Forget About Global Warming, We Should Be Environmentally Conscious Because We Can

Like any self-respecting member of that group of people born somewhere between 1985 and 2000, I feel that we should protect the planet. Not only do I feel we should protect and respect the planet, but I feel that it is our responsibility to do so, and this responsibility arises from the simple fact that we are intimately and existentially linked to the planet: we couldn’t survive without it. While there will most likely be a Mars colony eventually, I don’t think one can argue life on Mars would be of a comparable quality to life on earth. We’ll be living but probably not thriving.

Arguments for why we should recycle and use less water and  be more environmentally conscious generally stem from this line of logic. We should be more environmentally conscious because our lives depend on it, but this logic strikes me as similar to another argument which is less tangible but has similar incentives. This is the argument fundamentalist Christians usually make; you should believe and worship Jesus Christ because if you don’t you will burn in hell forever. This argument is never very appealing because it turns morality into nothing more than an economic exchange, faithful worship in exchange for eternal life – the choice should be easy right? Not really.

The fundamentalist Christian has another problem with his argument, a fundamental one (pun intended). That problem is that to get people to buy into his argument he has to first convince people that there is a real heaven (and eternal life) that we should want to acquire and that there is a real hell that we want to avoid.

The environmentalist should think that he has his work cut out for him, the planet is getting hotter, and everyone should want to avoid a real-life hell, right? According to some the earth will eventually (in as soon as thirty years) be so hot that in some places people will regularly die of heat exhaustion. This fact alone should be enough to convince people to recycle. But it’s not so simple.

Older citizens of the earth can avoiding thinking about the environment by convincing themselves that they’ll be dead before they see any real effects of climate change.

For one, the older citizens of the earth can avoid thinking about the environment by convincing themselves that they’ll be dead before they see any real effects of climate change. The younger ones can just “choose” their facts carefully and decide that nothing they do affects the earth in any way, or decide that the earth isn’t even heating up in the first place.

Moreover, there’s still that problem we mentioned earlier. The environmentalist is using the same rather dry economic approach to saving the earth; you should save it because if you do you can continue to live on it. Recycling in exchange for life. Once again it’s a transaction. Why is this a problem? Because people simply aren’t motivated very well by these kinds of incentives. Why do smokers still smoke? Why do people still eat processed meat when it’s contributing to colon cancer? One reason is that humans aren’t very good at making long term decisions, but that’s a topic for another day.

The stick tends to be less motivating than the carrot.

The other reason is that the incentives are too easy to dismiss as not relevant to us personally. The earth’s not heating up and even if it is I can’t personally stop it, I won’t get colon cancer because I don’t eat processed meat every day, I won’t get lung cancer because my grandfather lived to be ninety and he smoked every day. The stick tends to be less motivating than the carrot, especially when one feels that they can duck if the stick comes their way.

Now how does all this relate to the environment? It relates because as I’ve said, the aforementioned environmentalist is using the same “stick” argument as the fundamentalist Christian: be good or you’ll suffer the consequences. So what’s the alternative? Well we know that there are people who are Christian for reasons other than avoiding hell, and we know that there are earthly citizens who recycle for other reasons than avoiding environmental apocalypse. We just have to change the incentives. How so? I think we should protect and respect the planet for the simple fact that we can.

Western society is always concerned with efficiency, especially in business. Efficiency means more money with less work or more energy with less work. Either way we get more with less. Efficiency is an optimization problem. Just as prices of transistors have gone done astronomically (by a factor of about a billion) over the course of 50 years. Their sizes have shrunk and their numbers of production have increased dramatically. This is optimization. A discovery is made, a new technology initially is very expensive to produce, and then slowly its means of production as well as its performance is optimized. We like this, which is why we keep tabs on productivity (e.g., the productivity index) just like we do on societal happiness.

Western society is always concerned with efficiency.

It is for this reason that we should strive to be environmentally friendly: because it’s efficient. The natural world is very efficient, nothing is wasted, yet we as the most intelligent species are incredibly wasteful. A lion doesn’t have to peel the plastic wrap off of a impala before it eats it. Maybe it doesn’t eat the hide, but that hide doesn’t take 400 years to decompose, and what it doesn’t eat gets eaten by something else, scavengers or microorganisms.

So we as a species are badly losing the sport of efficiency to the entire natural world, and we should take steps to up our game. We should strive for renewable energies for the simple fact that we should want human civilization to be a well-oiled machine – using less oil. Sure we maybe wouldn’t be where we are today without oil, but we as a society can “optimize” past this resource. We should be environmentally conscious on principle. Just as professionals optimize their technique for best performance. Our species should optimize its way of life for best performance.

We should be environmentally conscious on principle.

Exhaust fumes cause cancer and breathing issues. Healthcare money is then spent to fix these issues, but if we didn’t have to breath bad air in the first place, that money could be used somewhere else, it could be optimized. Plastic bottles are thrown into landfills and that land is now unusable for any other purpose, probably forever. Chemicals from the landfills seep into the ground and cause water pollution issues. Money is then spent to fix these issues, or the medical issues that result from polluted water. This is inefficient. That land could be used for a better purpose, that money could be used for another purpose. It could be optimized.

In a society so fueled by productivity and efficiency, why do we continue to do things that are neither productive nor efficient. We should start to recycle, seek cleaner energies, and conserve resources on principle, not because it saves our earth, nor because it sustains our life, but because it’s makes our species efficient, and this is a goal worth striving for.