Moral Philosophy and Energy Policy
Last week, my son, a college freshman, sat down to his first class in philosophy.
First, can someone tell me why philosophy isn’t taught in high school? Is there some reason we think we need to shelter kids from life’s great questions until they’re older? I never taught the subject formally, though I tutored quite a few undergraduates while I was in graduate school, which often caused me to wonder how I would construct my own “101” course if I happened to be in that position, and at what age group I would present it.
What happened when mankind evolved to the point, about 10,000 years ago, that we had a solid grasp on basic agricultural principles, and so no longer needed to roam, hunting for and gathering food in a nonstop life-and-death struggle? What happened when we started to look up into the heavens — and the questions started to flow: Who made all this stuff? Why are we here? What happens when we die?
I’d certainly get the kids into questions like that – “speculative philosophy” as it’s called. But I wouldn’t do so at the expense of “moral philosophy,” whose questions are different, though no easier: What is the nature of our responsibilities to others? What does it mean to say I have a “right” to do or have something? A “duty?” And from what do these rights and duties come? The bible? Our conscience? The mores of our group?
I bring this up because the debate about energy really unfolds along these lines. It boils down to this:
If we really don’t have a duty to anyone but ourselves, we can serve the world’s energy needs very well with fossil fuels. Yes, we’re running out of oil, but not right this minute. Yes, fossil fuels more generally are ruining our health and our environment, but they’re by far the cheapest way to power our civilization at this point in time. People who scoff at the idea of a duty to others say, “Look, we can generate baseload electricity with coal at about three cents a kilowatt-hour. If that creates a problem, that’s too damn bad. Until someone can beat three cents, we’ll burn coal. ”
Yes, there is no doubt that we can do that. But don’t all people have certain rights — and others among us certain duties — that make this a more interesting question?
You pose the question of moral responsibility in very black and white terms. If our present energy choices were that clearly delineated, we would probably have a huge majority of peaple clamoring to pay more to save the earth.
Solar and wind cost more than coal for more reasons than the cost of human capital to fabricate the components. There are huge energy inputs that go into the construction of so called green energy projects. When the life span of these panels, towers and rotors is brief, the cycle of fabricating new components adds to the inefficiency. We measure the net efficiency of a system with its payback period. Everyone agrees that noxious air is something to avoid from coal fired plants but the greenest of the greens are just as alarmed by the visual pollution of turbines on the skyline, bird kills, shading of the desert and destruction of the habitat of desert tortises. Add those things into the “cost” of green energ and we are still a long way from a black and white world of green is good and fossil fuels are bad. Striving to improve the efficiency of coal fired plants and the continued improvement in air quality is totally discounted by those who can fly to an environmental conference in a private jet and still call their opponents nasty names.
If we choose to use energy we choose to pollute. There is no way to put a green label on profligate consumption.
Larry Lemmert
We spend trillions killing each other and billions feeding the multitudes that are starving and facing extinction when we could solve the problem within years and none would suffer and die from a lack of food shelter or lack of medicines.
The world does not care to solve the problems as they tend to profit most from human suffering.
It is wrong to say “there are huge energy inputs” to fabricating clean energy plant. A wind turbine ‘pays back’ embodied energy in a few months. On the other hand the EROEI of tar sands is pretty bad and getting worse!
It is in fact a clean moral issue: green energy may cost more now, but if we commit to building lots of it (as is gradually happening, growth rates of 50%+ in wind and solar), then the cost will come down.
Key limitation at present is the incumbent oil majors who maintain a cognitive dissonance in their view that “world will still be fuelled on fossils by 2030” and pretend this is somehow acceptable despite rapid climate change. Guys, who is going to lead? It is a moral question.
Thanks for the post Craig.
I go to local “Green” Events, I know of no one who has a Jet. The cost of a Coal plant is never in the equation, why is that? The cost to out fit USA with Gas Stations is never discussed, why is that? the Billions of subsidies to Coal is minimized why? One Oil spill negates all the birds killed, Un metered and subsidized water to produce Oil, non listed costs of Oil ……Rhetoric…..
