Test 2 Questions Flashcards
Define ‘radical inequality.’
Radical inequality describes a situation in which some have vastly more than is needed for a decent life, some have less than enough for a decent life, and the total resources available are sufficient for all to have a decent life.
Shue advocates adopting three principles of equity when determining how to distribute the costs of addressing climate change. List these three principles.
(1) where some have secured an unfair advantage at the cost of others in the past, they should bear greater burdens going forward to restore equality;
(2) those who have more ought to do more; and
(3) in situations of radical inequality, everyone should be guaranteed an adequate minimum.
Explain how human economic activity and development is causally related to global warming.
Human economic activity is powered by the burning of fossil fuels, which provide 86.7% of human energy needs. The burning of fossil fuels releases large amounts of greenhouse gases such as CO2 into the atmosphere. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have an insulating effect: they allow energy from the sun in to heat the planet, but they impede heat from escaping the planet.
Some argue that Western nations should not be held responsible for their past contributions to climate change because they could not know at the time that there was anything wrong with what they were doing. Explain how Shue objects to this argument.
Shue responds to this argument by distinguishing between punishment and responsibility. While it is commonly accepted that responsibility for a punishable act entails that one knew or should have known that the act was punishable, and so is punishable for have chosen otherwise, there is also responsibility in the causal sense: that one is, in fact, causally responsible for an act. Where the act creates a problem that affects all, it is reasonable to demand that those who are most responsible in the mere causal sense bear a greater share of the burden in addressing the problem. To do otherwise would be to treat those less causally responsible as one’s servants.
Know what is meant by the greenhouse effect, global warming and why this is causally related to human activity
Climate is the weather conditions prevailing in an area in general or over a very long period. The Earth’s climate has not been stable; the entire planet has been covered in ice before according to him!
Why does the climate change? We have greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
Some of the energy from the sun is reflected off the surface of the planet, and greenhouse gases absorb that energy that would go off into space and is captured and directed back down into the planet. The more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the more heat preserved on the surface of the Earth. If you took away the atmosphere from Earth, our mean equilibrium temperature would be -14 degrees Celsius, but it is actually 15 degrees Celsius with the atmosphere.
There is a carbon cycle and when there is more carbon in the atmosphere, more heat is absorbed and the planet warms, and vice-versa.
Volcanic eruptions release a whole lot of carbon and lava which breaks through the ice and heats the planet in big ways, and the cycle ebbs and flows throughout history.
We human beings have supposedly evolved towards the end of one of the Ice Ages, one of the glacial periods of Earth’s history.
Anthropogenetic: we are concerned now because the current warming we are going through is because of human activity and it is too fast. The cause is burning fossil fuels; since 1750 that’s how we power our economic activity. 82-86% of all human economic activity on the planet is powered by burning fossil fuels (when you burn fossil fuels, you release carbon into the atmosphere).
We are at +1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Last 6 years: +0.2 degrees Celsius warmed.
However, no country is on track to meet their voluntary targets in the Paris Climate Agreement to stop emissions of CO2.
Know the environmental impacts of global warming
-Glacial melting: when glaciers melt, that water flows into the oceans and you get the next point. The Thwaites Glacier is melting: it is massive and about the size of England. It is in a crazy remote part of Antarctica. If it melts, which it could at any time, global sea levels could rise about 65 centimetres. Also, it acts like a cork in the Antarctica ice sheet; if you take that out, you would see glacial melts that would increase global sea levels by over 10 metres! Also less water is available in the water system for human demands as glaciers melt.
-Sea level rise.
-Loss of biodiversity: animals won’t be able to adapt to the rapid changes in the environment. If we lose bees, they pollinate many types of plants and so that would hurt our ability to feed our massively growing population.
-Ocean acidity and warming can threaten survival of many species in the ocean and there would be a loss of coral.
-Drought: change of weather patterns can lead to famine and drought. The Sahel in Africa is undergoing desertification as the climate heats up. Farmers in Chad are running out of water for their farms and cattle. This is leading to war for scarce water resources. Drought raises food and water security issues.
Know the consequences for humans of the environmental impacts of global warming
Environmental Consequences of Climate Change: What are the consequences for human beings?
-Extreme weather events; e.g. hurricanes, polar vortex (snow in Texas last year); devastating wildfires. This leads to loss of life and property and significant infrastructure spending. Tokyo is in danger of submerging at some point, and so are other cities.
