Don’t Blame Me: Defending My Recommendation
Part 2, all of the objections you’ve made before
The point of this article is to defend the position I staked out last week in Part 1. In the first article, I presented a reasonable moral standard we should hold ourselves and others to regarding our emissions, considering their harmful effects on society and the current absence of sufficient policy to amend for this fact. I argued that we should have to pay to compensate for the costs of our emissions, by donating the value of the estimated social cost or our emissions to effective charities.
This proposal was in response to what I perceived to be unconstructive criticism of Taylor Swift’s carbon footprint and use of carbon footprints. I say unconstructive because the criticism generally lacked a specific recommendation for how she ought to do better; in particular it is not enough just to say she needs to reduce her carbon footprint, we need to know how much. The standard I proposed gives an answer to this, she should reduce her emission down to whatever level she is willing to pay the social cost of. Any more is unjustifiable. But if she pays the appropriate value of the social cost of her emissions, my standard is content with her actions.
This article will make the most sense if you have read the first, but I think that synopsis will give you enough background to make sense of this one. Here, I am defending my proposed moral standard from anticipated objections. The first is similar to a familiar critique of utilitarianism, that benefits to one group cannot necessarily justify harms to another. Without buying into utilitarianism, I will demonstrate that in this particular case benefits can justify harms at least to a substantial extent. The other two objections take issue with the idea of paying for emissions: first, that it makes doing so a privilege of the rich; and second, that it does not actually enforce the reductions in emissions that we really do need. If the former is a problem, I argue it is a problem of fairness in the distribution of income and wealth rather than with my moral standard. Regarding the second, I will show that the latter objection is far less concerning if we consider just how strong my proposed standard is.
Note that I will be using the same approximate carbon price of 200 USD from the previous article.
Anti-Utilitarian Objection: Life Offset Credits
“let’s explore why life credits would be silly”
The first objection pokes at the utilitarian logic of my recommendation. It contends that paying for the costs of our actions does not necessarily license us to do bad things. More generally, doing a good thing does not always license us to do an equally — or even less — bad thing. After all we would never allow lifesavers to drown one imperilled beachgoer for each that they save. Consider also the case of being at fault in a car crash. There is a legitimate moral case that you should pay for the damages, but this does not work in reverse; you cannot just decide to run into people on the road, even if you fully intend to pay for damages. This objection is expressed neatly in the following comic.
This comic makes a reasonable point; letting people purchase life credits to get away with murder would be very silly. Yet the artist is wrong in presenting this as analogous to carbon credits. Hence, they are wrong too in implying carbon credits are equally silly. To see why, let’s explore why life credits would be silly before assuming the same reasons apply to carbon credits.
When I recommend that we should be willing to pay for our carbon emissions’ costs, this rests on an important assumption: that the benefits of our consumption can, at least partially, justify its external costs. Our willingness to pay for our emissions proves that, to us, the benefits are worth both the private and social costs. Paying this cost to charity demonstrates that our benefit is worth the cost, because we were actually willing to pay the total cost of our consumption. The fact the money goes to effective charities should ease distributive justice concerns regarding the redistribution of benefits inherent in this recommendation.
This argument is not totally utilitarian but it is importantly similar in the sense that one group’s benefits are being used to justify harms to another. One decent criticism of utilitarianism points out the many instances where this kind of justification does not work. Enter: killing people for your own satisfaction. Most will find that a murderer’s satisfaction is an unsatisfactory justification for murdering, even if they find it really satisfying. The same goes for some lesser infractions like littering. Perhaps it really is the case that tossing a can on my neighbour’s yard affords me more pleasure than it does displeasure to my neighbour. Even if I could prove this to them, it would not justify my behaviour.
The same is not so obviously true in the case of carbon emissions. Basically, everybody is on the hook for affecting increased emissions on a regular basis. Claiming that people cannot justify murder based on their own perceived benefit is an easy pill to swallow. Claiming that the benefits of carbon emissions cannot be justificatory is less a pill and more a brick to swallow. This would demand a catastrophic reduction in general quality of life, most forms of transport would be banned, nearly all international transport and shipping is wiped out, a lot of energy production has to go, and so on. This is far more extreme than ordinary climate change abatement recommendations, such as transitioning over time to renewables. From this we should be cleared of the belief that paying to pollute is always a silly idea. Some amount of emissions must be, morally, worthwhile — at least for the present and near future.
