This past Friday, I was listening to This American Life, which was covering “kid politics.” In one of the segments, Ira Glass brought in a high school freshman skeptical of climate change and Roberta Johnson, PhD, executive director of the National Earth Science Teachers Association who helps develop curricula around how climate change is taught in schools. I encourage you to listen to that clip: It is truly astounding just how far-reaching climate change denial theory has become in the United States. And by astounding, I also mean frightening.
When almost every reputable climate scientist, 97 percent in fact, says climate change is real, is caused by humans and is inconceivably destructive, how can that be ignored? I’m all for debate, but this is different. The debate we should be having is, “How can we curb the Earth’s accelerated heating now?” — not, “I’m unconvinced; how can we do more offshore oil drilling and tar sands extraction?”
And this begs an even more important question: What is the morality behind climate change? Why aren’t we holding ourselves to the highest of ethical standards when climate change threatens the very existence of many — many who played no role in pressure-cooking the Earth.
I was able to speak recently with Kathleen Dean Moore, PhD, a distinguished professor of philosophy at Oregon State University. She, along with Michael Nelson, wrote Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, which aims to discuss the morality behind climate change and how we are all responsible for its consequences. After talking with Dr. Moore, it becomes even clearer that we all need to hold ourselves to a higher moral accountability when it comes to this, literally, hot topic — and in the end, we can work together to salvage the world. It just takes effort, and a lot of it.
Q: I want to start with the UN climate talks that took place in Durban, South Africa. They were, for the most part, incredibly ineffective and didn’t really lead to any new meaningful emissions standards. What was your take on the climate talks?
Dr. Moore: I thought that probably the most important thing that came out of Durban was the clear recognition that it was the United States that was blocking any meaningful treaty. It was the young people standing up, often times who stand up without being recognized, who made that very, very clear. So I thought the talks in Durban were a demonstration of the effectiveness of courage in young people and revealing of the American intransigence.
Q: Like you said, one of the more notable events at the climate talks was when Abigail Borah, the 21-year-old Middlebury College student, spoke out during a session by saying any type of 2020 climate treaty is far too late and that she’s “stopped settling for what is deemed ‘politically feasible’ by obstructionists and started asking for what is morally required and scientifically necessary.” What is morally required and how can this become an issue for global change?
Dr. Kathleen Dean Moore
Dr. Moore: That was an important point she made, because she turned the whole discussion on its head. We’ve been going all these years saying nothing can get through Congress; we really can’t come to any agreement because of the political realities of the United States, and so nothing can be done. But what she was saying was, “No, we need some moral leadership.” We need people saying what must be done. Once you have that articulated, then we can make the move to figure out how we can do it. But if we shape our ambitions by this very paltry, shameful inability to make any political progress, we won’t ever achieve anything important.
I found that she was really quite smart in turning that on its head and saying, “Let’s ask the important questions first. What must we do?” And it was interesting that she identified the low overall urgency and the scientific urgency together, because that’s what we need. We need to recognize the facts the scientists are telling us, and then we need to affirm our duty to act responsibly in the face of those facts. I think one of the things that inspired me from what she said was to think about our obligations to future generations, assuming that Abigail represents the future. To understand that whatever world we leave behind when we’re done with our recklessness is the world that the young people are going to have to live, raise families, and make a living.
Q: And what was your take on the response to her actions? She was ejected from the session, and it was almost as if those leading the talks dismissed her.
Dr. Moore: The leader of the session was saying, “No one is listening to you,” which was of course a bold-faced lie. People were listening very carefully. As she was led away, there was a standing ovation as I understand it. She was saying things that people were probably waiting all week to hear. I think it was probably a very thrilling moment for the people there to understand that with courage, important things can be said. But with this other craven speechifying, nothing important was happening.
Q: To go back to what you alluded to earlier, the United States, in particular, was playing the role of obstructionist and was a huge impediment to any meaningful negotiations. The United States was arguing that it wouldn’t agree to any new treaty or Kyoto Protocol unless China signed on. China is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, but the United States is actually one of the highest emitters per capita. Why isn’t the Unites States acting as a moral leader in these climate talks?
