The Environment: Please Play Fair

(Image from publicdomainpictures.net)

I just finished reading Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent piece in The New Yorker about the Danish island where they produce more energy than they consume.

One thing that made the piece excellent was all the specific numerical information. The island has 11 large wind turbines, and about 12 smaller ones. The island is roughly the size of Nantucket. "Together, they produce some twenty-six million kilowatt-hours a year, which is just about enough to meet all the island’s demands for electricity," Kolbert explains.

There's also numerical information about environmentalism in general. I have to say, I've been hoping for such information for some time. I mean, I don't use those energy-efficient lightbulbs, but I also don't have a car, and I don't have many electric appliances. How does it all even out?

Kolbert talks about the conclusions of a Swiss group, that about 2,000 Kilowatts continuously, per person, is about what is sustainable from an environmental perspective. So, if you had 20 100-watt bulbs burning all the time. That's 17,000 Kilowatt hours per year per person.

In some countries, averages are way lower: the average Bangladeshi, Kolbert says, uses about 2,600 Kilowatt hours per year, which is 300 Kilowatts continuously. The average Chinese person is using about 1500 Kilowatts continously; close to the 2,000 Kilowatt goal.

The US and Canada, Kolbert tells us, are at a whopping 12,000 Kilowatts continuously. That means we'd have to reduce by five-sixths the amount of energy we use.

Wow.

I have two thoughts. The first is, it's hard to say from reading the article where my own Kilowatt usage is, but one thing that seems clear is that air travel is my main problematic indulgence.

One round trip between Zurich and Shanghai uses up 800 of that yearly 2,000 target maximum. I make several trips per year on airplanes, and even though they're typically shorter, the number surely adds up.

The second is, I'm not fucking reducing my consumption until some other people reduce theirs, too.

People talk about environmentalism as if it has to be consistent with freedom and autonomy; people can just choose environmentally good alternatives for themselves, as they see fit.

But honestly, there is no way I am curtailing my consumption from, whatever, 12,000 to 10,000 Kilowatt hours by reducing my air travel, while there are plenty of people with second homes on the beach, personal airplanes, and vacation spas for their dogs.

I'm just not. I'm not a big energy user, but I'm not going to become a small energy user 'til some other -- richer -- people step up to the plate.

Western world, consider yourselves informed, and warned. You gotta play fair, or the rest of us aren't going to play at all.

The People In Your Neighborhood

Because I was awfully busy last week, I missed reading The New York Times, and so I missed being enraged by the opinion piece, "What to Expect When You're Free Trading." Now that the archives are online, though, it was easy to get all enraged about it this afternoon. So, as the kids say, "No problem!"

In arguing against compensation for workers laid off in the wake of job-loss from global free trade, Steven Landsburg asks us to consider that in relevantly similar cases, compensation would not be morally required. In the irritating passage, he says,

Suppose, after years of buying shampoo at your local pharmacy, you discover you can order the same shampoo for less money on the Web. Do you have an obligation to compensate your pharmacist? If you move to a cheaper apartment, should you compensate your landlord? When you eat at McDonald’s, should you compensate the owners of the diner next door? Public policy should not be designed to advance moral instincts that we all reject every day of our lives.

Well, now that you mention it, um,. . . maybe? One letter writer to The Times made a good point (letters are here):

In fact, if I care about having a neighborhood with things like a local pharmacy (and I do, for what it’s worth), then I will continue to buy my shampoo there even if I have to pay a bit more.

And I would be getting a great bargain — not only shampoo, but also a community.

It was this letter that alerted me to having missed the original story. Obviously the author's point is logical: if you spend at Walmart, you'll be surrounded by Walmarts. If you spend at the mall instead of downtown, downtown will go away. I frequently spend extra money to buy at places I like; this is simple means-end rationality.

How well does the point extend to the analogy? Well, Mr. Landsburg might say that this is apples and oranges. By hypothesis he's considering cases in which one is indifferent to the differences and comparing on cost. Indeed, if a book is cheaper at Amazon and more expensive at bn.com, I'll buy from Amazon. I don't feel morally obliged to send money to bn.com.

But in a way I think it's actually apples and apples. Having the people in my town, my state, and my country happily employed is not unlike having a pharmacy around the corner: it's a nice way to live. This is well-captured by the final remark: you get a community. Goods like this are so vague they're hard to reason about, but they're also of the utmost importance.

Incidentally, the next letter on the page accuses free trade opponents of willfully overlooking the benefits of free trade: what if you had to grow your own food, fer Chrissake! Um, you don't have to be against trade to think that there should be limits to it. Just because free trade is good doesn't mean some other things, that don't fit easily with it, aren't good either. Why does everything have to be all or nothing? Sheesh!

