scp=4&sq=june+24+2008&st=nyt) Verlyn

Pacific coast (Stanley Donwood, 2003) http://www.slowlydownward.com/

Klinkenborg focuses on the notion of "carbon footprint" as an inverse measure of environmental value and as a metaphor for thinking about it. Rather, he tries to focus on this. But a strange lack of focus pervades his piece.

Klinkenborg never mines the deep-running veins of irony that lie below the surface of carbon footprint speech. In the end, all he can say is that the concept is a little glib, a little simple-minded, a little too prone to abuse by insincere marketing efforts, and a little too likely to be superseded by a better measure. Yet he concludes with this extraordinarily grand non sequitur:

Think about it properly, and it leads you to a profound critique of who we are and how we behave.

A profound critique? How does talk about carbon footprints get us to that? Klinkenborg's bland and generalized expression of discomfort provides no clue. Not even to a substantive critique, let alone a grand one. Nor does his discussion produce even a single hint for how carbon footprint talk might connect with our identity and our behavior.

Nevertheless, despite Klinkenborg's inability to clearly explain or articulate his malaise with the notion of a carbon footprint, his malaise is warranted. Our sanctimonious fretting about carbon footprints is self-deceptive and does hint at underlying and disturbing ironies. But how?

Most fundamentally, focusing on the phrase "carbon footprint" excuses us from exercising a basic moral responsibility. That responsibility is the one to critically examine what gives meaning to our individual human lives, and how to fashion societies that nurture ways of living that have such meaning. Couching our society's environmentally destructive behavior in terms of carbon footprints catapults us past this critical examination. It permits us to eagerly engage in discussions of the science and technology while we fly by questions of value.

In doing this, we ignore the preeminent question of our times – whether economic development, whose sole aim is the accumulation and preservation of money, and which is driven by the satisfaction of self-interested preferences for things that are bought and sold, should be the value that dominates our individual and social lives. Ignoring this question of value, we fail to ask whether we should be cultivating and preserving any value other than economic wealth. The claims of the political and corporate cheerleaders, who extol economic "goods" as the most fundamental, if not the only ones, go largely unchallenged.

No wonder BP and other of the most environmentally destructive corporations in the world embrace the phrase "carbon footprint" with such natural ease.

But how could this innocent-seeming, apparently scientific and objective phrase have acquired its self-denying and self-deceptive power? The answer is precisely by wrapping the dilemma of progressive environmental destruction in a scientific cloak. As an object of scientific measurement, it is easy to let ourselves believe that the problem of planetary devastation is a scientific problem, amenable to scientific solutions – not the matter of hard moral and spiritual choices that it really is.

Moreover, as a "merely" scientific problem, it is not even one that we need to solve for ourselves. Scientists and engineers can take care of it for us. They can tell us which technology is "right" for us to use. We can buy green, consume green. We can buy "sustainable brands" (http://arieff.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/how-green-is-your-brand/index.html?ref=opinion). Better yet, "given the right incentives", corporations can tell us what is right and increase their wealth by selling "the right things" to us. In their endless pursuit of economic growth (amassing larger and larger piles of money), they are delighted to deploy their scientists, engineers, and marketeers to do just that. We place our trust in the corporate agents of economic development and wealth accumulation to halt or reverse the destruction of our planet. We invest this trust unquestioningly because, as we have said, economic development and the accumulation of wealth are unquestioned goods.

The carbon footprints lead over and away from two grand ironies at the heart of our environmental problems.

The first irony is that the relatively unfettered application of economic instruments, which we trust to pull us back from the brink of total planetary devastation has been and continues to be the principal engine of environmental destruction. That this fact fails to alert us that something in this arrangement is awry testifies to the depth of our delusion and denial of the moral nature of the problem.

The second irony has to do with our complicit historic collective complicity in aiding and abetting the engine of destruction and our current reflexive inclination – in the face of the overwhelming individual, social and environmental destruction this as produced – to aid and abet it some more. As Wendell Berry (in "The Idea of a Local Economy", Orion, 2001) notes, we long ago ceded to industry our responsibility to take a personal part in providing ourselves with such basic goods as food, water, clothing, and shelter – and more recently, entertainment, education, and care of the sick. In so doing, we launched and sustained the destructive industrial juggernaut in the first place. Now confronted with the dire effects and planetary scale of that juggernaut's destructive engine, we cede our responsibility for stopping the destruction to the very agent that is its principal driving force.

This second ironic vein runs still deeper – back into the realm of value. When we let the blind working of the economy take responsibility for basic needs and social goods, we cede more than "just" control of our water or food or any of the other above-mentioned goods. More fundamentally, we cede responsibility for deciding and asserting, independent of the economy, what individual and social values we wish to preserve. The economy decides for us. It does this by its own rules of operation. Those rules are entirely focused on buying low and selling high. We, as citizens, thereby forfeit control of our very values.

The irony is that if we decline to reflect on or assert whatever alternative values we may have, if we fail to challenge the currently unquestioned "goods" of continued accumulation of wealth by continued economic growth, then it is a delusion to think that the economy will magically produce or reflect those alternative values "given the right incentives". Of course, the economy can and does sometimes respond to changed incentives designed to divert it from what we currently perceive to be the most direct path to total destruction. The economy can be diverted. But on a slightly altered path, it will, as it always has, trample the same values in different ways. Or it will trample different values that are, at the moment, less well understood or less well guarded.