Yet we may still wonder whether Taylor Swift’s jet can be justified in enchanting the air just by paying off its emissions. It would entail no such comparable shutdown of society to prohibit this behaviour. For this, I offer a hypothetical. Imagine Taylor Swift had a team of engineers invent for her a truly carbon neutral private jet, call it: Sweet Nothing. It is more costly to run, the extra costs are roughly equal to the external cost of flying a regular private jet. It is the same in every other way, save for one final quirk. By some mechanism, the jet teleports existing emissions from one part of the world to another. I think it should be obvious that Swift should fly Sweet Nothing rather than a regular private jet. Not only this, but it would also be very difficult to criticise her for doing so, using this plane apparently hurts nobody. There is also no meaningful difference between Swift’s hypothetical jet, and her flying a regular one while paying for carbon credits. That is, if only offset credits worked properly.
Imagine instead a jet called Karma which tries to balance the bad it does to the world with good. Karma has the regular private jet emissions, and the same increased running costs as the previous hypothetical. This jet’s quirk is that by some mechanism, for every hour it spends in the sky, it distributes 80 mosquito nets in malaria vulnerable areas, or 200 vitamin A supplements to nutrient deficient children, decreasing their risk of deadly infections, or 2–3 courses of routine childhood vaccinations to children who otherwise would not be vaccinated (calculated by taking previous 200 dollars per tonne figure, multiplied by 2 tonnes of emissions per hour, divided by the cost per unit provided for GiveWell’s top charities). Doing so, a life is saved roughly every 12 hours the jet flies (taking Givewell’s cost per life saved, divided by the social cost of emissions per hour of private jet flight). Again, I think it should be easy to say Swift should fly Karma rather than a regular private jet, and its behaviour is identical to flying a regular one and donating the social cost of its emissions to charity. The emissions are harmful, but the benefits are comparable. If you think these benefits are not worth the costs, you must at least believe they are in the right ballpark — and I challenge you to estimate how many prevented malaria cases or childhood diseases it would take to change your mind.
Now imagine a final jet, identical to Karma except instead of emissions, its costly downside is that it kills people. Call it: Mean. By some mechanism, some innocent person ends up crushed on the runway whenever it lands. It is not clear we can tweak the numbers to make this jet okay to fly. Even paying an enormous fee to a highly efficient charity does not seem to justify knowingly condemning somebody to be crushed every time you take off. There could be reasonable disagreement about whether it is better to fly Sweet Nothing or Karma, but both are better than a regular jet, and these are all better than choosing to fly in Mean. I take this difference in intuitions as evidence that emissions can rightly be paid for — and that we should do so — even if other harms like murder cannot be justified this way. This is why I think the above comic on “Life Credits,” presents a false analogy to carbon offset credits. The impermissibility of the former does not imply the same of the latter.
Second Objection: Letting the rich pollute
“If somebody has money that they do not deserve, we can criticise them for whatever they spend it on”
This and the next objection come from a similar kind of concern, that if we make it okay to do something that is bad, just by paying for it, it seems like we are giving up on stopping that bad thing. In particular for this objection, it seems like we are giving up on stopping the rich from indulging in excessive emissions.
There is an understandable moral instinct against putting a monetary price on doing a bad thing, since this gives people with money the most access to doing that bad thing. Not only are we allowing the bad thing, but we are making it a privilege of the rich. In fact, I can agree to an extent that it feels unfair that Taylor Swift should get to pollute as much as she does just by paying an amount of money that is meaningless to her. Even taking her private jet emissions from the Yard article, which includes all emissions from her jet even when other people rented it out, we get about 8200 tonnes×$200 per tonne = $1640000 as the social cost of her emissions in 2022, which is comfortably covered on just any one night on the Eras tour.
The problem with this criticism is that it has nothing to do with paying for emissions and everything to do with thinking the rich make too much money. If we backtrack to a more intuitively defensible claim, that ordinary people can emit CO2 so long as they are willing to part with their hard-earned cash to pay for the costs of it; it is not clear how or at what point having more money would change this.
Take an ordinary person working for an average income. According to my position, barring my stated exceptions, they should pay for the costs of all the emissions they produce. If they do, then it’s okay to produce them, as they have compensated for the harms of their behaviour. Suppose they would like to do something that will further increase their emissions, maybe take a road trip, or fly interstate for a holiday. They would have to give something up to pay for the additional carbon cost they inflict onto the world. One way is to give up their time and energy; work some overtime to earn the extra money. Perhaps they wish to go on some international trips which are even more socially costly. They could devote even more of their time and energy to earning some qualification that allows them to be more productive, to make their work even more valuable, earning them enough money to pay the extra social costs. At each step along the way they are polluting the atmosphere more, but in some sense they are earning the right to do so. They have something to offer society in exchange for the costly things they want to do. So long as people have worked hard and productively enough to have really earned their income, it does not seem so hard to say they can spend it on what they like, so long as they pay for the costs of their consumption.
There are of course some bad things we do not allow you to pay for. You cannot pay to murder, steal, or litter. I think these examples bolster my claim that your income does not change whether you can pay to do bad things, just from the other direction. Above I argued that earning more money, by itself, cannot make it impermissible to pay to pollute. It is also the case that earning less money cannot make it permissible to murder, steal, or litter. There is no point of destitution where this becomes okay; nobody is allowed to pay for these.