This letter about community was much on my mind last Monday. Heading from Toronto to Ann Arbor, I had a three-hour layover in Detroit, and figured I'd spend some time walking around the city. It was MLK day so it wasn't a normal Monday in the city. But I got kind of emotional looking at how cool and interesting the city looked and how its poverty was just wearing everything down.

Here's some pictures.



A cool pretty building with art or graffitti in the windows. I really go for this sort of thing.


A giant Solstice ad! It's like they knew I was coming!


The view across the river from the Renaissance Center.

I tried to support the local economy by buying a guide book to Detroit in the Borders in the middle of the city. Alas, there are no guide books to Detroit. If you want to go to Vegas, though, you are in zee business.

Little Children

I really want to start off by saying that little kids are prigs, but since the evidence for this rests entirely on my own childhood, and a couple of anecdotes about other people, I guess I should just say that I was a prig as a little kid.

Things I was appalled by: cigarettes, premarital sex, lies, drunkenness. My attitude towards drugs was straight out of reefer madness. The idea of letting someone look at my homework sent me into a state of near-hysteria. They sent us to DARE (drug abuse resistance education; now known mainly for the number of Silver Lake types who wore that distinctive DARE t-shirt, red lettering on a black background, a few years ago) and I thought it was awesome. I was glad to see someone taking a stand against the drug menace, and when the police officer told us that if we knew drugs would be at a party we should not go to the party because of the likelihood that our drinks would be spiked with LSD, I nodded along vigorously.

This was not really a problem that faced me because I wasn't getting invited to so many parties anyway.

Evidence (dubious) that I wasn't totally alone in my priggishness: when my fifth grade class had a debate on the death penalty, nobody wanted to argue the anti side. The guy who eventually volunteered was also the guy who would mime the sex act with the shrubbery in the playground at recess, another complicated feature of childhood. Also the horrified fascination with which people would pretend drunkenness.

I wish I could say that by the time I was seventeen this had all gone away, but I pretty much continued priggish until I was well into college. The details might change, not so much, but the attitude of appalled indignation stuck around. I remember telling someone I knew from high school about my sophomore year roommate (first half) who was a wake and bake girl, and he was like, so, have you softened your position on drugs, and I said yes.

Other than the dubious pleasures of re-living my childhood, why am I bringing this up? I don't know. I think it's interesting, the passion with which children take moral positions. My best friend went to visit her grandparents when we were both in kindergarten, and when she came back we had this detailed political discussion about Ronald Reagan's "teach a man to fish" line and trickle down economics. There's something about not knowing anything about the world that allows these kinds of things to stick to you with greater force, to seem vitally important, especially when you're trying to make sense of what the hell is going on.

At least that's how it was for me. You?

What Not To Say

Since I write philosophy, I often come across paradoxes. You know, like Zeno's paradox: before the arrow can get where it's going, it has to get halfway there, and before it can get the rest of the way, it has to make it half of the rest of the way, and so on. So: the arrow never gets where it's going. But of course, it does.

Philosophers tend to talk about paradoxes in a sort of stripped down way, and I don't blame them, really -- that's what philosophers do. But I'm always on the lookout for actual real life manifestations of paradoxes. Messy, real-life, stuff.

One kind of sort of paradoxical thing is self-reference. In its simplest form, "This sentence is false." If it's true, it's false, and vice versa.

Self-reference seems to me to come up a lot in real life problems. Consider the things you cannot say, and mean, because of self-reference.

Like, "Don't take this the wrong way." When someone says that in preface of some criticism, you're always more likely, rather than less, to take it "the wrong way." What the speaker wants to say is something like, "I don't want you to feel criticized." But in signaling that a criticism is coming, doesn't it sort of do the opposite?

I also get into a puzzle when I think about opinions I have about stuff that's being discussed too much. How can you express your opinion that all the discussion about poor Britney and her meltdown is sad and wrong, without adding yourself to all the discussion about poor Britney and her meltdown? There, now, I've just added to the Google hits for "Britney meltdown."

Speaking of Britney, by the way, I was just remembering this evening that crazy marriage she had with her old boyfriend before K-Fed. Remember? The teen sweetheart or something? And her family was like "No way, unh unh, girl, you are not marrying this guy." I remember saying at the time, "They should have let her stay married to him; it'd probably work out better than anything else." Well. Shouldn't they have?

We've had a request for some C and C political discussion (in comments to this post). Speaking for myself, I am going to vote democratic, and I will vote for whoever gets nominated eventually. I am no fan of Hillary, for many of the same reasons lots of other people aren't. Like her support for the war, etc. etc.

But the recent kerfuffle about her tears has me completely dumbfounded. I saw the tape at the gym, and I thought, "Oh, there must have been some other occasion when she was crying." But no, that was it. A catch in the voice. A catch in the voice while describing the fact that she had a lot of ideas on how to run the country.

