The Price of Everything - Eduardo Porter [102]
For those deeply invested in the environmental movement, the answer to this dilemma is obvious. They couch arguments to save the environment in terms that appeal to the baby-seal lovers they assume live within us all. The environment, they suggest, is as inherently valuable as humanity. Nature is not to be conserved out of some estimate of its instrumental value to humankind. We should care for its intrinsic value, because it is the only nature there is. If we kill the last bear there will be bears no more. Earth First! puts it thus: “No Compromise in Defense of Mother Earth.” But it’s difficult to think this way when the debate is over allocating resources among competing virtuous endeavors.
Maybe we should abide by a rule that says we should leave the earth exactly as we got it so the next bunch can enjoy its bounty, as did we. No generation, of course, has behaved in such a way. Starting with the first sapiens who roamed the plains of Africa, humans have continuously altered their physical environment. By this rule, if we were given the choice of spending $1 billion to save the environment or to develop a vaccine that would benefit all future generations, we would have to choose the former.
If instead we tweak the mandate and demand that we bequeath at least as much “social capital” as we got—mixing in environmental assets with other good things like hospitals, roads, and educated people—we’re back at square one. How should we measure the value of the road against the damages caused by the exhaust from the cars and trucks traveling on it? Some things, like the extinction of the dodo, are going to be very difficult to value.
We might be moved to protect the future out of altruism. But if that is the case, should the urge to help unborn people two hundred years from now take precedence over the philanthropic inclinations we feel to help the unfortunate of the present generation? There are lots of priorities to choose from, including 33 million people living with HIV. In sub-Saharan Africa 9 mothers die for every 1,000 live births and 157 out of every 1,000 kids die before reaching the age of five. In Southern Asia, 46 percent of children under five are underweight and nearly a third of the working population earns less than one dollar a day.
John Rawls, perhaps the most influential American moral and political philosopher since World War II, argued that societies should strive to maximize the well-being of the least fortunate among them. No society that I know of has ever met this goal. But most democratic governments today redistribute income in some way, through taxes and spending programs, from the rich to the poor.
The recommendations to combat climate change in the Stern Review stand uncomfortably alongside this principle of social justice. If income per person were to grow by 1 percent a year over the next two centuries, less than half the pace of growth of the last century, people in the year 2200 would be 6.3 times as rich as they are today. Why should the poorer people of the present scrimp and save in order to protect the environment for their richer descendants, who could afford more environmental investments than we can?
THE PRICE OF THE FUTURE
Even if we were to decide that we should invest present resources to save future people from the perils of a warmer planet, another crucial question remains: how much?
The bill could be fairly high. The Stern Review, published in 2006, put the price tag on the worldwide effort to combat climate change at about 1 percent of the entire globe’s economic output. That amounts to about $600 billion a year.