Climate Change and Collective Action

Josh Landy
Can individual actions solve the climate crisis?

Ray Briggs
Is it enough to get solar panels and bike to work?

Josh Landy
What will it take for governments to tackle climate change?

Ray Briggs
Welcome to Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Josh Landy
…except your intelligence. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. We’re coming to you from the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Josh Landy
Continuing conversations that begin at philosophers corner on the Stanford campus where Ray teaches philosophy, and I direct the Philosophy and Literature Initiative.

Today we’re thinking about Collective Action and Climate Change.

Yeah, I mean, look: this summer was one of the hottest on record, you’ve got floods and fires getting worse all around the globe… It really feels like we’re on the precipice on the brink of an ecological disaster. We’ve got to do something about climate change.

Ray Briggs
Okay, but what are we going to do?

Josh Landy
Well, I don’t know about you but I put solar panels on my house, I just replaced my lights with LEDs, I even have an electric car now.

Ray Briggs
Okay Josh, but is that really enough? Like if you do that, but nobody else does anything we’re still going to end up with a climate catastrophe.

Josh Landy
Okay, but what if everybody does their bit?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, they’re not going to do their bit. A lot of people can’t afford to replace their light,s much less by an electric car. And even people who can, they don’t always want to.

Josh Landy
Okay, yeah, I admit that’s a real problem. I wish everyone was really enlightened thing. But a lot of people, even the ones who can afford it, seems like maybe they’re just a little short-sighted. They don’t seem to realize it’s in their own self-interest to save the world.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, but is it in their self-interest? Okay, commuting to work, or taking a flight to cool vacation spots, like, that hurts other people, but it benefits the person doing it. I think it’s a classic “tragedy of the commons.”

Tragedy of the commons—say more about that, Ray.

So this is an idea that goes back to the economist William Forster Lloyd. He was thinking about common land in Britain in the 19th century, where people could send their animals to graze. If you keep a cow on the commons, you get meat, you get milk—you basically benefit. And two cows? Well, that’s even better, right?

Josh Landy
Great, get two cows get three. What’s the problem?

Ray Briggs
Well, if everybody gets two or three cows, pretty soon all the grass is going to be gone. Even if every individual is doing what’s best for them, the group as a whole is going to suffer.

Josh Landy
Right, I mean, it’s like the dirty cups of the office kitchen: everyone thinks it’s someone else’s job. So the mugs just sit in the sink until they get moldy.

Ray Briggs
Exactly. And everyone thinks it’s someone else’s job to cut down on the carbon emissions. So the carbon just sits in the atmosphere until we all boil to death.

Josh Landy
Oh dear. So okay, what are we supposed to do about? I mean, if it’s not in anyone’s individual self-interest to fight climate change, how are you ever going to solve the problem?

Ray Briggs
Well Josh, what’s in people’s self-interest can change, right? So right now, it’s in a lot of people’s self-interest to drive to work—you know, they work in the city and all the cheap houses are out in the suburbs, and they don’t have reliable transit or safe bike lanes. But you could make it more affordable to live in the city near where you work. Or you could build better bike lanes and better trains.

Josh Landy
Me? I can’t do that, I’m just one person. I mean, worse, I’m just a professor. How on earth am I supposed to conjure up bike lanes and high speed trains, like with a magic wand or something? That’s why I’ve been doing what I can, I guess, you know, going solar investing in LEDs, stuff like that.

Ray Briggs
Okay, okay, you can change things single handedly, I grant that, but we can do it together. Our governments and organizations can change things, and they’re made up of people just like us.

Josh Landy
Sure. But look, even if my local government decides to build bike lanes, maybe the next-door county council’s gonna refuse to, and then you just get another tragedy of the commons at a higher level.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, don’t forget that you can also take to the streets and make noise, though—that’s also a form of collective action.

Josh Landy
True, but people have been doing that for quite a long time and, frankly, it doesn’t seem to have had much effect.

Ray Briggs
Well, maybe your guests will have some better ideas. It’s MIT philosopher Kieran Setiya, author of “Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.”

Josh Landy
But first, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter Holly J. McDede, to find out how collective action can help us deal with climate anxiety. She files this report.

Anya Draves
It’s impossible to ignore what’s happening, and I just really felt like responsibility to do something about it.

Holly McDede
Anya Draves is a freshman and environmental activist at the University of Pennsylvania. We talked while she was at a campus cafe.

Anya Draves
I’m also helping in the fight against racism and bias against sexism and all these other things because they’re all deeply connected and it’s all one big movement.

Holly McDede
A few years ago, she remembers learning about fires in the Amazon.