If New Orleans is in danger of submerging through a hurricane, and you want to build a wall around it, how do you know how tall to build it? Normally we would look into the past and see how often the storms are likely to come and how bad they are, and prepare that way. But climate change is happening in a way that is unlike anything that’s happened before so the past data isn’t relevant anymore!
Heat: The Phoenix International Airport shut down for a week due to extreme heat conditions: When a plane flies, the air under the wing is moving faster then the air above it, and when you apply thrust it creates lift and the plane flies. But hot air is less dense than cold air, and it rises. So the length of the runway is determined by the altitude and weather patterns of the location to work out the air density needed and the length of runway to get planes into the air. But those historical models are now out of the window with climate change and because the heat was so unprecedented you couldn’t safely put a jet down that runway and be assured it would get into the air, so they shut it down.
-Also, as our population rises, we will see our elderly population rise like crazy and we won’t have enough economic development and people to work the jobs we need or people to take care of all the elderly folks. Or think of Bangladesh: it has a massive population even though it is so small. It is not wealthy; it is dirt poor. Bangladesh is not high above sea level; if sea levels rose by 1 meter, 17,000 km of land submerged and 15 million people in Bangladesh alone would be climate refugees. 1.5 meters, 22,000 km of land submerged and 18 million affected. These people would spill over into neighbouring countries: Myanmar and India. These countries aren’t particularly accepting of refugees. Myanmar’s military Buddhist government killed many Rohingya Muslims who had to flee to Bangladesh. That government also killed many Christians there just recently through an air strike and denied it!
-We are also seeing a rise in political extremism and xenophobia and countries banning immigration even as people are fleeing conflict and violence and war. When you start moving great numbers of people you have a greater possibility of conflict and war and political extremism. The American Defence Department is preparing for this possibility and preparing for the impacts of climate change like war.
-Effects of climate change are speeding up and we may see effects of it in our lifetime.
The CO2 we put in the atmosphere can last from 200 years to up to hundreds of thousands of years. The concern is that once you start something, it is much harder to stop. The effects we are feeling now are because of the CO2 in the atmosphere from our grandparents, and so the full effects of what we are putting into the atmosphere now won’t be borne by us but by our children or grandchildren or further, and you can reach a tipping point where you can’t go back because you’ve put too much carbon into the environment.
Know why Simon believes natural resources are not running out; specifically, know why Simon believes that natural resources are infinite.
Simon has an economic perspective. His approach is consonant with the growth paradigm.
Growth paradigm: all economic growth is good. It is also consistent with the view of human beings that all human beings are rational economic maximizers.
Consumption Culture: Many writers we have read, including Peter Singer, say that we cannot continue in the same consumption culture that we have been participating in. He says consumption culture has a distorting effect on humans; it is a kind of sickness we should cure ourselves from. It challenges the notion that we are rational economic maximizers and that all economic growth is good.
So Simon is definitely on the opposite end of Singer.
Simon says the supply of natural resources is actually infinite! This is a startling claim.
Simon says its not the actual stuff we are interested in in terms of natural resources but the services they can provide for us.
If there is a car that we use some sort of metal to form, and the natural resource we use to get the metal from starts to become scarce. What will happen is the car will become more expensive as the metal becomes more expensive. Because of this, you will begin to innovate as you try to find new ways of doing something that allow you to continue to use the good or service (in this case the car) while bringing the costs down.
In the 2000s, people were talking about peak oil and prices were going through the roof. At that point car companies were trying to create engines that used less oil/gas and still performed the same way.
The idea here is that humans who are motivated to find new resources or new ways of getting those resources or ways to use those resources will innovate; they will find ways to recycle or new ways to get those resources or new ways to use them and the resources will be infinite in that sense.
Peak oil is a good example: look at US monthly crude oil production from 1920 to 2010; the production of oil grew and grew all the way up to the early 1970s and from there the production went down all the way to 2010. When OPEC happened in 1970, you had people trying to develop a new technology to extract oil. he US had to rely on Canada for oil, especially from our tar sands! Although it made the oil more expensive at that time, if they could find new ways to extract oil, its price eventually would go down and increase the supply for future generations and create a new way to get oil and increase the supply of oil massively. You can start to develop technology to go further and further out (into the oceans for example) and that opens up a whole new range and supply of oil that we never could have gotten in the 30s or even 70s. So people saying we would run out of oil in the 2000s or that the sky was falling were wrong; the scarcity drove us to find new ways to get oil.
