The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [101]
Yet it is not entirely unreasonable that people would resist the proposition that combating climate change must be our paramount priority. It is difficult to estimate the environmental, social, and economic damages of warming. And slashing carbon emissions could be expensive, slowing economic growth and sucking money from things like providing education and investing in factories. How do we know this is the best way to address the problem? Helping poor countries industrialize and reduce their dependence on farming might provide their citizens a better future than trying to preempt future weather convulsions that could devastate their crops.
The calculation demanded of our generation is not about the value of greenery compared with having more stuff. It pits our needs for goods, services, and a working environment against the value we place on the needs of other people one hundred years from now.
In the 1970s, the environmental economist Talbot Page used a literary trick to alert us to the ethical conundrum brought about by our overuse of the environment. He suggested we put ourselves in the shoes of a young man growing up in a world about to come to an end due to the immoderate appetites of previous generations. “You might well call out to the ghosts of the first generation, demanding by what right it made its decision,” he counseled. “It would hardly be satisfying to hear the answer, ‘We took a vote of all those present and decided to follow our own time preferences.’ ”
Our own time preferences are not very nice on the future. In an influential study in the 1990s, people around the United States were asked about how they valued people in the future compared with those currently alive. Almost four out of ten said they would prefer to invest in a program that saved a hundred lives from pollution in the present to an alternative plan that would save four thousand lives twenty-five years down the road. Almost half thought saving one person in the present was worth more than saving seventy in a hundred years. Other studies have concluded our preference for the present isn’t quite as stark. In a more recent survey, only 28 percent of respondents said a death a hundred years from now wasn’t as bad as a death next year. Still, it is clear that people feel greater kinship with their contemporaries than with people of the future, who can come across as abstractions rather than people.
We act by these beliefs every day, ignoring the needs of our descendants. The old, who vote in large numbers, regularly get a better deal from the political system than the young, who do not vote. Government spending skews heavily in favor of the old. Social spending on the elderly amounted to $19,700 per person in 2000, according to one study; children got $6,380. And those who don’t expect to be alive very far into the future care less about what warming will do to it.
Only a quarter of Americans over the age of sixty-five believe global warming is a very serious problem, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Among those aged eighteen to twenty-nine, almost half thought it was very serious. A poll in Europe also found that only one-third of those over sixty-five were very worried, compared with 40 percent of those aged twenty-five to forty-four, the prime childbearing age. Just over a fifth of the young were willing to pay a gas tax in order to curb carbon emissions, while only a tenth of the elderly were willing to do so.
THIS IS NOT merely a conflict pitting altruism against self-regard. Even if we were designing our choices to best serve others, we would still be left in an ethical quandary. Partha Dasgupta, a Bangladeshiborn professor of economics at Cambridge University, crafted his own moral story to illustrate the