Greg
I guess you have never met the leading green politicians who’s time is more important to them than the hypocritical message they send when they live an oppulent life style.
If you are right about the greens supporting green energy projects rather than nasty fossil fuel plants, why do they reject these projects when they are in their own back yards. Why did Ted Kennedy block wind power off of Cape Cod? The morality question should be applied to both extremes of the energy consumers in this country. The greens want to seize the moral high ground but lose it when they can’t get past NIMBY.
LL
Larry,
I’m totally with Greg. Birds killed by windmills? When you actually look up the statistics from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife and find that this occurrence is Negligible when compared to birds that are killed by skyscrapers and automobiles. The turtles, and poor dessert vegetation? What if we covered the 800 million parking spaces with Solar panels for shade and electricity? I’m done with the carbon economy that has been build with Federal tax subsidies, when you consider the wasted water, pollution, and health risks. The oil and Coal guys spending billions on our airwaves to tell us that coal is clean, and that jobs will be created. Why do we need a continental pipeline for Canada to our refineries in Houston, or shall is point out the export-oriented refineries on the gulf coast? “The State Department Environmental Impact Statement fails to adequately analyze lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions caused by the pipeline. Extraction and refinement of oil sands are more GHG-intensive compared to conventional oil. The EIS estimates that the additional annual GHG emissions from the proposed pipeline could range from an additional “12-23 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent… (roughly the equivalent of annual emissions from 2 to 4 coal-fired power plants)” over conventional crude oil from the Middle East.” Larry … our world is changing and even The Saudi Oil Minister Calls Global Warming “humanity’s most pressing concern”. [n a speech at the Middle East and North Africa energy conference in London yesterday, Al-Naimi — who once called renewable energy a “nightmare” — hailed energy efficiency and solar as important investments, global warming “real” and “pressing,” and explained that drilling for oil “does not create many jobs.”] Let’s move forward.
Michael D., I can accept much of what you say about the value of green technology over traditional fossil fuel energy conversions. But, you missed my main point dompletely. I am not making a big deal about bird kills by wind turbines, visual pollution, the humming sound, strobe effects on epileptic seizures, or desert tortise habitat destruction. Those threats to solar and wind power are false arguements that are thrown up by people who are afflicted by the NIMBY syndrome. The most vociferous objectors to the windtower sitings comes from those who are so jealous of their neighbors who fall within the boundary where payments are made by the power companies to the land owners. People within the power generation zone are happy to leaase the land for dual use.
We cannot move forward until personal interests can be set aside or at lease paid off. LL
Craig, you ask why philosophy isn’t taught in high school. Today’s high school teaching, like today’s energy discourse, is about the lowest common denominator (LCD). Public education’s goals is first socialization and secondly a focus on the necessary fundamental ABCs. Anything after that is elective, and the more free time and money you have, the more you can elect to undertake, including philosophy courses. Philosophy doesn’t seek the LCD but instead the broadest understanding of human thought and nature.
Today’s energy choices are also about LCD. In energy policy, one looks at levelized costs (LCOE) to compare and choose alternatives. The “best” energy system is the least cost option, yet LCOE rarely includes the exogenous costs to humans, the environment and to future generations. The result is that no optimum choices exist, only various degrees of harmful ones. So we continue to “muddle through” doing the best we can.
Philosophy, be it about rational thought or moral values, has its roots in nuance and belief, just as good energy policy should. Yet as Larry L points out, not everything is so black and white. We may have adopted the “civilizing” behaviors of agricultural communities, yet at our heart we are still hunter-gathers willing to improve our own fortunes to the disadvantage of all others and all other considerations. Philosophy seeks to unify self-interest with social-interests whether in thought, practice or emotional belief. Energy policy is left to individual choice and societal LCD.
