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A Reasonable Frugality*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2011

David Wiggins
David Wiggins
Affiliation:
New College, Oxford
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Extract

1. I begin with a citation from Our Final Century. Its author is Sir Martin Rees, the current President of the Royal Society.

A race of scientifically advanced extra-terrestrials watching our solar system could confidently [have predicted] that Earth would face doom in another 6 billion years, when the sun in its death throes swells up into a ‘red giant’ and vaporizes everything remaining on our planet's surface. But could they have predicted this unprecedented spasm [visible already] less than half way through Earth's life – these million human-induced alterations occupying, overall, less than a millionth of our planet's elapsed lifetime and seemingly occurring with runaway speed? ….

It may not be absurd hyperbole – indeed, it may not be an overstatement – to assert that the most crucial location in space and time (apart from the big bang itself) could be here and now. I think that the odds are no better than 50-50 that our present civilization on Earth will survive to the end of the present century without a serious setback….

Our choices and actions could ensure the perpetual future of life… or, in contrast, through malign intent or through misadventure, misdirected technology could jeopardize life's potential, foreclosing its human and post-human future.

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Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 69 , October 2011 , pp. 175 - 200
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Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2011

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References

1 William Heinemann, London 2003.

2 Ibid, 7–8.

3 The state of Nevada contains the nuclear waste dump for the USA.

4 Here I shall lean not upon Rees, whose preoccupations cover a much wider area, but upon chapters 1 and 31 of MacKay's, David J. C. book Sustainable Energy without the Hot Air (UIT Cambridge Ltd, 2009)Google Scholar.

5 And of other gases, CFCs, HFCs, methane, nitrous oxide etc., as measured in terms of the number of molecules of CO2 it would require to produce the same greenhouse effect. Taking these into account the current figure is not 380 but 400.

For another way and importantly different way of looking at the link between CO2 emissions and global temperature, see Allen, Myles R. et al. , pages 1163–6 in Nature 458 (30 April 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 MacKay, 10.

7 MacKay, 242.

8 Indeed we are well on the way to the point where, with the burning (say) of the trillionth tonne of CO2, it will be exhausted and the accumulated emissions will make the earth uninhabitable. See again here Myles R. Allen, op. cit., note 3.

9 Consider wasting water during a drought. Consider the acts of leaving behind unmarked radioactive waste, unexploded ordnance or landmines or, less perilously, something that people are almost certain to stumble over.

10 Cf. Hume's comparison at Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, section VI, part 1, ad fin. ‘…the happiness and misery of others are not spectacles entirely indifferent to us… the view of the former, whether in its causes or effects, like sunshine or the prospect of well-cultivated plains communicates a secret joy and satisfaction.’ The comparison works both ways.

11 Maathai, Wangari, Unbowed: One Woman's Story (Heinemann, 2007, London), 275–6Google Scholar.

12 Compare Wangari Maathai, quoted above; compare Williams, Bernard ‘Must a concern with the environment be centred on human beings?’ in Making Sense of Humanity (Cambridge, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and my ‘Nature, respect for nature and the human scale of values’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 100 (corrected text to be found only in the bound volume), 2000.

13 Compare Ramsey, Frank ‘Discounting is a practice which is ethically indefensible and arises merely from weakness of the imagination’, in Foundations: Essays in Philosophy, Logic, Mathematics and Economics, ed. Mellor, D. H., (RKP, 1978), 261Google Scholar.

14 See my ‘Solidarity and the Root of the Ethical’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 71/2009, 239–269CrossRefGoogle Scholar, developing what I say in Ethics: Twelve Lectures on the Philosophy of Morality, Penguin and Harvard, 2006. See pages 11, 15 and the Index sub ‘prohibitive aversions’.

15 I enlarge upon all this at Ethics: Twelve Lectures. See pages 46–50, 11–12. For one of Hume's claims concerning the role of reason, see (for instance) Enquiry into the Principles of Morals V, part 2, footnote.

16 In effect, the UK committee on climate change aims not to do better than to respect this limit. See Plowden, Stephen, ‘Trust the People on Climate Change’, Oxford Magazine, no. 299, Trinity Term 2010, 4–5Google Scholar.

17 See Aubrey Meyer, Contraction and Convergence: The Global Solution to Climate Change, Schumacher Briefing No. 5, Green Books, Dartington, Devon. See also Meyer, Aubrey, ‘The Case for Contraction and Convergence’, 29–56, in Surviving Climate Change, ed. Cromwell, David and Levane, Mark (Pluto Press, London 2007)Google Scholar.

18 In 2008 the US administration did try to offer the rest of the world an 80% reduction in CO2 emissions by the year 2050. It put legislation before Congress to achieve this. The legislation passed the lower house but was rejected by the Senate.

19 Analogous claims were plausible enough when made on behalf of the US Environmental Protection Agency's cap and trade scheme for controlling sulphur dioxide emissions. This was the endlessly fascinating Coasean paradigm for the EU and UN carbon trading scheme. But, depending as it did on the surveyability of a relatively restricted field of operation and a uniform rule of law under a single sovereignty, it is a strikingly poor paradigm for a worldwide system of carbon trading. Indeed, even within one territory, the surveyability problems relating to CO2 emissions and SO2 emissions are of altogether different orders of magnitude.

20 Gareth Jenkins made me see the importance of distinguishing these cases and helped me to demarcate the two objections that follow.

