Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
can't significantly affect the global climate system.
44
There isn't; whether we are or not can't be known
without first examining the evidence.
On the other side of the issue, among those who agree with catastrophic climate predictions, it's a com-
mon assumption that there's something
inherently
wrong with man having an impact on climate. If you
hold that assumption, you're likely to assume that the impact of man-made CO
2
emissions is very negat-
ive, even if the evidence showed it was actually mild or even positive.
Wecannotassumethingsaregoodorbad.Wemustrigorouslyseekoutthebig-pictureevidence—hence
the last issue: being clear on exactly what we mean by good or bad.
NAME OUR STANDARD
Ultimately, when thinking about fossil fuels, we are trying to figure out the right thing to do, the right
choices to make. But what exactly do we mean by right and wrong, good and bad? What is our
standard
of value
? By what standard or measure are we saying something is good or bad, great or catastrophic, right
or wrong, moral or immoral?
I hold human life as the standard of value, and you can see that in my earlier arguments: I think that our
fossil fuel use so far has been a moral choice
because it has enabled billions of people to live longer and
more fulfilling lives,
and I think that the cuts proposed by the environmentalists of the 1970s were wrong
because of all the death and suffering they would have inflicted on human beings
.
Not everyone holds human life as their standard of value, and people often argue that things are right
or wrong for reasons other than the ways they benefit or harm human beings. For example, many religious
people think that it is wrongto eat certain foodsorto engage in certain sexual acts, not because there is any
evidence that these foods or acts are unhealthy or otherwise harmful to human beings but simply because
they believe God forbids them. Their standard of value is not human life but (what they take to be) God's
will.
Religion is not the only source of nonhuman standards of value. Many leading environmental thinkers,
including those who predict fossil fuel catastrophe, hold as their standard of value what they call “pristine”
nature or wilderness—nature unaltered by man.
For example, in a
Los Angeles Times
review of
The End of Nature,
McKibben's influential topic of
twenty-five years ago predicting catastrophic climate change, David M. Graber, research biologist for the
National Park Service, wrote this summary of McKibben's message:
McKibbenisabiocentrist,andsoamI.Wearenotinterestedintheutilityofaparticularspeciesorfree-
flowing river, or ecosystem, to mankind. They have intrinsic value, more value—to me—than another
human body, or a billion of them. Human happiness, and certainly human fecundity, are not as import-
ant as a wild and healthy planet. I know social scientists who remind me that people are part of nature,
but it isn't true. Somewhere along the line—at about a billion [
sic
] years ago, maybe half that—we quit
the contract and became a cancer. We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is
cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil-energy consumption,
and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as
Homo sapiens
should
decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along.
45
