The interesting article about the science of moral judgements in the New York Times also had a really excellent remark about the way our society is responding to the issue of global warming I wanted to share.

And nowhere is moralization more of a hazard than in our greatest global challenge. The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness. Though voluntary conservation may be one wedge in an effective carbon-reduction pie, the other wedges will have to be morally boring, like a carbon tax and new energy technologies, or even taboo, like nuclear power and deliberate manipulation of the ocean and atmosphere. Our habit of moralizing problems, merging them with intuitions of purity and contamination, and resting content when we feel the right feelings, can get in the way of doing the right thing.

I think this is spot on. As I’ve been saying for a long time the tendency to view global warming into a personal moral issue is a monumental mistake. For starters by moralizing the environment we immediately alienate a great many people who might have joined an attempt to solve an economic and engineering problem. Surely global warming is an issue that has moral consequences (like any other) but by associating it with the idea that we have a moral duty to live more simply and repudiate consumerism you not only ensure that people with other moral views aren’t inclined to join up but you also create a sort of righteous indignation that interferes with compromise and creates animosity. I mean if global warming had been presented as a pragmatic concern I doubt we would have seen the same extent to denial and resistance to what is ultimately an extremely technical scientific conclusion. However, because global warming was used as part of a sermon to lecture the public about their evil consumerist ways it inspired a strong bitter backlash.

It now appears we are almost past the hurdle of global warming skepticism but nevertheless the moral attitude toward the environment continues to create problems. For instance consider this selection of posts for blog action day. Following the usual formula for personal moral advice these posts tell people what simple sacrifices they could make to use less energy, recycle more and otherwise be more environmentally friendly. What could be wrong with this?

Well everything. For starters by making the issue into one of personal morality we’ve implicitly adopted the idea that environmental solutions must be sacrifices because we don’t give moral credit for things that we want to do anyway. In our personal lives this tends to result in nothing worse than wasted effort but by encouraging this idea we create an environment where the best solutions (those that require the least sacrifice) aren’t properly favored. Also, just as we tend to unreasonably view Mother Teresa as a better person than Bill Gates so too does moralizing environmental choices skew our praise toward useless sacrifice. There is no good reason whatsoever to try and minimize the total volume of waste you produce but because we have moralized environmentalism we end up stupidly glorifying people who carry their trash around with them. Even individual choices to conserve energy aren’t very useful as they lower the price of oil based fuels for others.

If people just wanted to waste their time like this that would be one thing but the real problem arises because the public only has a limited willingness to sacrifice for the environment. After all if I sort my recycling and turn the thermostat down at night why should I have to pay a tax on gas too. It’s bad enough that turning the environment into a personal moral issue uses up people’s willingness to sacrifice on inefficient solutions rather than the needed national fixes but it even creates antipathy for useful economic fixes. So long as it’s an engineering/economic problem the idea of trading emission credits seems perfectly reasonable but the moment you start viewing CO2 emissions as a moral harm the idea that you can purchase indulgences starts to rub people the wrong way. In fact I’ve seen more than a few environmentalists objecting to carbon credits on this basis.

Unfortunately I don’t have the slightest clue what we can do to unmoralize the environment at this state.