Generation Gap
There’s a tendency to assume that the age polarization in elections basically just reflects stylistic considerations. And clearly there’s something to that idea. But look at the end of this op-ed on climate change by Carlos Pascual and Strobe Talbott:
Many Americans will accept that logic, and make real changes, only if they believe greenhouse gas emissions will affect them personally. Today’s adults, even if they will not be around at mid-century, must think about the fate of their children and grandchildren. Obama can look to his two daughters, and McCain to his four grandchildren. They are among nearly 75 million Americans — and 2.2 billion people worldwide — younger than 18. That generation will be in its 40s or 50s when one of two things happens: Either the temperature of the planet warms more than 4.5 degrees and vast regions slide toward being uninhabitable, or the wisdom of the next president and his fellow leaders around the world pays off in the ultimate reward — survival.
This “think of the grandkids” idea is neat, but obviously it’s easier to think of yourself. A lot of people who are alive today will be dead in 30-40 years when climate change starts to have really persistently terrible consequences . . . but then there’s another whole bunch of us who are planning to still be alive. That kind of thing can give you a very different perspective on how much we should care about taking action now to forestall problems in 2045.
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23 Responses to “Generation Gap”
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August 28th, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Based on the article, 2045 is the point of major disaster. What happens, decade by decade to that time? More extreme weather (heat, rain, etc) over the next 10-20 years? Show how that will impact people’s energy bills, homeowners’ insurance.
Will basements throughout coastal America get flooded every year, driving up insurance rates? Will extended drought make wildfires more likely and homes in wooded areas of the West undesirable?
Will personal savings become depleted and federal taxes increased to cope with more natural disasters? If people see that their dreams of retirement (in the next 10-20 yrs) eroded away, you’ll get their attention.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
To be contrarian (not a denialist, but an anti-alarmist) most of the estimates for 2040-2050 put the rise at 2-3 degrees even with no action.
And people live in regions that on a cursory look are ‘uninhabitable’, that’s where McCain has many of his Heisenberg Houses.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:44 pm
it’s true; if you’re old and on death’s doorstep, it’s hard to care about what will happen to a bunch of kids a bunch of decades from now.
and if you’re old, senile, and really, really hateful–
well, it’s no wonder john mccain is in favor of global warming.
he wants you fucking kids to get off his lawn for good, whether he’s alive to see it or not.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Will basements throughout coastal America get flooded every year, driving up insurance rates? Will extended drought make wildfires more likely and homes in wooded areas of the West undesirable?
The odds are against anything major that’s concretely attributable to global warming happening between now and Nov. 8–which is the only time interval that I imagine McCain and his strategists are concerned with at the moment.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
We need the mainstream media to pay more attention to stuff like this in order for change to come quicker. We’re all bascially being held hostage by them, and a lot of smart people who should be directed towards working on solving these problems are probably spinning a hamster wheel as weapons designers, pulling dirty tricks for the Republicans, etc.
What I worrry about more than global warming (rightly or wrongly) is our energy sources running out. Oil may run out pretty soon. Coal is supposed to run out in 95 years, but that is if we don’t get a whole bunch more electric-powered, plug-in cars, which could increase the power plants’ coal demands a lot. No cars = no food. So we’ve got to figure out an alternative to gasoline powerd cars (and one that takes into account that coal is going to run out soon, too) and we’ve got to do it soon enough so that we don’t get a taste of anarchy.
August 28th, 2008 at 3:55 pm
Many Americans will accept that logic, and make real changes, only if they believe greenhouse gas emissions will affect them personally.
Bloody hell, what kind of an ethics is that?
August 28th, 2008 at 3:58 pm
Maybe if more people made the jump to a hybrid-vehicle, it would get the auto industry and energy manufactures to recognize that this is the future quicker.