Oooh, was it calculated? Was it honest?

All I can say is, wow, man, if that counts as crying, I am going to be carted off tomorrow for bi-polar disorder or something. Jeez-louise. Talk about something not worth discussing!

But, you know, you can't really blog about how dumb it is to discuss something. 'Cause, yeah, there you are discussing. Self-reference in action!

It was good old Bertie Russell and Kurt Goedel who really took the self-reference problem and made serious fucking hay with it. Russell used it to dismantle and disprove Frege's entire life's work of showing how to reduce mathematics to logic. Goedel used it to show that no list of axioms could determine as true or false every mathematical sentence.

Pretty lofty. But I always wonder. Did they encounter the everyday self-reference problems? Would they care about Britney and her troubles? Did they ever try to tell a loved-one, "Don't take this the wrong way, but. . ."

Probably they did. Russell went to jail for his pacifism, and Goedel died of starvation when his wife died, because he thought he was being poisoned.

It's a tough life out there, no matter how smart you are.

It's The Other People, Stupid

In this previous post, I said that there is a limit to the right a person has to decide their own future. In particular, I pointed out, when it comes to health care, your right of self-determination runs smack into, and is overridden by, my right not to be surrounded by sick people dying of preventable diseases whose treatment they can't afford.

Especially when you just know, like the mortgage lenders, they'll come crying to the rest of us: Hey! It's not my fault! I didn't know! Help me!

In this post I've got something else to say about health care and human psychology. Or, uh, American psychology, I should say.

In this editorial from the early part of November, Paul Krugman sums up what he takes to be the core argument for health care reform in the US. He writes,

"The United States spends far more on health care per person than any other nation. Yet we have lower life expectancy than most other rich countries. Furthermore, every other advanced country provides all its citizens with health insurance; only in America is a large fraction of the population uninsured or underinsured."

Krugman suggests that to any reasonable person these would be knock-down arguments for reform, and he goes on to offer some replies to counter-arguments in defense of this basic position.

These counter-arguments seem right to me; I haven't got anything to add there. But what I'm interested in is the reason there is reluctance to change the US healthcare system. I'm sure there are lots of reasons.

But one reason no one talks much about is this: most people having an opinion are actually getting very good health care. The Krugman argument talks about averages, totals, and the uninsured. Most people, I think, actually don't care much about averages, totals, and the uninsured.

Most middle-class and wealthy people probably think that if the health-care system changes in the direction of socialization that their care will become worse. In fact, I'm betting that for lots of people, the idea of socialized health care brings immediately to mind an image like the following: There they are, sick, sitting in a racially diverse room, with lots of poor people around, being told by some bureaucrat that there are 100 welfare queens ahead of them in line for the one MRI machine.

No one, I think, feels comfortable discussing this fear, so they find other things to say.

This fear is what we should discuss, for one reason: the fear is only relevant to the kind of socialized health care system no-one in the US is proposing anyway: a single-tier, no-private-doctors system.

In lots of European systems, there is socialized health care with nothing like this, because anyone has the choice to pay themselves, or get private insurance, and lots of people do, and they don't have to sit in any dark depressing rooms with people who don't play golf. They can do whatever they want.

Clearly any system anyone adopts in the US will have these options. The argument then is partly "this isn't such a change" -- in addition to the familiar "we have to change." And the argument should include an explicit injunction to take the cares of others into consideration.

Along a slightly different line of thought:
I'm an American living in Canada. Here in Canada we actually have a single-tier, no-private doctors system. It's interesting, because, you know, some of the things people say about it are true: there aren't enough machines, there are waiting times, places are understaffed and sometimes depressing and chaotic. And they're that way no matter who you are.

I've been here for a few years and so far the care I've gotten has been great. But more interestingly, I'd say, there are benefits to this system that you can't really imagine until you're here, but they're extraordinary.

Everyone gets the same health care. Duh. It's so simple, but it kind of transforms the way you interact with and feel about your fellow citizens. It gives everyone dignity. No one has to plead for help, and no one feels like a second-class citizen. If the system sucks, it sucks for everyone, so something gets done about it.

You're at the gym chatting with the cleaning lady. You're at McDonald's ordering a Big Mac. You're buying the papers at the weird convenience store.

All the people you see, you talk to, you're all in it together. You can look people in the eye, and not feel like shit. It's kind of awesome.

But this awesomeness isn't going to translate to the US. Whatever. Focus on getting it together for the people who need it, and let the people who can afford it do whatever they want. Don't tell people, "This will make it work for you." Tell them, "If you don't care about anyone else you're being overly selfish." Or fill in your own adjective.