And what you see after 2010 to 2017, is a massive increase in US oil production, to levels we have never seen before! The doomsayers were quite wrong! The US is a net oil exporter; it produces more oil than it uses and is one of the largest exporters in the world. What happened? How did they go from suckling on the Canadian teet (taking oil from us and heavily relying on us) to having so much oil?
Hydraulic fracking (especially in Ohio and North Dakota) has massively increased the amount of oil being extracted and produced. You have oil locked up in fissures of rock (the old technology of sinking a well wouldn’t work) so you force into the rock high pressure water with chemical mixtures which shatter the rock and give us access to oil locked up in sediments. The supply has increased again; it opened up supply we never knew we had. This helps Simon’s claim that resources are actually infinite!
Know how Simon’s argument relates to the ‘management approach’
Simon has an economic perspective. His approach is consonant with the growth paradigm.
Growth paradigm: all economic growth is good. It is also consistent with the view of human beings that all human beings are rational economic maximizers.
Consumption Culture: Many writers we have read, including Peter Singer, say that we cannot continue in the same consumption culture that we have been participating in. He says consumption culture has a distorting effect on humans; it is a kind of sickness we should cure ourselves from. It challenges the notion that we are rational economic maximizers and that all economic growth is good.
If humans are rational economic maximizers, we will respond to incentives (carrots) or disincentives (sticks) because we are rational.
Tragedy of the Commons: Imagine four herdsman who raise sheep with their individual plot of land. The amount of sheep you can have is determined by the land quality. Assume each farmer can only graze four sheep sustainably. But assume they share a common pasture that everyone can use freely. If you’re in competition, you will want to own more sheep and you will graze them on the common land. But of course each farmer will do that too, and the common’s carry capacity will be exhausted and now each farmer has way too many sheep. Now you have to kill off your sheep or your land will be exhausted of its carrying capacity.
Because it’s your own land, you have an interest in making sure you don’t wreck it, but common land doesn’t have any incentive for you to not wreck it. This is an argument for private property as it incentivizes care for your own land.
A way to deal with this is to regulate the common. No person may have more than one sheep grazing on the common.
In terms of climate change, the atmosphere constitutes a commons. Every nation can put stuff into the atmosphere and they won’t bear the entire cost of what they put up there; it’s a commons. This relates to a concept called externalized costs.
He would want to manage climate change through govt. regulation, tax incentives, carbon tax, etc. uses positive reinforcement or negative (sticks and carrots again haha)
Know why Sagoff would challenge our consumption culture
Issue with Growth Paradigm and Consumer Culture: He talks about we have seen that wants are insatiable, that the early economists were wrong when predicting that once everyone got to a comfortable standard of living, they wouldn’t care about getting more wealth. This happened to not be the case! People continued to want more and more. This perhaps doesn’t pose a problem for the Earth physically, but it poses a problem for the purpose wealth serves.
If wants are insatiable (you get what you want but you always want more), you will never be happy. If the goal is satisfying wants and desires, you will never be happy because you will always want more. Wealth loses its purpose as it doesn’t help us achieve happiness. (This is especially true from a Utilitarian perspective where the goal is to maximize happiness). If the goal of the Growth Paradigm (all growth is good and consumption is good) is to satisfy wants and desires, but wants and desires are insatiable, then the goal is unattainable and we are in trouble. Economic progress will not solve all of humanity’s problems. (Interesting!!)
The Growth Paradigm seems to not be characteristic of actual human beings but maybe a cultural artifact of rampant individualism since the Industrial Revolution.
Issue with Consumer Culture and the Market Economy: when you impose the market economy on traditional indigenous cultures to make them more financially sustainable can create problems along with opportunities. It can dissolve the ties to family, land, community, and place that Indigenous peoples rely on for security and can cause the powerlessness that it is trying to free these people from. The Western paradigm is not a universal one and can have a destructive effect on the other things that shape people’s identity, purpose and place.
But from an egoistic perspective, should we care about the destruction of other cultures that don’t affect us?
When you do things that have an adverse impact on people’s culture and hurt the things that bind them, you will get pushback and blowback. You do not want the things to happen that happened to America (like 9/11 or suicide bombers) because Al Qaeda was very angry at American’s interference in the Middle East and imposed Western values in those countries. Hampton argued that this comes naturally from the fact that there was imposition of values by America. I don’t totally agree with the implications of this comment that America earned that response!!