There is no mystery about why this is so. The instruments of economic development and wealth accumulation have just those economic goods as ends; no others. Economic development has absolutely no interest or motive to serve any value but more economic development for even greater accumulation of wealth. Economic powers may be motivated to convince us that they are dedicated to other values, if they perceive that that will facilitate the even greater accumulation of wealth. But they have every motive to avoid, at any cost, the question of whether economic growth and the accumulation of wealth might be fundamentally at odds with far more important individual and social human values.

There is perhaps some mystery why we lose sight of this. Part of the answer is that we have come to think of corporations as citizens. We have come to accept them and treat them as persons – with a person's values, needs, and rights. For example (one of the most significant ones), corporations have First Amendment rights in the United States. Corporations contribute to political campaigns as a form of "free speech". They avoid state product labeling laws as their right "not to speak".

As Berry (in the essay cited above) acutely observes, there is a terrible confusion in this:

... the limitless destructiveness of [the] economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. As such, unlike a person, a corporation does not age. It does not arrive ,as most persons finally do, at a realization of the shortness and smallness of human lives; it does not come to see the future as the lifetime of the children and grandchildren of anybody in particular. It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.

In short, a corporation acting in its own self-interest to buy low and sell high does not embrace any human or social values. Corporations might be thought capable of serving some social needs – such as providing meaningful vocations for people – "gd jbs w hi pa", as Mark Sagoff puts it (Sagoff, Mark, "The Economy of the Earth", 2nd edition, Cambridge, 2008, p. 3). But even this potential is rarely and with great difficulty realized, and for the same reason: It is only an incidental side effect that occurs when it serves the ultimate end of wealth accumulation which does not have the good of "gd jbs w hi pa" as its end. As Berry goes on to note:

[The] economy is a machine, of which people are merely the interchangeable parts. One has no choice but to do the work (if any) that the economy prescribes, and to accept the prescribed wage.

In his essay, Berry supplies a list of fourteen "assumptions implicit in the idea that corporations should be "free" to buy low and sell high". Among others, there are the assumptions:

1. That stable and preserving relationships among people, places, and things do not matter and are of no worth.
...
5. That there is no conflict between greed and ecological or bodily health.
6. That there is no conflict between self-interest and public service.
...
14. That ... vocation is a dead issue.

The irony encapsulated in carbon footprint speech is the irony of ceding our responsibility for confronting a fundamental violation of values – including individual, social, and environmental values – to the violators. In the realm of environmental value, some of us think that we have a moral responsibility to preserve our planet as some recognizable semblance of the place it has been for all humanity for the 200,000 years of human existence. Some of us think that the economic machinery that came into play just 250 years ago is on the brink of making that responsibility impossible to fulfill. Yet, we seem compelled to hide these values behind scientific-seeming, impersonal characterizations of the desperate circumstances that threaten them.

It is worth pondering why, despite his malaise with the carbon footprint metaphor, Klinkenborg silently skates by all that is truly disturbing in it. It may be that he his blind to them. And perhaps we should not be surprised by this. He explicates the metaphor in this way:

“Carbon footprint” is to your physical being what “soul” is to your spiritual being.

Here Klinkenborg denies, by contrast, a connection of one's carbon footprint to one's spiritual being. He puts up a wall with our spirituality and our morality on one side and our carbon impact on the other, physical side of the wall. In doing this, he seems to reveal an underlying belief that the environment is, at bottom a physical resource that serves economic goods. Whatever value it has is It as a bunch of raw materials to make things, and sometime later, a dumping ground for those made things. Its importance attaches to its availability for these uses – to mankind in general, and to economic development in particular. This belief is at the heart of the economic view of natural value. It seems that, like most of us, Klinkenborg cannot escape its gravity.

So no wonder Klinkenborg seems vague, unfocused, and mild in protesting BP's

Realistic (Stanley Donwood, 2006)

appropriation of carbon footprint speech. He shares with that corporation and probably all others, a fundamentally flawed view of environmental value.

That view is represented no better than by Richard Sandor. Sandor is founder, chairman, and CEO of the Chicago Climate Exchange (CCX). The CCX is where corporations, fearing that future regulations may adversely affect the size of their money piles, buy and sell the right to pollute the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. Asked to comment on the possibility that this kind of economic "solution" may not be morally right or equitable, he embraces all that is behind carbon footprint talk. In one remarkable breath, he dismisses personal and social values as irrelevant, conflates corporations with persons, and declares that the solution is the economy (stupid):

Frankly, this debate just makes me want to scream... People tell me, well ... corporate guys who just want to buy the right to pollute are bad ... and we should not be giving them incentives to stop. But we need to address the problems that exist, not drown in fear or lose ourselves in morality. Behavior changes when you offer incentives. If you want to punish people for being bad corporate citizens, you should go to your local church or synagogue and tell God to punish them. Because that is not our problem.

(Specter, Michael, "Big Foot", The New Yorker, February 25, 2008, pp. 52-53)

A Scientific Postscript

There is something a bit perplexing Klinkenborg's use of "Carboniferous" in the title of his piece. That geological period saw a precipitous drop in CO₂ levels (from 1500 ppm to 350 ppm) accompanied by a precipitous drop in global average temperature (from 22° C to 12° C) and the accumulation of shale and coal (from which the period got its name). Our current period is reversing all these trends. But it is both odd and eerie that we now have a climate (385 ppm CO₂ and 14.5° C) that closely approximates that of the late Carboniferous. And our current climate is heading in precisely the direction that it took after the late Carboniferous – to 2000 ppm CO₂ and 22° C by the late Permian.