The Impersonalization of Climate, Moral Licensing, and the Desperate Need to Care

I want to start with a lesson from Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast Revisionist History. In the episode entitled Burden of Proof, Gladwell borrows from a presentation he did at the University of Pennsylvania in 2013, in which he describes the story of Friedrich Hoffman. Hoffman was the senior statistician at the Prudential Insurance Company in the early 20th century. His job was to travel around the country and interview people, to find out what the major causes of death were in communities across the United States. Hoffman was key in determining the link between asthma and the sooty black dust that miners breathed in all day. He connected asthma and coal dust by looking at census data and comparing the life expectancies of farmers and miners and isolating “miners’ asthma” as the critical differentiating factor.

But when Hoffman published his report arguing that Asthma, a major cause of death, was related to breathing in black dust in mines, nothing changed. Nothing changed and, Gladwell said, “people stood up and read Hoffman’s report and said, ‘you’ve got no proof.’”

It was not until after 50 years had passed, until the 1970s, that anyone took action on “Miners’ Asthma.”

Gladwell said, “That should never have happened. We should have acted on this in 1918; instead, we acted on this in 1975. We look around the room and we say to ourselves, “We would never do that, would we? We’re much too educated and sophisticated and empathetic to ever look at the suffering of someone else and say, ‘Oh, we’re not going to act until we have proof,’” but we do do that.”

Gladwell used this example to demonstrate a difficult conclusion: that the brain-damaging effects of repeated heavy blows and tackles in football, and the subsequent succession of suicides caused by the the disease CTE, an accumulation of the protein tau in a protein’s brain, are comparable to Hoffman’s association of mine dust and asthma, and the 50 years of inaction that left coal miners to die from “miners’ asthma” until 1975. Gladwell goes on to argue that the burden of proof has been fulfilled in regards to football, and that it therefore deserves major action — even as far as banning football altogether.

Following his presentation at Penn, Gladwell says “…as I walked to the post-event reception, one of the big deans at Penn looked at me and shook his head. He said, ‘We’re not stopping football.’ Of course not and it won’t stop. At least not until the third suicide or maybe the fourth suicide or the fifth, at which point the students and alumni of Penn will finally say, ‘That’s an awfully high price to pay for a game.’”

I bring this up because I find it critically applicable to our nation’s ongoing inaction and indolence regarding Climate Change. The evidence for global warming is irrefutable and mounting, and its effects are becoming more devastating and universal each year.

Last month, a study was published in the Nature Communications Journal and reported on by the New York Times. It found that the number of people affected by rising sea levels by 2050 would be 3 times the originally estimation. This means that about 150 million people would be displaced by rising sea levels in the next 31 years. The new estimates conjecture that most of Southern Vietnam, Bangladesh, China’s Pearl River Delta, and large cities like Shanghai, Alexandria, and Mumbai will all be below sea level.

Increases in global temperature will drastically affect climates that already have high temperatures, making places like the Middle East less inhabitable. Additionally, temperature increase will change the way the global economy is run, for the worse, by reducing arable land and reshaping the agriculture industry. This last item could have a profound impact in North America specifically, as 1.4 million people in Mexico and Central America who rely on the agriculture sector will not be able to grow crops anymore, possibly forcing them to search for new work elsewhere.

Climate change is also making natural disasters more disastrous, as we’ve witnessed here in the U.S. with more ferocious and harder-to-contain fires in California, and more frequent and devastating hurricanes along the Atlantic Coast, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Caribbean.

Glaciers are melting at never before seen speeds; every year, winters bring less and less snow to the Rocky Mountains, Alps, and Sierra Nevada; and natural habitats are being changed and shrunk at a rate that evolution simply cannot keep up with. All of this is happening faster even than scientists previously imagined, as recent measurements of global ocean temperature have revealed.

Ban Ki-moon and Patrick Verkooijen write in a New York Times editorial from Thursday, “Let us put it in language Mr. Trump might understand. If average global temperatures rise by the end of the century by another one degree Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, there will be no winners on this planet. Only losers.”

The lesson from Gladwell’s Burden of Proof is essentially that humans are naturally wary of change, often to their own detriment. In regards to climate change, the burden of proof has been fulfilled, or was never in itself completely relevant; what remains is the burden of truth: at what point do we reconcile the fact that how we envision the world to be is not entirely what it is?

It is frustratingly predictable that through this deluge of scientific evidence, the American government has done nothing — at least since Trump took office. In fact, the Trump Administration has reversed U.S. climate policy, destroying much of the progress of the preceding Obama Administration, most recently in officially initiating the withdrawal process from the Paris Climate Accords.

Though many states, cities, and counties have stepped up to the challenge and taken it upon themselves to fulfill Paris without the federal government’s support, Trump’s reversal has taken a massive toll, as carbon emissions increased from last year.

One of my greatest concerns regarding the climate crisis is some of what I talked about last week: the sense I got that most people aren’t really that concerned; that most of my peers — even my environmentally-aware and climate-distressed peers — do not completely comprehend the exigence of our situation.

Because of this, there seems to be a chronic impersonalization of Climate Change — not only in terms of understanding that it will affect oneself, but also in failing to connect that it will affect other people, and, rather, that they should care about those other people.