Can energy policy match philosophy in its scope? Philosophy is taught in schools of higher education because in such schools there is freedom to argue and debate. Until we have similar forums in which to choose energy policy, it remains highly unlikely that the tenor of today’s debate will change…despite how much we wish it to be otherwise.
read Guarded Hearts journals, the James P. Beyor journals, go to amazon.com, yahoo.com, or google for the questions to the answers you seek. read between the lines, move publications.net.
Craig,
I’m afraid I find your assertions about what is cheaper and what electric service costs are a bit off base. Perhaps you need to review the numerous financially attractive end-use improvements, distributed generation technologies and whole costs of fossil and uranium fuels today. As you know, short term market pricing is highly distorted due to massive historic and on-going corporate subsidies for these. Or don’t zero taxes for Big Oil along with other direct and indirect, century old subsidies count in the “economic equation?” For example, see the IEA, 2011 World Energy Outlook concerning a half trillion dollars of annual global subsidies.
Not to mention war for petroleum and petroleum for war, and climate destabilization. Which I would argue is more important than even the perverse “cheapness” of contaminating fossil and uranium “fuels.” Countries like Germany and Denmark have finally seen the light (wisdom of whole cost economics and security) and will end use of either.
Dear Craig,
2 for 1 questions one helps answer the other,
Answer #1 High Schools teach whatever curriculum the school board. Dictates!
We vote in the school board based on their philosophy’s.
The separation of Church and State also affects what can be taught If you can’t teach my philosophy you can’t teach any.
A Catholic or Muslim school will teach its philosophy.
Answer # 2 A Corporation is a legal Entity (with no soul)
its philosophy is to maximize shareholder value!
Not the chances of the shareholders or their descendants actually surviving to enjoy it.
The Corporate Board dictates what is Moral in their business
Their morality is often in conflict with their fiscal duties, Now they have been given the right of Free Speech. Super PAcs, A billion dollars to elect a president privately raised,some matched by the taxpayer?
I also love the new clean coal ads
There is no such thing as clean coal, As yet all they really have is ways to collect the CO2 and hide it. mercury, Acid rain, etc its a long list..
What about the real cost
If they are forced to pay for land restoration and remediation (which should be a cost of doing business )
And plant forests lb for lb equal to what they burn in fossil fuels.
I have a Son you have a Son. I wish that my son Michael can have sons if he chooses someday, grand-kids should be allowed to live for a while too.
You or I can’t save the Planet but we can save something recycle reuse, Clean up the neighborhood, fix an elderly neighbors fence, Start after school program Green Philosophy
we better do this or we die. We have to nurture nature work with it not despite it. AS best we can.
I call for a new amendment to the constitution.
The Separation of Corporations and State.
I think they have an unfair advantage & undue influence.
Sincerely Roy Wagner
The world evolved by survival of the fittest and society evolved around parasitic feeding and socialistic patterns.
To insist that humans become evolved spirits in a century or twenty would seem rather absurd.We are going to persist in our perisitic natures until we are forced to survive as a species and then we will all be doomed.Eventually nature will return to its former glory and the whole process will start again funny how history always repeats itself.
In my country, Romania, philosophy is actually a compulsory subject in the last (12th) high school grade.
Energy policy is stagnant because the economic, energy, environmental, moral, technical, etc, dimensions of energy alternatives have not been made quantitatively clear to the public. Good policy in a democracy is a result of a well informed public; ignorance spurs erratic policy at best. Each energy alternative has its advocacy group for reasons of self interest, e.g., KY is an advocate for coal, ND is an advocate for oil, etc. and there is not a single source that helps one compare in a quantitative fashion all of the energy alternatives. My guess is that less than one-half of US citizens believe that global warming is real. With global warming removed from the equation, the case for many energy alternatives is weak.
First, re. philosophy, I minored in Philosophy at UVA, and the best course I ever took there was “Forms of Reasoning” also known as Informal Logic, which taught me the difference between a claim and a fully developed argument. This is an insight I continue to use every day. It could, and should, be taught in every high school in this country.
