In this series of blog posts I will discuss some of the assigned readings for the Sustainable Planning Seminar (Urban Planning/Geography/Landscape Architecture 446) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC).

This week’s readings were:

1. “How Engineering the Human Body Could Combat Climate Change” by Ross Andersen (The Atlantic, 2012)
2. “The Ethics of Climate Change” by Richard Somerville (Yale Environment 360, 2008)
3. “The Ethics of Climate Change” by John Broome (Scientific American, 2008)
4. “A New Climate for Society” by Sheila Jasanoff (2010)

Notes

Broome:

• “When interests conflict, ‘should’ questions are always ethical.” This is a good quote.
• Sophisticated philosophy is rarely needed… Most people recognize that people harmed directly or indirectly by the actions of another should be compensated.
• Question: how can harm be attributed to a particular climate event? We could look at the excess deaths compared to previous periods or years. This technique came up in 2020 to explain the impact of COVID-19.
• Discounting made simple: a high discount rate implies the future is less valuable than the present.
• The answer to this ethical question (“what should we do about climate change”) cannot be reduced to a simple cost benefit analysis.
• Utilitarianism vs Prioritarianism – the latter is a brand new concept to me. Which I readily subscribe to. I was under the impression that utilitarianism meant simply to maximize the most good for the most people. I didn’t realize that this meant all “benefits” were equally weighted. Even if the benefits discussed do not improve well-being uniformly across all demographics. Prioritarianism is the concept I was missing.
• Discount Rate: High growth rate forces a high discount rate (non-ethical). The ethical component enters when we ask how much we value the well-being of future people.
• It seems like there is an assumption that future people will be relatively better off than we are currently. Yet, if we allow climate change to continue unabated, will this remain true?
• The author’s answer is to adopt utilitarianism and maintain “temporal impartiality.” I’m no philosopher, but it seems that assuming people in the future will be better off than we are now doesn’t account for the loss of natural capital and ecosystem services. Also, it seems like this measures “well-being” in terms of material wealth. Is this the best metric (not that I can propose an alternative at this time)?

Somerville:

• This piece wasn’t particularly illuminating. Discussions about climate change solutions should include an ethical perspective? Duh. There weren’t any unique angles or ethical questions to examine, either.
• Geo-engineering shouldn’t be used because we cannot ascertain all possible side effects.

Andersen (Actually, the primary research by S. Matthew Liao):

• Why would you need “cognitive enhancement” to reduce birth rates when we could just improve access to sex education and resources for reproductive health.
• Important to emphasize the author is not advocating for involuntary modifications.
• I don’t think we need to resort to engineering smaller humans, there are plenty of simpler methods to reduce total consumption. Rather than reducing the basic needs of individuals, why not reduce excess consumption? In other words, the basic energy requirements are not the main driver of climate change, but rather the excess of those basic requirements.
• Back to the argument about cognitive enhancement… This just completely falls apart. The study they cited which suggested lower cognitive ability is correlated with having children younger used the ASVAB score as a measurement of cognitive ability. The ASVAB has questions like, “who invented the telescope?” and “what is 8^5 + 8^9?” Some questions, like pattern recognition questions and “assembling objects” might be an indicator of cognitive ability, but general knowledge questions are a measure of education (and not even a perfect measurement of that). That study weak evidence that humans need to be genetically engineered for higher cognitive ability and not invest in better education.

• “Also, as we envisage it, human engineering would be a voluntary activity – possibly supported by incentives such as tax breaks or sponsored healthcare – rather than a coerced, mandatory activity.”

• How is this different from other “economic incentives” like a carbon tax, if it requires external motivation? These human engineering solutions fail for the same reasons that other methods fail, if it’s left up to choice.

Jasonoff:

• “Societies must let go of the familiar, comfortable modes of living with nature.” Do modern societies really live with nature?
• “[H]azardous technologies such as nuclear power […]” sigh
• This essay is about the semiotics of environment.