Earning more money will always allow you to do more of anything that can be paid for. This is okay so long as having more money reflects engaging in some extra degree of difficult, productive work — if you really deserve that extra money. If somebody has money that they do not deserve, we can criticise them for whatever they spend it on. Not because buying that thing is wrong, but because they are not properly entitled to it. This, I think, is the real issue being asserted when people criticise private jets, even in cases where the social costs are paid for. Even if private jets were carbon neutral, it would still be problematic if their fliers did not do the work to earn that level of decadence.
I think this is a decent argument, and it may be that private jet fliers in general do not properly deserve their privileged access to the air. However, it is a separate and frankly more involved argument than what is being discussed here. Its outcome has no bearing on whether paying for emissions is a permissible type of thing to do. People with more money will always be able to do more of anything that they can pay for. This is a feature and not a bug, and is not enough on its own to make otherwise permissible purchases wrong.
Third Objection: This doesn’t enforce emissions reductions
“the idea that having to pay for pollution will not create meaningful reductions is either wildly overoptimistic or misguided”
The other objection, often deployed against carbon credits but also applicable here, claims that allowing people to pay for emissions is at best a temporary solution as it will not achieve the meaningful emissions cuts that we need.
One very unserious article claims that the practice of offsetting emissions encourages carbon-heavy lifestyles. How it is possible that having people pay for their emissions encourages them to emit more is beyond me.
This Climate Council article slams carbon offsets, claiming they “cannot replace genuine emissions reductions”. The source for this claim is another article explaining the practical shortcomings of offsets, so it might be reasoned they are claiming offsets are bad only because of their established lack of credibility. Yet the next paragraph claims that the Chubb Review’s recommendations for improving carbon credits’ integrity miss the “elephant in the room,” and that “the only lasting solution is genuine and deep cuts in emissions.” In their final remarks they call for improved integrity and transparency in offsets, but claim that even so, “carbon offsets should not be a license for pollution as usual.”
My contention is with the premise that paying for pollution could leave us with business as usual. If carbon offset credits really worked it is not clear why this would be an issue, since buying carbon credits to pollute really would be carbon neutral. In the case of my recommendation, believing that we would fail to meaningfully reduce emissions just by requiring that we pay their social cost is very difficult when we consider how demanding this expectation really is.
Consider just a domestic, round-trip flight from Brisbane to Melbourne. According to the carbon calculator I used, this trip produces 0.89 tonnes of carbon, making the social cost about 178 USD.
Consider the price of driving. The average vehicle in Australia travels 12.1 thousand kilometres in a year. If we generously assume the typical Australian car is a medium, 1.8L four cylinder — like my late Corolla, which I miss dearly — this makes for 3.44 tonnes of CO2, worth a social cost of about 688 USD. These figures are perhaps manageable, but I find it difficult to imagine that nobody would feel incentivised to drive or fly less, or to mitigate any other emissions intensive behaviours.
So the idea that having to pay for pollution will not create meaningful reductions is either wildly overoptimistic or misguided. To believe this, you must believe either that carbon emissions are so harmless that paying their social costs would be an insignificant burden, or that they really are harmful and have a high social cost, but that people would just pay for it anyway without substantial behaviour change.
Summary
This series of articles has been an attempt first to convince you of a better standard to hold ourselves and others to when it comes to emissions, and second to clickbait you into reading it by putting Taylor Swift in the title. Saying that it is okay to pollute so long as you pay for the social costs feels like an overly permissive standard at first. It might feel like I am saying we should have to put up with a permanent Cruel Summer if Taylor Swift splashes a little cash to pay for it. I think this is because of a well-placed intuition that we need to reduce emissions and so should be critical of any emissions that have yet to be reduced. However, unless we believe the appropriate standard is to get to net zero immediately, some amount of emissions are going to have to be okay on the way there. I take these articles to be supportive of emissions reductions toward net zero, understanding that not all emissions can be stopped immediately or easily.
This is why I propose a standard, in absence of sufficient policy measures, to evaluate individuals’ emissions behaviour. My standard differentiates the emissions that should be stopped right now and the ones that are justified for the time being based on willingness to pay for their social costs. Certainly some will find flaws in this standard. I encourage those who do to come up with a better one; any net-zero pathway that is not instant will need one. Writing a letter to the editor is Better Than Revenge.
This article was written by Clancy McMahon. Clancy is a current PPE student with a gentle, well-informed disposition and will gladly argue you into the ground. This is the second section of his first article for statecraft, and he is keen for further debate — so just try him!
Thank you to Clare Johns and Emma Hansen for editing this piece.