There is a non-negligible portion of the American population that is attempting to do something about Climate Change in their individual lifestyles — and this is good. And there is another portion of the American population, predominantly students and young people, who are protesting and showing their discontent at the climate-ignorant status quo — and this, too, is good.

But we’re still operating within the bounds of normal politics. On a recent episode of The Ezra Klein Show from Vox Media, Ezra Klein said, “… There are periods in human life that aren’t normal times; that the niceties of politics are actually not enough; that you can’t treat it as a game you can lose, you have to treat it as something that has to be won. And that goes for things like nonviolent resistance, people sitting down on freeways, driving the business of countries to halt because to not do that is too dangerous…”

I find this argument fascinating and persuasive. What is the right thing to do when faced with such an existential crisis, as we are, when the government does nothing to address it?

I think the answer does include a little bit of civil disobedience; when government is unjust, obtuse, and ignorant, people must do everything they can to fight the crisis, including replacing the political set with one that, in this case, is going to take action on climate change.

In this moment, everyone must change their lifestyle, their behavior, to more responsibly take on the climate crisis, inside the bounds of their means. This means that those who are wealthy enough must, in moral conscience, put solar panels on their roof, buy electric cars, and do what they can, as directed by reason, to reduce their carbon footprint.

However, in the engagement in behavior change, we encounter a potential problem: Moral Licensing. Moral Licensing is the psychological explanation we tell ourselves to justify doing bad: it is when we tell ourselves that because we did something good in the past, we are entitled to do something bad now.

This relates to behavior change because there is a set group of people who will advocate for climate action, change their individual behavior to be more sustainable, and not vote. I know these people: they’re college students.

Voter turnout in Adams County in the elections on Tuesday was about 26.3%. 1,102 people voted in Gettysburg on Tuesday for borough council, school board, state supreme court, and a panoply of other local offices. There are 2,433 students at Gettysburg College: that’s more than twice the number of people who voted this week. This demographic, college students, are some of the people who will be most affected by climate change and who are the most environmentally-aware.

It doesn’t take much to swing an election, really: that elections come down to a few percentage points proves this unequivocally. The reason that the government shuns climate action is because good people — people that I am friends with — don’t vote.

Because, really, we’re not going to be able to do this unless we get the government on side. We can and we must do everything in our individual power to fight this fight: to switch over to renewable energies, to buy electric cars, to take public transportation, to eat better food, to commute less, to turn off the lights when we leave the room, to turn off our cars when we’re parked, to reuse, reduce, recycle, and compost. But ultimately, the problem with behavior change is the fact that for every person who does show that they care, that they are in this fight to win it, whatever change they must endure, someone else can turn their air conditioning on full blast in their truck, sit in a parking lot for an hour, and melt away the Arctic.

We can’t contain ourselves to politics as usual: the slow, lugubrious process of gradual change that is so often employed to solve problems. Ezra Klein put it like this: “Nobody ever likes the idea that you have to go outside normal politics… but the reason it happens is because the alternative is unimaginable, the alternative is being wiped out, the alternative is something that cannot possibly be permitted to happen.”

Here at Gettysburg College, we need a movement. Too often, students at Gettysburg get excited, put on their activist hats for the day, protests, and then go back to their dorms and wait six months before they protest again.

This can be seen in how quickly students dropped sustainability after there was some improvement, allowing the administration to take back the initiative and stop progress before it accomplished too much.

According to an article from The Gettysburgian published in October written by Nicole DeJacimo, who, full disclosure, is a friend of mine, “Soon after sustainability was launched with much fanfare as a campus priority late in the [Katherine Haley] Will administration, it all but disappeared from the campus consciousness when President Janet Morgan Riggs took office in 2008.”

Furthermore, there has only been one climate protest on campus this semester, the global climate walkout, a far cry from anything resembling an effective movement.

Student body apathy on climate change has allowed the administration to remove sustainability from their priorities: “…sustainability is not listed among the goals accomplished or still in progress in the 2011 updated strategic plan. The 2016 strategic plan similarly makes no mention of sustainability.”

The administration has touted a 47.92% decrease in net emissions since 2006 as proof of their commitment to sustainability. However, much of this is comprised of carbon offsets. On carbon offsets, Environmental Studies Professor Rutherford Platt said, “Sometimes [carbon offsets] are used to absolve the institutions of doing the harder work.”

If the student body at Gettysburg College organized and put out the effort to do their part in addressing the climate crisis by holding the administration and their local, state, and national government to account, real change could happen. Students must begin a movement and start participating in local politics if any progress is going to be made on climate change. The solution comes in a combination of ardently pursuing change in oneself, in individual behavior change, and change in society, in its law and fundamental values. If students at Gettysburg begin to care, really care, and express that by taking action, all else will follow.

We have to change fast; we’re running out of time. Every delay multiplies the suffering that climate change may cause, thus putting it in our charge to better ourselves and our communities without hesitation.

But we’re not yet too late to stop climate change from reaching a potentially disastrous tipping point.

Kate Marvel, a climate scientist from NASA, said on the Ezra Klein Show, “…I think we do have that choice right now: whatever that boundary is, if it even exists, we haven’t stepped over it yet.”

This monologue is taken from an episode of the Pensive Anchor, a student-produced podcast from 91.1 WZBT Gettysburg at Gettysburg College. Tune in here: https://www.podbean.com/eu/pb-dir3v-c6c66d.