Dear conservatives —you’re wrong about climate change
Disclaimer for anyone reading this: All charts do not represent my views on immigration merely a thought exercise for trying to understand the conservative viewpoint on immigration from majority Muslim countries.
Dear American conservatives,
One of my favorite ways to try to understand what’s happening in the world and manage my anxiety is to think about risk management.
To do that: I make charts. I’m sure you are, thus far, enthralled by my liberal snowflake methodologies, but hear me out.
For every big event that’s happening in the world right now. I make a chart that looks like this:
I try to fill in each square in this figure with the consequences of a given scenario (true + inaction, true + action, false + inaction, false + action). without taking into consideration my own personal feelings on the matter (i.e. whether or not I believe the situation to be true or false). I usually make several of these from different starting places to see if I come to the same conclusion. What this allows me to do is think about what the consequences are of specific actions and inactions whether or not what I believe to be true is actually true: from my perspective and from yours.
For example, one potential chart I could make involves our current immigration crisis. For this situation, I made a chart from your perspective given my best understanding of your argument for why refugees from Muslim majority countries should not be allowed in the U.S.
I start from my best understanding of your argument: We cannot guarantee that refugees from Muslim majority countries are not religious extremists. Ignoring all of my arguments to the contrary, I can make this chart.
I can then fill in each of these boxes with the consequences of what would happen at the intersection of each of these. For example, an oversimplified version as a conservative American might be:
From this chart it is easy for me to find the highest risk and lowest risk options (highest in red from your perspective, lowest in green, again from your perspective).
And then I can figure out which consequences are positive, negative, and neutral (+, — , and ~ respectively).
This provides me with a couple of options given that I can only control my actions. That means, I can only choose to act or not act (the left or the right). I have to accept the consequences of both boxes on the left or the right. I can’t choose whether or not refugees represent a threat. If I choose the lefthand side of the chart — I opt for high risk, high reward (from my perception of your thoughts on this issue). If I choose the righthand side of the chart — I choose to benefit a little at a low risk. By choosing not to allow refugees into the US, you are, by your own words, choosing the lowest risk option. What that means is that — even if you are a wrong and refugees do not represent a potential threat, the worst outcome is neutral for you if you choose to not allow refugees into the country (from a grossly oversimplified perspective of what I believe is the conservative viewpoint).
I can make this chart from a number of different starting points and the starting points are certainly biased and I am assuming that you would like to choose the least risky option for our country. From this same risk management perspective, I believe you are making an illogical decision on climate change.
A simplified version of my chart on climate change looks like this:
The least risky strategy is to take action on climate change WHETHER OR NOT you believe me (a scientist) on it being an issue that needs to be addressed.
AND we aren’t even taking into consideration the unintended benefits of acting on climate change such as: having a diversified energy portfolio and preventing some pollution which is gross by any standards.
Sure, we can start from any number of places but for climate change, inaction is almost always the riskiest option given that the cost of human lives is always more negative than economic costs, something I think you and I can agree on. For reference on alternative charts, my actual feelings on immigration below:
From this starting point it’s pretty easy to arrive at my conclusion which is that WHETHER OR NOT refugees represent a potential threat to Americans, choosing to allow them into the US is the least risky scenario in terms of cost of human life.
This risk assessment is a pretty callous way to look at these issues, particularly when we’re talking about f*cking people. But this approach is informative and comforting for me because it allows me think outside of my biases. I can think about the consequences of action and inaction in situations whether or not my personal beliefs are true and I hope you can do the same.
With love,
Katie Barry*
Katie Barry is not a risk management expert and I’m sure someone who actually is could do a better job of this.
