4 ms·
Not the OP, but: don't. You can't. Never mind that it's not practical, it's also simply not moral. Rich people in the west probably could and should use less e
by mseebach 9y ago
Not the OP, but: don't. You can't.
Never mind that it's not practical, it's also simply not moral. Rich people in the west probably could and should use less energy, but something like 3/5ths of the world are entering the global middle class, and it's just wrong that we sit in out Teslas and tell them to forego the comfortable high-energy lifestyles that we've benefitted from.
- pjc50 9y agoYou're kind of assuming there's no moral weight on the other side of the scale. Statistical morality is not something that humans or even moral philosophers are very good at, but that doesn't mean it can be ignored. Statements like "the probability of a flood exacerbated by sea level rise causing X million people to die in Bangladesh goes up by Y for every liter of gasoline you use". Y is very small but it's not zero. Does that mean that if some disaster happens everyone who uses gasoline is very slightly culpable? It's difficult to talk about. > forego the comfortable high-energy lifestyles One interpretation of the IPCC reports might be that "if all 7bn+ people on earth use American levels of energy from fossil fuels then the average temperature will rise by an amount which will cause massive crop failures". That is, it might be impossible as a matter of physics for everyone to have comfortable, cheap high-fossil-energy lifestyles while still growing enough to eat.