Second, the cost argument vs. renewable energy is fundamentally flawed if we acknowledge that 1)the fossil fuel energy is financing a multimillion dollar campaign to confuse the public about climate change and promote the use of dirty energy, and 2)the huge subsidies for the oil and gas industry and the costs to the public in cleaning up the pollution and health impacts (“externalities” in economics terms)caused by fossil fuels are never factored into the equation.
Craig: Morality has changed because it has to do with a personal point of view, what he or she sees as beneficial to him or her, sometimes not even considering the other humans around. When it comes to the root, well, I mean, when something hits us in the face, we react and try to justify whatever to suit our situation. The really difficult thing is to teach and accept that one´s rights go all the way to where the other´s rights are harmed, so, if you do something wrong to others, everyone should come up to defend your rights, but everybody is so busy doing their own business that they expect someone else to do the job. ( The government?) well you know… As for the harm that energy companies are doing to the environment, they are doing a good job directing attention in another direction.You are doing a great job, front line battle against all the odds.
Energy is a necessity, environmental health is becoming a real problem that everybody wants to avoid taking the responsibility.
Some very good comments here. As far as the link between lack of philosophy taught in school and the energy conversation, here’s my take in a nutshell: Philosophy would encourage critical thinking and the last thing the large energy companies (and pharmaceutical companies, insurance, etc ) want is a populace of critical thinkers. So it seems there is a connection between their overzealous lobbying of congress for subsidies and our state funded schools not teaching critical thinking. There is evidence about the Rockefeller foundation (and other large foundations) that deliberately support the “dumbing down” of our populace. That being said, renewable energy WILL PREVAIL. Nature will win this war of attrition.
Craig;
In Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe” a giant computer (the largest computer in the world),called “Deep Thought”, was built to find the answer to “life, the universe, and everything”. The computer pondered the question for generations, and finally came up with the answer: 42. By this time no one could remember what the question was, and so began to construct a new,bigger computer to figure out what the question was.
Like the humans in the book, too many of us find philosophic thought too daunting, and are willing to leave it to others, and then choose from a shopping list of canned philosophies,without a means of evaluating them, since we haven’t learned the art of serious thought.
We live in a world in which our very perceptions of reality are socially constructed (“what is truth on one side of the Pyrenees is error on the other”-Blaise Pascal) and rigourously defended as the immutable truth (an excellent book on this subject is “The Social Construction of Reality” by Berger and Luckmann). We construct “belief systems” of “truths” that are mutually self-reinforcing, but will fall apart if one “truth” is proved false. To have your belief system fall apart is a frightening thing, so we must defend every “truth”, even in the face of overwhelming contraty evidence (thus, for example, the petroleum industry must prove that there is no other affordable way to meet our “energy needs”).
I believe that we should not wait even for high school to introduce students to the study of philosophy; it should begin at the early grades. But this raises the danger that they will challenge our belief systems, and this is apparently too frightening to most of us.
Hi;
A couple of slipups in my previous post;
The title of Adams’ book is, of course, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”.
And I do know how to spell “contrary”. A typo.
I took philosophy in my senior year of high school, back in 1975. It was a rare offering back then too.
It seems to me that political positions are frequently reversed from what they should be regarding religion. If I believe in a loving God then I should want to respect His creation and serve His children – especially His favorites who are the poor. So it follows I would support spending more for clean energy and agree with most Democratic Party policies.
If I were an athiest I would not care about the state of the world after I’m gone so I would rather pollute more so as to maximize my pleasure while I am here – so it follows I should be a Republican climate change denyer.
The hugely powerful conservative media machine has perverted religion and turned religious people against their true values.
Bob, you are making a huge assumption that the best way to help the poor is to put them on the dole with government programs. Forcibly taking from the rich to give to the poor is not going to work because eventually you run out of other people’s money. Look at Greece!
Helping the poor is certainly an admonition that most religions would support but the commandment is directed at the individual. We that follow the Christian teachings are instructed to help the poor directly… to give a man your coat, to give him water to drink. The good Samaritan gave assistance to the destitute man along the side of the road. He did not lobby city council for money to hireYou someone else to help him.