After all, they’re profit-driven entities and can only go “where there dicks are pointing,” that is, to where the demand is. More people buying hybrid cars gets people thinking about the problem and creates a buzz around the new vehicles. You can’t get a big change without a lot of talking and a lot of buzz.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:03 pm
And don’t bet anything that the rich-rich, energy-and-auto corporation-board class aren’t thinking they can just let us reorganize our whole society into more pedestrian-oriented, localized arrangements (that may be completely futile attempts to keep up with rising costs of goods as oil runs out), come up with non-gas vehicles and new nuclear power plants at the last minute, and let 5 % of Americans starve, or let big areas of America turn into war-zones. Any fantasy in which they get to keep all the stuff they have already, and everyone else becomes much weaker relative to them, isn’t a fantasy that those rich bastards are likely to become easily scared of.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Matt, it is fairly obvious you do not have kids. Of course, I have to wonder if the CEOs of big oil are also childless.
Young people have an investment in the future because they don’t really believe they will ever die. Old people have an investment in the future too, because they know they will die–their investment is their children.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:09 pm
Warming’s not all bad. Here in Canada, we’ll see a major trade route open up through the Northwest passage. Who knows, the little town of Iqaluit could become the new Singapore. The extinction of the polar bear — the world’s largest land predator and the only bear whose entire diet consists of large mammals like us — is a price Stephen Colbert would be willing to pay.
So long as we survive the inevitable challenges to our sovereignty, it’s going to be all about the Bordens, baby.
(well, we’ll see what happens to the already dry Okanagan wine/fruit country, and I wouldn’t buy a house in Richmond BC and…)
The hard part isn’t caring about future people, it’s caring about future people in Bangladesh. People generally currently care about their kids and grandkids, but not so much about suffering overseas.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:11 pm
Re: That generation will be in its 40s or 50s when one of two things happens:
This is a false dichotomy. It’s not that there’s “one of two things” going to happen in the future. Stating that about something as inherently indeterminate as the world’s climate is asinine. There are a huge number of potential states for the world’s climate into which it may evolve between now and mid century– including remaining pretty much what it is now. It’s not simply a choice between catastrophe and ecological nirvana.
This is NOT an argument for “let’s do nothing”, but it is an argument for avoiding apocalyptic rhetoric and predictions.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Bloody hell, what kind of an ethics is that?
It’s not ethics. It’s human nature.
To move effectively against AGW requires people to be something they’ve never been: to deny themselves quite a bit of ease and freedom to bring about an uncertain abatement of an undetermined ill, not for a specific, known, local relation of their own but for everyone, the world over, even for people who are disregarding the issue. Even for people they consider their enemies. And do it persistently for a long long time.
I’m not banking on it.
August 28th, 2008 at 4:59 pm
Right, that’s why young people are such notoriously good savers, they’re constantly worried about their retirement. It’s also why they never engage in binge drinking, drug use, unsafe sex, or drunk driving- their constant concern for the future and harmful future consequences.
People, no matter age, aren’t terribly good at pricing future risks. They tend to implicitly believe the future will be a straight line projection of the recent past. If you’re young and healthy, surely that trend will continue for the forseeable future, (which is tantamount to forever) right?
I hope we can take meaningful action on climate change before there are incontrovertable signs of it taking hold, but I fear that may be what it takes.
August 28th, 2008 at 5:25 pm
Jesus is due back somewheres between degree three and degree four Celsius, so it doesn’t really matter.
This turn of events will take care of the deficit at the same time. We get to stiff those damn Chinese!
August 28th, 2008 at 6:02 pm
Based on the article, 2045 is the point of major disaster.
Which is one reason why the article is such nonsense. There is no consensus among scientists on how much global temperatures will rise by a given date, because it depends on all sorts of variables that are very hard to predict, both empirical (such as climate sensitivity) and socieconomic (such as rate of economic growth). And there’s even less consensus about the environmental effects of a given rise in temperature. And even less than that about the cost-benefit ratio of spending money now to try and prevent the warming versus spending money in the future to try and prevent it or adapt to it.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:15 pm
Maybe if more people made the jump to a hybrid-vehicle, it would get the auto industry and energy manufactures to recognize that this is the future quicker.
Well, Obama’s on board. He’s proposing to spend $150 billion over the next 10 years to try and accelerate the move to new automobile engine and fuel technologies. In particular, electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles.