Another issue with the Growth Paradigm: it actually doesn’t help the wealthy Western communities themselves either as people are less happy, satisfied, and fulfilled than they used to be. They are working themselves to death and research shows that bigger incomes don’t yield an increase in feelings of satisfaction or well-being at least for those above a poverty level, and even lottery winners aren’t happier as a result. We don’t even see better health outcomes for Americans even though they have some of the best health care access in the world! They are too focused on the growth paradigm and excluding the real important things: faith, friends, family, love and virtues that money cannot buy. But in all this they miss the real meaning and wellspring of satisfaction and happiness in life: Jesus. Man they are missing the point here in all of this, yet getting close.
Know Shue’s 3 principles of equity and how he would apply them with respect to distributing the burdens of addressing climate change
- The first is that when a party has taken an unfair advantage of others by imposing costs up on them without their consent, those who have been put at a disadvantage are entitled to demand that in the future the offending party shoulder unequal burdens, at least to the extent of the unfair advantage previously taken, to restore equality.
Those who have more ought to do more. - Among a number of parties, all of whom are bound to contribute to some common endeavour, the parties who have the most resources normally should contribute the most to the endeavour.
- When some people have less than enough for a decent human life, the people have far more than enough, and the total resources available are so great that everyone could have at least enough without preventing some people from still retaining considerably more than others have, it is unfair not to guarantee everyone at least an adequate minimum.
- Know the objections to his 3 principles of equity that Shue canvasses and know how Shue responds these criticisms
An objection to this is that the LDCs also benefitted from the enrichment of the DCs through the Industrial Revolution. The argument to that objection is that whatever benefits the LDCs have taken from the Industrial Revolution, they have been charged for and had to pay for. Most transfers have been charged to the recipients of any good they have received and they have been left with an enormous amount of debt in trying to purchase good things from industrialization. A weak empirical objection in terms of history.
Causal responsibility: you are tenting on a mountain and an avalanche is caused by accident that crushes the campers tenting below you. The mountain is not morally responsible because it is not a moral agent; it didn’t choose to send the ice down, but the physics are set in motion by laws of nature, and it doesn’t have a brain to think. You may be causally responsible though, although you didn’t know you were doing anything wrong so you are not morally responsible.
Moral responsibility: if you stab someone to death, you are morally responsible for their murder. You intended them harm and deserve moral punishment. Although sometimes these responsibilities mix together.
The second objection is that the environmental damage that was done in the past was not intentional because they did not know and could not foresee the damage that they were causing in burning fossil fuels and industrializing. The ought, can principle by Kant: if you could not have known, then there is no ‘ought’ to have not done it. This applies here with climate change. This objection trades on the moral responsibility option mentioned above; these people were only causally responsible in that they caused it but not morally responsible in that they did not know what they were doing. This objection is a pretty good one.
Shue’s response:
Punishment and responsibility are confused here.
Punishment results from moral responsibility.
Responsibility results from causal responsible. The lion that eats you is not morally responsible but he is causally responsible.
In terms of humans, this principle comes into effect when we talk about accidents.
If Dave goes into your house and is a klutz and breaks an expensive vase; he didn’t intend to do that, and can’t control the fact that he is a klutz, but he is causally responsible for breaking it anyway. He isn’t morally responsible (wasn’t intending harm) but still causally responsible. But if Dave then tells you to clean it up yourself, he is acting as your master. And Shue says that in order to be justifiable, an inequality in something between two parties must be compatible with an equality of dignity and respect between two parties (he established this earlier as most people believe that this is a right way to live). So telling someone else to clean up the mess you made (even on accident) is treating them as your servant and not your equal. In this way, even if the people who industrialized didn’t know about the consequences of their actions, they are still casually responsible for dealing with it; they cannot just expect others totally uninvolved to help them deal with it; that is not treating them as equals.
A third objection: we cannot be held responsible for the actions of our ancestors, of which we did not actually take part in at all. We cannot hold grandsons responsible for what their grandparents did. This appeals to a principle which says that one person ought not to be held responsible for what is done by another person who is completely unrelated. But here Shue contests the fact that we are completely unrelated. We have to remember that most of our theories are individualistic in nature and so in that way we are unrelated to our ancestors. But from a collective point of view things are different for us as a collective society and culture that has caused this issue. The ethics focus is individual but the problem is arising not from what one person has done but from what many people as a collective have done.
You could argue that corporations and governments do not age but just change representatives and so they should be held responsible, but this gets into the messy area of corporate body identity and is hard to justify, but we will get into this later.