You elevate governmental aid to a lofty plane and denigrate the motives of people who believe that charity should begin and end with family, friends, neigbors and churches helping each other. The question of who is my neighbor is also addressed.
The churches have historically been the institution that addresses the needs of those who fall through the cracks. Massive government programs have taxed people to the extent that private philanthopy squeezed out of the picture. And, the inefficiencies of mindless bureaucratic institutions have created waste of our tax dollars that could have been used to help the poor.
You need to look at this problem of social responsibility with a keener eye for what is best for the poor and down-trodden. Creating a permanent underclass that depends on government handouts is counter productive and not really true charity. L
“Forcibly taking from the rich to give to the poor is not going to work…”
Taking from us all to give to the rich is even less likely to work; and that is what we are doing when we give tax breaks and incentives to oil companies and large corporations, who are making almost obscene profits and paying zero or next-to-zero taxes. Since governments need money to operate (and provide the services we insist on), they have to collect that money from elsewhere (that means us, baby), or resort to deficit spending (which has resulted in the present fiscal mess).
The typical excuse for this is that these companies will then create jobs. False. Statistically, it is shown that most jobs are created by small-to-medium-size firms (all of which are paying taxes) and new start-ups (who also provide the bulk of new innovation). Giant corporations will usually use their tax breaks mostly to pay bonuses to their already-rich executives.
We need to collect from those from which it is due, and give the tax breaks (or loan guarantees, or both; and yes,there are instances when they are justified) to those most likely to give us a fair return, not those who are biggest and can scream the loudest.
Pursuent to that, please note: the U.S. government does not give out loans to corporations; they are forbidden to do so by law. They can give out loan guarantees; the actual loans are given by private investors.
Bob, your assumption that all atheists do not care about the future state of the world and humanity is as mistaken as your assumption that all religious people do.
You appear to assume that atheists have no beliefs or principles. In fact, they do; they only do not believe in the same version of a personified God that you do. This does not preclude a caring philosophy.
Perhaps a few do not care (all beliefs can be perverted); but the same is true of religious people (one such group of zealous God-fearers flew two airliners into New York’s UN Towers, another into the Pentagon, and attempted to fly a fourth into the White House).
A common mistaken assumption of the religious right in the U.S. is that the country was founded on Christian principles. But the first U.S. treaty with a Muslim country (drafted during the Adams administration and signed by Jefferson) clearly states that the country was founded on secular principles. Most of the founders were Masons; Masons believed that religion was a private matter, and only required a belief in a higher purpose for humankind.
If you visit Jefferson’s gravesite, you will see that his inscription (dictated by himself) lists what he considered his three highest achievements: 1. Author of the Declaration of Independence. 2. Author of the Virginia Statute of Human Rights (enacted while he was Governor of Virginia, and the basis of the First Amendment guaranteeing religious freedom). 3. Founder of the University of Virginia (a secular college. The fact that he was third President of the United States is not mentioned.
Religious freedom was meant to include the freedom to be an atheist; and prejudging atheists is equivalent to prejudging Christians, Muslims, or any other religious group.
I took Philosophy in high school and hated it. Luckily, I took it again in college. It is not a subject for teens, at least not how it was taught to me.
On Renewable Energy, I get the fuss, but it is crazy that we think this is some kind of moral debate. There are good economic and social reasons why renewable power is coming and will be our primary energy source sooner than we all think. The fact is that change always has resistance, and the more people are invested in something (like we all are in current power generation), the harder that change is. I don’t despair. I see daily the huge interest and increase in renewable energy usage with the costs dropping on a regular basis. Can any other energy source say the same?
Philosophy and moral social norms are taught in elementry school in other countries. Learning philosophy and morality is, therefore, compulsory. However, in the U.S., philosophy is not a compusory subject, even in college. One of the reasons for this is, in the U.S., historicaly morals and philosophy were considered to be in the bounds of “church” and “home” as opposed to “state”. College students have a choice in what classes they take and are considered old enough to decide which apects of the many philosophies out there they can accept.
Reblogged this on Energy post.