Dr. Moore: You know, it’s trying to connect the dots the way the Occupy movement has been doing it: Follow the money. Why has Congress been masked in this terrible silence and denial about climate change? Who’s paying for the elections of these so-called representatives of the people? It’s the extraction industries. In 2011, the oil and gas industry spent almost $111 million on lobbying alone. In the third quarter of 2011, the five Big Oil companies made $33 billion in profits. And then the Citizens United decision eliminated all the limits on what on they can spend to support candidates. You have candidates beholden to the extraction industries. You have, basically, a takeover of the democracy by representatives of Big Oil. Until that can change, I don’t think that United States is going to be showing a whole lot of moral courage.
I was also rereading President Obama’s campaign speech. The text of it is extraordinary. He says, “Let’s be the generation that frees itself from the tyranny of oil.” That was so thrilling to all of us. Failure to take any responsibility for that conviction seems to me to be a shameful thing.
Q: The issue of climate change is a gargantuan task, so what are some of the first steps we, as regular citizens, should take?
Dr. Moore: Well, I think there needs to be action on both the personal and political arenas. The first thing that I think college students should do is refuse to allow themselves to be made into instruments of destruction. This can be reflected in the decision students make about what they buy, how they spend their money, how they spend their time, the kind of jobs they prepare for. They need to be absolutely firm that they will not be the handmaidens of the destructive industries, that they won’t allow their lives to be dedicated to destruction. You can free yourself then to live a life you believe in.
I always tell students as they plan their lives, they might remember an East Coast theologian, whose name is Frederick Buechner, who said, “If you’re looking for your calling, you’ll find it at the intersection of your greatest joy and the world’s deepest need.” And I think that’s what students can do. They all have a passion. They all have something that they’re really good at, that they really care about. The question that they can be asking themselves is, “How can I turn that passion, how can I turn that joy, to meet the needs of the world?”
On the public sphere, students have turned the tide of history before, and they can do it again. And they need to be the vanguard in the effort to reclaim democracy from corporations. They need to be the vanguard of efforts to say, “It used to be that the government was of the people, by the people, for the people, and right now we have a government that is of the Big Oil and serves the interests to the absolute degradation of our environment and the destruction of the future of our children.
Q: Another huge issue associated with climate change has been the Keystone XL Pipeline. There have been massive protests surrounding it, as and some have said if the pipeline were approved, it would “game over” for the planet in terms of climate instability. What are your thoughts on this huge issue, especially as President Obama will be under the gun again to make a final decision?
Dr. Moore: It was James Hanson who made that “game over” claim. Bill McKibben and his organization 350.org are doing such beautiful work. If there’s a message to get out to people who are interested in joining an effective group, that would be very important to get to them.
People are saying we have to stop the [Keystone XL] because it might poison the water below Nebraska; we have to stop it because there might be an oil leak in the habitat. But no, it’s more than that. We have to stop it because stopping that pipeline will be a way to signal that we can’t continue to build an infrastructure to destroy the Earth. We have to stop making it possible to continue to take more and more and more from the Earth. It’s way bigger than water below Nebraska.
Q: This is a huge election year, and a lot of money being spent on campaigns, as you alluded to the Citizens United case earlier. Regardless of who the nominees are, do you think the next president will do something positive to help out this crisis of climate change? Is there something good you can see coming out of this presidential election?
Dr. Moore: [laughs] Let me give two answers because I’m of two minds. The first answer is no. The selection is going to be controlled and decided by the fossil fuel industry. The amount of money that they’re putting into it is overwhelming, and the person who’s elected is going to be cowed by that. They’re going to have to answer to the people who gave them the money that allowed them to take office. That’s one answer. It’s the cynical, hopeless, awful answer.