Amazon documentary
The Amazon rainforest is known as the lungs of the Earth.

Holly McDede
That pushed her to learn more about cattle ranching.

Amazon documentary
How much of the Amazon has been scarred by all of this cattle ranching? We already lost almost 20% of the Amazon, and without Amazon forest, the life of human beings are under threat in this world.

Holly McDede
Then came the sense of responsibility. Then the guilt. Then the desire to do something. So she stopped eating meat.

Anya Draves
It’s not entirely tangible, I supposw, but it felt tangible. It felt like something I could do. And so I felt really, like, just compelled to do it.

Holly McDede
Anya was a student at Berkeley High in California. And so she co-founded the Zero Waste Club, a group where students pledge to reduce waste in their daily lives. She launched the Meatless Monday campaign to stop the cafeteria from serving meat one day a week.

Anya Draves
The year that we were really working on this, like the head chef was on sabbatical or something like that. And so the cafeteria staff was like, “No, we can’t do anything without our head chef here. So like, if you want to make this change, like, you have to wait until she comes back next year.” And we were like, “Okay, like, what?

Holly McDede
At most, they managed to get some businesses to offer discounts when students ordered vegetarian food. These battles were stressful and exhausting.

Anya Draves
But giving up feels worse, because then I feel like I’m like letting a planet down.

Sarah Schwartz
There was a recent survey of about 10,000 young people from 10 countries across the globe. And approximately three quarters agreed with the statement, “The future is frightening.”

Holly McDede
Sarah Schwartz is an associate professor of psychology at Suffolk University in Boston. She’s referring to a survey that was led by Bath University. A study she worked on from the Yale School of Public Health suggests that collective action can help ease the effects of climate change anxiety.

Sarah Schwartz
One of the main themes was the enormity of the problem of climate change, and then the insignificance of what they can do.

Holly McDede
In a survey for that study, researchers found individual actions like recycling or turning off light did not have the same mental health benefits as collective action.

Sarah Schwartz
We know when it comes to facing these large kind of existential crises that it’s so easy to feel hopeless and alone, and that when you can come together with the others, that it can lead to the sense of agency, and maybe we actually can do something.

Laelia Benoit
If it’s a collective problem, then we have to think about collective solitions.

Holly McDede
Laelia Benoit, from the Yale Child Study Center also collaborated on that research. She remembers working with an adolescent who had mild autism. He had unplugged old unused appliances and went vegan. His parents cancelled their vacation plans over his concerns for the environment—but they were worried about him.

Laelia Benoit
And I couldn’t help thinking like he’s absolutely right.

Holly McDede
Benoit says society produces all kinds of violence, and that can hurt mental health.

Laelia Benoit
If you try answering the problem with an individual solution, it will be a mess. So, you know, try give an antidepressant for, I don’t know, sexism stigma or racism. It’s a mess. It’s an individual solution for collective program.

Holly McDede
Learning about climate change is a kind of grief. And if you sit with that grief, you might notice a new energy seemingly out of nowhere.

Laelia Benoit
But it doesn’t come out of nowhere—it comes out of a process of grief, you know. Then you have renewed energy and then you are able to be part of the solution. And to take action.

Holly McDede
Back at the University of Pennsylvania, Anya Draves is still trying to figure out how she can fix some of the problems. She says they don’t compost on campus or separate recycling, and they rely too much on bottled water.

Anya Draves
Yeah, there’s like a lot of issues. And so I’m really like, I want to start getting involved right away. I just like don’t know where to start or how to do that yet.

Holly McDede
She just needs to find more individuals who want to make collective change. For Philosophy Talk, I’m Holly J. McDede,

Josh Landy
Thanks for that encouraging report. Holly, I’m Josh Landy with me is my Stanford colleague, Ray Briggs. And today we’re thinking about collective action and climate change.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by Kieran Setiya. He’s a professor of philosophy at MIT and the author of many things, including most recently “Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.” Kieran, welcome back to Philosophy Talk.

Kieran Setiya
Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here again.

Josh Landy
So Kieran, we know this isn’t just a theoretical question for you. Have you been engaging with climate change at a practical level?

Kieran Setiya
What mainly as a faculty supporter of the Fossil Free MIT student group, which staged a sit in outside the president’s office trying to pressure MIT to divest from fossil fuels? And that’s it and went on for a while there were letters to the administration. And eventually, we did win some concessions not divestment, but the first ever Climate Action Plan and some kind of overview of that. And I think we made some progress.

Ray Briggs
That’s great. I mean, it sounds like it wasn’t easy. Why do you think it’s so hard to get people to do something about the climate problem?

