Lost Signals

In an episode of Filosofiska Rummet, Ditt - och mitt - ansvar för klimatet, three guests discussed climate change from the perspective of personal responsibility. 

First, sustainability scientist Kimberly Nicholas raised the significance of consumption choices as one of the ways we can all help reduce our “carbon footprints” and combat climate change. Nicholas shared her own decision to limit flying and mentioned how she and her husband had purchased a sailing boat with the hope of one day being able to sail from Sweden, where they currently reside, to visit family back in the USA. The assumption here is that sailing results in lower greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than air travel, thereby having a smaller impact on global warming. I should add that I listened to the episode on a recent flight from Tenerife to Budapest.

Are there any possible objections to this way of reasoning? I’ll start with one that wasn’t discussed in the episode.

To sail in itself naturally doesn’t emit any carbon dioxide, but to give a fair assessment, we must also consider the emissions generated during the manufacturing of the sailing boat. On that note, I found this article indicating that the production of an IMOCA 60 results in a surprisingly high emission of 550 tonnes of CO2 equivalents. Now, if the emissions from Nicholas’s ocean-crossing boat are anywhere near this figure, then surely flying is the more environmentally friendly option in comparison.

But what if the premise of being able to impact GHG emissions by such decisions is flawed, to begin with? Karim Jebari, a researcher at the Institute for Future Studies and one of the other guests, questioned the very idea of consumption choice-induced carbon footprints. Jebari argued that it’s not like flying — or driving a car for that matter — has a negligible effect but that the effect is in fact zero! According to Jebari, flying to, or refraining from flying to, say, Paris neither increases nor limits the amount of GHG in the atmosphere. Or, to put it more precisely, it does not affect the expected emissions in either direction. How come?

The first step is to understand that we have little direct control over the emissions from burning the jet fuel that powers the plane’s engines. Even if abstaining from a flight would tip the scale so the airline cancels the flight, they won’t dig back the fuel in the ground. For all practical purposes we need instead to think of consumer choices as price signals. That is, when we buy a service that requires oil (in this case), we increase the oil demand, which raises the price and makes it a little more likely for some companies to ramp up production and exploit more oil — at least if we operate on a freeish market. The crux, according to Jebari, is that oil prices are so far from being determined by market forces through supply and demand that it makes little sense assuming our signals are not lost in the noise. For instance, OPEC is a famous cartel that agrees on the supply periodically and has a significant impact on the rest of the oil market. Further, there are even empirical findings that suggest that oil exploration paradoxically increases when the price drops. Jebari explains in this article, here translated from Swedish:

When oil consumers reduce their demand, producers interpret this as a signal that demand will decrease even more in the future. In practice, this means that the producers will act as if their assets (oil reserves, capital, etc.) will be expropriated in the future. This implies that the oil producers who can, will increase their investments in new exploitation and produce as much as possible as long as they can, even if they earn less money per barrel of oil. After all, earning less is better than earning nothing at all.

And to get to the core of Jebaris’s conclusion with regard to consumer choices:

Actions that have no climate impact cannot justify a moral responsibility to refrain from them, for the same reason that I do not have a moral responsibility to thank Santa Claus for my Christmas presents.

Does it hold water? I can see a couple of ways to push back against this. The first one is to question the empirical claim that we can discard price signals across the board, but I won’t attempt to explore that further here. A second type of objection is about moral responsibility: is it really true that actions that have no negative consequences must carry no moral significance? Let me first explain with an example why this can’t be correct in general.

Consider a bomb placed in a shopping mall. The bomb has a unique detonation mechanism that requires at least two out of a three-person committee to signal their approval remotely. Each of the three people is fully aware of the general setup but does not know in which shopping mall the bomb is hidden (why there would be little hope of finding and removing it) and is unaware of who the other two committee members are.

At some point, the condition is checked, and if at least two of the three have signed off, the bomb detonates. Now, let’s say all three approved, and the bomb blew up and killed a lot of people. If Alice is one of the committee members, is there any way she could possibly deny moral culpability?

Well, knowing all the facts, she could claim that her action — voting in favor of detonating the bomb — had precisely zero impact on the outcome since the approval of both of the other participants was sufficient to make the bomb explode. The technical term is the causal impotence objection. If your action truly had no impact on the outcome, how could you possibly be attributed any responsibility? 

Few people would accept this line of defense, and it certainly wouldn’t hold up in a legal court. We intuitively consider Alice at least partly responsible for the calamity. 

However, Jebari might object that there’s an important difference between blowing up a shopping mall and a trip to Paris: after all, Alice did not know whether her action had any impact or not. If any of the other committee members had voted no, Alice’s choice would have tipped the scale. So, at the very least, we must shift focus and talk about the expected knowable impact from the point in time when the decision was made in order to assess moral blame.

But then consider a slightly different scenario where a lot of people would be given the opportunity to detonate the bomb for, say, a cash price. The first one who signs up gets the price, and the bomb goes off. Now, Alice knows for sure that Bob (and many others with him) would jump on the opportunity as soon as they get a chance, and she concludes that she should reap the reward before anyone else does. Her action has zero percent chance of altering the outcome. Is she, therefore, morally in the clear?

We may have a similar type of situation in which anyone’s decision regarding flying has zero probability of impacting the amount of burned fossil fuel. But invoking the causal impotence argument to dismiss any responsibility for the emitted carbon is somewhat equivalent to Alice denying moral responsibility for detonating the bomb.

So, what did the other guests think of Jebari’s reasoning? Kimberly Nicholas did not seem impressed and made the point that while this argument might be an interesting philosophical thought experiment, it hardly has any practical implications. Here, I would argue quite the opposite. Again, I believe this question is better decomposed into the following:

• How do our actions impact the probability of altering GHG emissions?

• How do we attribute moral responsibility for the GHG emissions that do take place?

Unless there is any empirical flaw in Jebari’s argument — from a very practical point of view when it comes to reducing GHG emissions, refraining from flying likely doesn’t even marginally combat global warming and the question is a mere distraction. However, it is still perfectly reasonable to discuss moral culpability from a philosophical perspective.