21 For recent reportage of some prevalent scams, see page 26 of The Guardian, Wednesday 27th October 2010. No doubt steps will be taken to counter this particular fraud. Another puncture, another patch. See further ‘A realistic policy on international carbon offsets’ by Michael W. Wara and David G. Victor, Working Paper 74, April 2008, http://pesd.stanford.edu.

22 This distinction rests on a moral judgment, someone will say. Yes, I reply, but at some point every practical argument in this area has to rest on some sort of moral judgment. Why try to postpone it?

It is a thought too rarely entertained that the methodological requirement to minimize or postpone ethical considerations is not necessarily ‘ethically neutral’ or promotive of objectivity. Why try to be neutral for as long as possible between just and unjust or good and evil? As regards the objectivity at t of the standards at t of vital need presupposed by judgments of wastefulness, see my Needs, Values, Truth (amended Third Edition Oxford, 2002)Google ScholarPubMed, Essay One.

23 For one set of responses to Hansen, see Stern, Nicholas, A Blueprint for a Safer Planet (Bodley Head, London 2009), 150–152,Google Scholar 39. For more on the said acquiescence, see Stephen Plowden, op. cit. and Myles R. Allen, cited at note 3 above.

24 Some say that ought implies can. Do they mean that, if I live irresponsibly enough, I can release myself from my obligations to my debtors? A careful statement of the connection between ought and can will not affect the claim in the text.

25 More specifically, let the objective be to do everything we find we reasonably can do while respecting so far as possible the ideal that looks always to a state of affairs where each and everyone will want each and everyone else to be protected in his/her efforts to pursue (through means constrained by the same ideal) his/her own most in his/her circumstances unforsakeable vital needs. See here my ‘Solidarity’, op cit, 265.

26 For one version of this, see Ethics: Twelve Lectures, op. cit. Chapter 10.

27 See Helm, Dieter, ‘Climate-change policy: why has so little been achieved’, Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 24, No. 2, 2008, 211–238CrossRefGoogle Scholar. I am indebted to this article.

28 It is a pity that MacKay, like Stern, says little or nothing about agriculture and its dependence upon fertilizers derived from fossil fuels, but let us supply this deficit by supposing that they have undergone a quiet conversion to organic agriculture, permaculture or whatever. As the paper goes to press, I note that a United Nations report has aligned itself with the same thinking and claims that this is the way for poor farmers to double their food production claiming that these are in fact the way for poor farmers to double their food production. (Reuters report, March 8th, 2011.)

29 See MacKay, 233, 178–9.

30 At a summit rather different from Copenhagen, to which nations came without specific negotiating positions fixed in advance, and where they could listen to one another in a spirit less defensive and more inquisitive, one might have hoped for an open-ended discussion of world population trends and of the unwisdom or idiocy of employment taxes and policies which have the effect of displacing human labour at a time when there is a massive excess of human labour. Attending for a moment to the question of feeding the billions, it might have dwelt on forms of agriculture less dispersive of CO2 and less destructive of soil than those now generally practised. It might also have attended to the ways in which the world's fisheries are being destroyed by greed and destructive technology, even as the acidification of the oceans not only destroys the plankton on which marine life depends.but also threatens carbon sink.

31 Think, for instance, of ‘Metroland’ – the large area north and north west of London (Baker Street) opened out in the earlier twentieth century to new habitation and new commerce by the Metropolitan Railway. Think how it was before the motor car dispersed dwellings and commerce in every direction in the way Pettit describes, gradually filling all the spaces that lay between separate lines and stations.

32 Meanwhile in London, the capital of one of the most capitalocentric countries of the world, planners have been reluctant to allow congestion on roads or tube lines to constrain demand or prompt businesses to see for themselves whether the time has come for them to expand elsewhere into places where economic activity is conspicuously lacking and housing cheaper and more plentiful. Such a policy has railway implications, to which let the response have proper regard for freight transport.

33 See Metz, David, ‘The Myth of Travel Time Saving’ Transport Reviews, 2007Google Scholar.

34 I do not understand the arguments offered against recouping this expenditure by levying tolls on the motorway sections of the new network. Why should not such tolls reflect the engine capacities and CO2 emissions of the vehicles paying the tolls?

35 It is worth adding that at the time we are recalling such lives were nevertheless not confined within that narrow horizon. Almost any place in the UK was within reach of almost any other place in the UK by public transport. Contrast a journey made at nearly 200 mph for two-thirds or four-fifths of the way only to find no more public transport at all for the rest of the journey.

36 The suggestion is offered in full awareness of countless differences between town, suburb, exurb and country.

37 See here more generally Wiggins, David and Hillman, Mayer, ‘Railways, Settlement and Access’, in Barnett, Anthony and Scruton, Roger eds, Town and Country, (Jonathan Cape, 1997)Google Scholar.

It is noteworthy that in the same epoch in which rural public transport was dismantled hundreds of thousands of people were moving outwards towards rural areas. Witness the rise in house prices there and the lamentable effects for the rural economy of both these changes.

38 See MacKay, 233, 178–9.

39 See The Death and Life of the Great American City, 1962.

40 For the symbolic and real significance of the trillionth tonne, see again Myles R. Allen op. cit., note 3.

41 Here too belongs a frame of mind, which in his forthcoming Green Philosophy: Turning for Home, (Grove Atlantic, 2011), Roger Scruton calls oikophilia, the love of home/homeland.