Kieran Setiya
I think they’re the sort of local law obstacles like the power of fossil fuel companies. And then there are gigantic obstacles, like the fact that it’s not just a tragedy of the commons of the kind that you guys described earlier, but an intergenerational one. So in a regular tragedy of the commons, it’s in everyone’s interest if everyone sort of cooperates. But in the case of climate change, the present generation is going to have to sacrifice a lot for future generations. And it may not really make sense to them.

Ray Briggs
I see. So if we help future generations, we have to give something up. And there’s this big problem of trying to distribute resources equally, between us and people who don’t even exist yet. Is that right?

Kieran Setiya
Exactly. So it looks like it might be a situation where most of the benefits accrue to future generations. So in a normal tragedy of the commons, if we all cooperate, we all get something out of it, even though, you know, there’s still the temptation to cheat. Whereas in this case, it might be that the present generation, if we just reduce our emissions dramatically, say, we don’t get that much out of it in the short term, all the benefits accrue to the future. And so it looks like it’s really unclear why this is in our interests.

Josh Landy
Okay. But you know, get a bunch of smart philosophers on that solve that problem done. Right? That’s it right?

Kieran Setiya
Well, you can. So I think the solutions here are partly economic, it involves things like, you know, borrowing against the future. So, you know, taking out a lot of government debt to take action now is an effective way of trying to mitigate this by sort of transferring resources from future generations to the present, so that the costs are being borne by them. And it isn’t such a great sacrifice. Now, you know, the economic gains of making those investments also give the president benefits. So there are sort of economic strategies for trying to overcome this intergenerational problem, I think.

Josh Landy
So that’s one sort of problems that is the economic strand, and the sacrifice of future generations. But it mean, are there other things like for example, you know, in the, in the classic treasury, that common scenario, people are just sending their cows to graze some grass, they’re not poisoning the grass, right? Whereas we’re pumping a bunch of carbon into the atmosphere? Doesn’t that make it kind of a tragedy of the commons on steroids?

Kieran Setiya
No, that is exactly right. So there’s a way in which we’re really under estimating, certainly, the practical and especially the moral stakes, if we just think of this as a tragedy of the commons, as if it’s just about the fair distribution of a resource in which people sort of innocently consuming that resource collectively generate something bad, namely, deprivation of the resource for the future. Because what’s actually happening in in the case of climate change, as you said, is, we’re not just distributing a resource by consuming fossil fuels and using them in the way we have done primarily in the West, we’re changing the world in ways that will cause immense harm, droughts, famines, floods, storms, hunger, water shortages, that will predominantly affect people in other parts of the world. So what we’re doing is collectively causing harm for our own benefit, which is sort of the paradigm of injustice of unjust action. So morally, this is a lot worse than being a bit you know, sneaking an extra cow on to the onto the field.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about collective action and climate change with Kieran Setiya from MIT.

Ray Briggs
Who can we join forces with in the battle against climate change? What can we accomplish collectively? And how can we make it happen?

Josh Landy
Facing our problems together—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Childish Gambino
I’m hoping that this world will change / But it just feels the same.

Josh Landy
If we’re going to stop every day from getting hotter than the next we’re going to have to do it together. I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re thinking about collective action and climate change. With Kieran Setiya from MIT.

Josh Landy
Got questions about climate and collective action? Email us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot ORG—or comment on our website. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 500 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So Kieran, you mentioned a few obstacles in the way of climate action. So what else is part of the problem? Did we get to everything?

Kieran Setiya
You know, unfortunately, no, there were other problems too. And there are lots of them. But one is this. There’s a sense that even after you’ve sort of isolated the the injustice that we’re all participating in and collectively causing, and you think I need to do something about this, there’s the worry you guys raised earlier that I’m just one individual and anything I do is a drop in the bucket. You know, I can try to reduce my carbon footprint. But basically all I’m doing is sending a tiny signal to the market that may be demand has gone down a little bit and there’s a tiny chance And that if enough of people do that, there’ll be some change in the market for fossil fuels, which will eventually, in some complicated way, reduce the supply, which will eventually make some, you know, some difference. It’s, it feels like a kind of tiny, incremental shift in probabilities. And it’s hard to really feel the kind of moral force of that the moral progress there, given that it might be very expensive and take significant sacrifice. For me, it’s hard to it’s not like this is going to be cost free for the individuals who focus on changing their own behaviors.

Ray Briggs
That sounds a little kind of hopeless making. You stop from being hopeless?