Now see if you can get Matthew Yglesias to do more to promote this. Every time he talks about transportation, it’s all just the same old nonsense about how we “need” high-speed rail and more transit. He seems to have almost no interest at all in promoting the development and adoption of cleaner and more fuel-efficient cars.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:22 pm
More publicity about increasing longevity might help with enlightened self-interest. Quite a few of today’s 60 year olds will be around in 40 years, especially if you take the current rate of increasing longevity and project it forward.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
This is the type of overheated alarmism that plays right into the hands of climate-change deniers. If you read the IPCC report, you don’t find anything like this kind of certainty about the future climate, and certainly not in the next 30 years.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:49 pm
“Many Americans will accept that logic, and make real changes, only if they believe greenhouse gas emissions will affect them personally. ”
Hmm. But I thought Americans were super religious (cf Bush, GW; and McCain, John; and Obama, Barack; and practically every other politician in the country).
And I thought, based on the massive shitstorm that accompanied the release of Sam Harris’ books, or Christopher Hitchens’ _God is not Great_, or Richard Dawkins’ _The God Delusion_, that one of the wonderful things about religion (especially in its Christian form) is that it makes us all more moral people who, among other things, care about other people, including those beyond our family, and those of future generations.
If we have very obvious evidence (as here) that this is all a crock of shit (that either religion does fsckall to make people better human beings, and/or that Americans don’t seem to be much affected by the strictures of religion), then why exactly do we continue to be so respectful to religious types? Especially on blogs like this and Kevin Drum’s old blog. I understand the tactical argument that religious nuts can vote, so you might as well humor them, but the standard argument seems to be that we should do a whole lot more, that these are deep, wise and moral people and we can all learn something from them.
Apparently the lessons we can learn are: “if it feels good, do it; be an asshole; foul your own nest; screw over everyone else”. Not exactly what I thought the Bible was supposed to be about, but it does explain why the religious right and plutocrat right get on so well.
August 28th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
It’s not ethics. It’s human nature.
Well, maybe. Ethics does involve rising above base human nature. MY is referring to stage 2 of the Kohlberg scheme, but to make this work we need people to get up to at least stage 5.
August 29th, 2008 at 1:09 am
A few months ago, the blogosphere was full of predictions that the Arctic Ice Cap would completely melt this summer. As this blog post points out, it has not: http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/08/15/arctic-ice-extent-discrepancy-nsidc-versus-cryosphere-today/
In fact, some are concerned about global cooling…. where Chicago would be buried under a mile of ice.
I’m not a climate change expert, but wanted to share this perspective.
August 29th, 2008 at 2:05 am
“In fact, some are concerned about global cooling”
Really. REAL scientists as opposed to morons and corporate whores?
Please provide us with the name of a single respected scientist who is worried about this. And if such a SCIENTIST does not exist, the STFU.
August 29th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
For SP Gass: start with the first two paragraphs:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/08/26/AR2008082603014.html?hpid=topnews
For others.. let’s start with a few basic rules about how public science needs to be conducted: (from Scientists and Engineers for America)
1. Federal policy shall be made using the best available science and analysis both from within the government and from the rest of society.
2. The federal government shall never intentionally publish false or misleading scientific information nor post such material on federal websites.
3. Scientists conducting research or analysis with federal funding shall be free to discuss and publish the results of unclassified research after a reasonable period of review without fear of intimidation or adverse personnel action.
4. Federal employees reporting what they believe to be manipulation of federal research and analysis for political or ideological reasons should be free to bring this information to the attention of the public and shall be protected from intimidation, retribution or adverse personnel action by effective enforcement of Whistle Blower laws.
5. No scientists should fear reprisals or intimidation because of the results of their research.
6. Appointments to federal scientific advisory committees shall be based on the candidate’s scientific qualifications, not political affiliation or ideology.
7. The federal government shall not support any science education program that includes instruction in concepts that are derived from ideology and not science.
8. While scientists may elect to withhold methods or studies that might be misused there shall be no federal prohibition on publication of basic research results. Decisions made about blocking the release of information about specific applied research and technologies for reasons of national security shall be the result of a transparent process. Classification decisions shall be made by trained professionals using a clear set of published criteria and there shall be a clear process for challenging decisions and a process for remedying mistakes and abuses of the classification system.