Here comes another one. These days with the country so evenly decided — elections are decided by a very small number of votes. I mean, you look at Iowa where it was won by eight votes. You look at Gore and Bush. These elections are very, very close, which means that changing minds of very few people is an effective way to do it. You don’t have to convince the nation. You only have to convince the four or five percent of the voters who turn the elections. It becomes very possible for students, for example — who really have the most invested in this — to be out there campaigning for the person on the promise that that person has to engage climate change. So that’s the second answer, and it’s very possible for large numbers of young people to have a decisive influence on the election.
Here’s a third answer. Do you want three? People keep saying it’s going to take a crisis, it’s going to take something really horrible — a war in the Middle East that drives up the price of oil, or it’s going to take some sort of huge calamity — and people will wake up to the reality that they need to find new ways to fuel their activities. Who knows what’s going to happen in the future with that sort of thing. The business of predicting elections or predicting the behavior of the president after he or she is elected is pretty uncertain.
Q: To get more into your wheelhouse — the philosophy and morals behind all this — we’re taught when we’re younger that we should treat someone else as we would want to be treated. It’s a very basic lesson. But when it comes to climate change, you see all of these different adverse events that are negatively impacting the most vulnerable of people directly or indirectly due to climate change. Mass droughts, incredible storms, floods. Why are people ignoring the morality behind this?
Dr. Moore: We asked 100 of the world’s moral leaders in our book, Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril, to respond to the question, “Do we have a moral obligation to the future to leave a world as rich in possibilities as our own?” And we got these most incredible responses that we categorized into 14 different moral reasons for taking action now on climate change. The argument that you cite is the argument that was offered to us from Desmond Tutu. He said fundamentally, our obligation is the same one it always has been: To treat others as you would wish to be treated. He makes exactly the point that you made, which is that the consequences of our reckless, profligate, sometimes really unthinking use of fossil fuels could cause incredible suffering to future generations, which is of course not what we would want for ourselves or even for our children who we profess to love.
There also are many other reasons, but one of them that speaks so strongly to me is the notion of human rights. There may not be much moral agreement among the people of the world, but I think there is a pretty clear understanding that we are all created with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And I think that the scientists are making it very clear that the consequences of climate change are going to be dangerous to our lives and health — droughts, as you say, the storms, the crop failures, the spreading of infectious diseases, the environmental refugees — the damage to people’s prospects of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are going to be a humanitarian crisis like the world has never seen. So I believe that to approach this as a violation of human rights is a deeply meaningful way to think about what we’re doing.
Q: What are some of things that people can do in their own communities to try to negate climate change?
Dr. Moore: One of the most hopeful things I’ve been seeing is the movement toward transition communities. People get together and imagine how they might live in a very different world. Their first job is to create the capacity for collaborative decision-making, to come together to learn how to listen to each other and to learn how to empower their moral imagination and reach decisions together. Once that capacity is built into a community, then the ability is there to rethink how we transport ourselves, find our food and re-imagine ways of living and then put them into practice in the small town. It may not be that we can turn elections, although I think we have to try, but we certainly can reinvent our lives. At the municipal level, the governments are still working and functioning for the sake of the people. You might look at the transition movement and see some of the wonderful new ideas that are pretty much coming out of town hall meetings.
Q: I’m 24 years old, and I like to think I’m still optimistic about things. Is there still cause for people my age to be optimistic?
Dr. Moore: Absolutely. You have no choice. There are all kinds of reasons to lose hope, and people say when they lose hope, they abdicate moral responsibility. They fall into moral despair. “There’s nothing I can do, so I won’t try at all.” I’m a critical thinking teacher — and that’s a logical fallacy. That’s the fallacy of false dichotomy, to think that there are only two alternatives: hope and despair. In fact, there’s this huge middle ground between the two of them, and we call it moral integrity. We call it “walking the talk.” We call it living in ways that honor the things that you think are right and good in the world. A person who may not have good reasons to be optimistic at the same time has very good reasons to act in a way that’s honorable and to act in a way that’s consistent with his or her beliefs about how people ought to act in the world. I would maybe suggest that the question shouldn’t be, “Should we fall into despair, or should we cling to some sort of slender hope?” The real question is, “How are we going to embody our values in the ways we live our lives?”