Even if you think of the 2008 housing crash, it is hard to say who specifically is ethically/morally responsible for that, but it hurt a lot of people and so some people should definitely be held responsible, but this is hard to do when collective actions combined to cause problems.
Shue’s response to the third objection:
Back in the day we didn’t know about the problem, but we have known about the problem for a while now and have continued the same kinds of practices as back then. It’s not like we figured out our practices were hurting the environment and started to cut back and change our behaviours. But even if we know today that it is wrong, why is it that what was done by grandpa should be paid by us. Our present endorsement of the actions now still shouldn’t make us responsible for it in the past (professor thinks this is a weaker response).
Shue’s other response is that we are not completely unrelated to our grandparents but rather have greatly benefitted in every part of life (even in utero and pre-birth care) from the industrialization that our forefathers engaged in. Our life prospects are far greater here than in LDCs and that is partially because of the previous industrialization developments of medicine, stability, technology, etc. This view is also used in support of reparations from slavery, but it only comes from the assumption that everyone should start at the same point which is a radical one!
- Know the objections to his 3 principles of equity that Shue canvasses and know how Shue responds these criticisms
Shue is a neo-Rawlsian… at the outset he proposes three principles of equity that are uncontroversial. Based on these his whole argument rests. His argument is one for a progressive tax rate where the rich should pay more (and a higher percentage) because they have much more to spare and can afford it while still being able to survive and avoid poverty. Very similar to Rawl’s idea of distributive justice that wealth inequality should only occur when it benefits the least well off in society or the most disadvantaged, and that is what this principle of equity is based on.
For climate change, this means that Western countries who have contributed way more to climate change should pay far more, and small countries like Mozambique or Mauritius should have to pay far far less as they haven’t contributed much to climate change and their populations are barely at subsistence levels so they cannot afford to pay much to mitigate climate change anyway.
The objection Shue raises is the disincentive effect: just like with progressive tax rates, the rich are job creators and if they are taxed heavily they just won’t create jobs and that will be bad, and the same goes for climate change. Why should these countries take risks, display more imagination or expend more effort in order to gain more resources if the result will only be that the extra they produce will be taken from them, leaving them not much better off than those who produced far less.
Shue would say that this is looking at this in an economical matter when it is really an ethical matter. This argument was made about slavery as dismantling it would be economically inefficient, but it was morally wrong and so that morality trumps any economic incentives it may go against.
Another response would be that concerns about incentives often arise when it’s assumed that maximum production and limitless growth are the best goal, however these are often unsustainable and so are not worth pursuing anyway or incentivizing; this is a response to do with ends.
Another response is about means; those who are preoccupied with incentives often speculate that unlimited incentives are virtually always required, but that is factually wrong. Often people are willing to contribute some additional amount to help the welfare of others even if they do not themselves improve their own welfare, and so it is unrealistic to try to operate an economy on the assumption that people generally would produce more irrespective of whether doing so was in their best interest. Rather people just need some incentives, but not unlimited incentive. It is a mistake to think that nothing but the maximum incentive is ever enough; we only need some incentive. Look at WWII and the 90% tax rate on the rich when they considered winning the war extremely important.
- Know the objections to his 3 principles of equity that Shue canvasses and know how Shue responds these criticisms
This means that some people cannot and should not contribute to addressing climate change because they do not have enough for a decent human life. We need to first ensure they have enough to live decently before they can even think about dealing with climate change.
One insane objection is that we have overpopulation so we might as well let these people die to help the world deal with overpopulation. That is a horrible argument ethically.
Objection: Another better one is that in traditional ethics, you are responsible for what you can control (a guaranteed minimum for people in your country) but it is more problematic to say you are responsible for providing an adequate minimum for someone in another country where you have no control over what they are going to do or what the government is doing there. The argument is that it makes an imperfect duty (one that would be charitable if you help them) into a perfect duty (one that is obligatory for you to do) and that is problematic; we should only have a negative requirement not to harm, not a positive requirement to help.
Shue’s response:
Our interest is for LDC’s to contribute to addressing climate change.
LDC’s interest: subsistence, basic needs. Yemen was facing massive food shortages and disease because of war; who cares about climate change when you are starving or dying of disease.
Shue is saying that if the wealthy nations have no general obligation to help the poor, the poor have no general obligation to help the wealthy with our interests and priorities. The poor states can fully determine their liberty as much as the wealthy states and it is all the more so as long as the wealthy states are content to watch hundreds of thousands of children die each year for lack of material necessities which the total resources in the world could remedy many times over. No one who is starving to death would stop searching for food to help someone else fix a leak in their roof without being promised food; same deal here with DCs and LDCs and climate change. This is exactly like Rawls social contract theory and distributive justice: what makes something rationally universalized for him is that everyone can see that the arrangement is in their interests, especially those who are the least well off (in this case, LDCs).
The US could put political pressure on Saudi Arabia and stop providing military aid to them and this would stop the war in Yemen, and this would happen without putting soldiers on the ground.
In another war with Ukraine, the US and Europe could stop giving subsidies and aid to Ukraine and the war would end fast, but do we want that? No because it would result in massive loss of life and death for Ukraine and Russia would easily win. So sometimes intervention by DCs is wanted and necessary… not so black and white.
We have not intervened in many places: In Rwanda the US and Western countries stepped back and didn’t get involved and was gun-shy because of Somalia and what happened there, and there was a horrible genocide there because the UN mission was not beefed up by the United States military.
The civil war in Syria became a multi-decade long affair generating a massive refugee crisis and Obama refused to intervene; should he have? These are such difficult calls! The information you need to know to make the right call is foggy.
It is false to say no intervention is every warranted and false to say that all intervention is warranted as well.
Know the reasons why Jamieson believes that the management approach must fail with respect to climate change
In the first part of his paper we have a discussion of the management approach to climate change in which he says it must fail. He says we cannot look at addressing climate change as an economic issue.
Rather he argues that the problem should be looked at as a values issue (ethics), but he argues that our dominant ethical theories are inadequate for this.
The responsibility paradigm is inadequate, says Jamieson.
Then he gives a “positive suggestion” at the end in which he does not develop it much but it gives us something to discuss.
The management approach looks at climate change and its consequences as problems to be managed through techniques from neoclassical economic theory and try to manipulate behaviour by controlling economic incentives through taxes, regulations, and subsidies. The thought is: give people carrots and they will do something and be motivated to get more; give them sticks and they will try to avoid the sticks and stop doing that behaviour. It is suggested that people are motivated by economic consequences and by the pursuit of profit and wealth.
But Jamieson says this is bound to fail. He says that we assume that this is the only theory out there that accurately represents human motivation. But often this claim is circular; we know something is in someone’s interests because they pursue it and if they pursue it we know its in their interests. Hard to falsify and trivial.
Also empirically many people around the world give up their own interests (in fighting wars or for loved ones) to realize ideals to which they are committed or to help others or to fight evil. More people seem to engage in this than those who commit crimes. People are motivated by a broad range of concerns and sacrifice interests for a greater, impersonal good often based in family, friends, religion, political ideals, etc. So the management approach’s underling assumption that all interests are economic is false and fails here.
But sometimes humans do act to fulfill their economic interests; we often do this, in fact. So there must be more to his argument than this.
Jamieson argues that for the management approach to work and for us to provide incentives and disincentives that will drive behaviour, we need data that can back up those incentives. The tough thing with climate change and the management approach is that we do not have much actual certainty of the impacts of climate change in the future.
There is great uncertainty about the impact of warming on regional climates and the impacts won’t be homogenous. Some places will be warmer than others, precipitation patterns will change, and the estimates of the economic consequences of climate are radically uncertain. This uncertainty helps people to say that we don’t have enough data and knowledge to act in a meaningful way to help the problem today.
Another reason these costs can’t be reliably assessed has to do with the breadth of the impact: all regions of the planet will be effect but we don’t even know a lot about some of these regions at all. We don’t even have monetarized economies in these places and we don’t even know anything about them before climate change, much less after.
Also the diversity of the potential impacts: it will affect unmanaged ecosystems and patterns of urbanization and the causal impacts will ripple in ways we cannot anticipate right now. Some nations may benefit at the cost of others and complex interactions will occur between these effects. It is unimaginable we could aggregate the adverse impacts of global climate change in such a way to dictate policy responses.
Jamieson says that it is false that any economic analysis of climate change (that we base policy on) is better than none. To back this up he gives an example of the government doing an economic analysis of whether to build its national transportation system around the private automobile. We couldn’t have predicted all the secondary effects of driving cars and that is much smaller than global warming on a large scale, so it is crazy to think we can accurately analyze global climate change. He argues a bad analysis can be so wrong it can lead us to do bad, outrageous things (“a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing”).