Kieran Setiya
Well, I there’s two things to say that we One is I think we are making some progress on these things. I think the Paris Agreement, in terms of dealing with collective action at the national scale really got somewhere. So there’s that. And the other is that I think when we think about this in our own lives, we shouldn’t be thinking of it primarily, in terms of reducing our individual carbon footprints, as it were, the direct harm I caused by my behavior, and the emissions associated with it, we should be thinking more in terms of our complicity in the systems of the fossil fuel economy that are collectively causing this harm. And the thought, well, we need to change those systems. So the question is, what can we do by collective action to change these systems, and that could be at the political level, you know, voting is the most obvious thing voting for politicians who will take action on this, but there are so many other levels of collective action we can look for, for instance, you know, Fossil Free MIT was aiming at collective action at the scale of an institution, that’s just one institution, but a significant one where whose actions might be precedents for others. There’s also things you can do at the company you work at, or in the town, you live in sort of more local action. So I think, acting collectively, is not just as the roving reporter said, you know, anxiety reducing, rather than just sitting on your own and worrying. It’s also the way to proceed and the kind of obligation, we have to really act on climate change.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So you mentioned that I’m part of a bunch of collectives, how do I figure out which ones to kind of mobilize in combating climate change?

Kieran Setiya
So I think this is something that the political philosopher Ben Lorenz calls the question of the agent of change. So it’s, you know, it’s even applied philosophy often ends with philosophers sort of proposing policies, and never having asked the question you’re asking now, namely, who will enact these policies? And how will I get them to do it? I don’t think there’s a general answer to that. The question you’re raising, I think it’s about each of us thinking, what are the the kind of collectives I am part of, that can make a difference what collectives exists. So, you know, some people are real leaders and activists on their own. And that’s great. But often you’re in the situation I was in, well, you’re not really much of an activist or a leader on these issues. But you find something like Fossil Free MIT working at an institution that’s near you like MIT and you think, hold on, this is an agent of change, this could make a difference. So I think it’s for people who aren’t already activist, it’s about looking in, you’re paying attention to what’s going on locally, to see where there are already seeds of collective action. So it might be that there’s already in your town, a group of people who are lobbying the local council, to shift building standards to make them more environmentally conscious. And then you think, okay, that’s happening, I can add a body to it. And it might be the kind of scale where one more body and all my friends who are now going to vote for this is a significant difference. So I don’t think there’s a general answer other than look around in sort of your networks and think, where are the collectives that I could plug into? Yeah,

Josh Landy
I mean, that makes sense to me. We also have something divestment of fossil fuel divestment movement at Stanford that I, I’ve certainly been a part of not, again, not a leader off, but I want to I certainly wanted to put, you know, throw my vote in for that. So it seems like there are these different scales at which you can be thinking, as it were locally, but collectively, right? So you’ve got your workplace divestment, maybe even remote work in some cases, right. If you push for remote work, in cases where that seems to make sense, then you reduce commuting, then they’re they’re sort of slightly broader level that is your city, where maybe you can push for people to, you know, improve transit, put solar panels on things, maybe maybe even institute some sort of climate education in school. Then you’ve got your state where your state can do like emission standards on vehicles, if it’s making vehicles and then all the way I guess up to your to the country where you’re voting in national elections. Where do you think is The most important, you know what, of all these different scales, which is the most important or the most effective? Kiran?

Kieran Setiya
I’m not again, I’m not sure there’s a completely general answer that because I think they’re also not exclusive. So it’s not as if deciding to participate in the kind of divestment movement at Stanford prevents you from voting and lobbying your politicians after often you can sort of do several of these things at once. But I suppose my inclination is to think that local action is has got to be part of the solution. So I think the thing to say is merely voting is not going to be enough, partly because often what happens is you’ll vote for politicians who aren’t going to actually enact the policies you want. So continued lobbying is required to do that, and also whose power to change things, especially in a country like the US is going to depend on what happens at the state and city level. So I think the main thing to say is vote, keep lobbying at the president and at the Senate level, but also do find something local, where the actual enactment of these policies is going to happen, because pressure from both directions is what’s going to get to make real change occur, and kind of do both.

Josh Landy
That makes sense. I mean, in terms of lobbying, are you in favor of protest movement? So I think of Greta tunberg, school strike or extinction rebellion, is that the kind of collective action you think we need to be doing getting out in the streets, not just lobbying by you know, emailing your, your representative, but getting out there? What do you think?

Kieran Setiya
I think the answer to that is yes. I mean, I think if you look back at cases where there has been significant social change, you look back at, say, the abolition of slavery in the UK, or you look at apartheid in South Africa. In both cases, a huge part of what happened was public and collective protest. And often it did take a financial form. So in in the UK fight against slavery, there were boycotts of sugar, sugar boycotts, it was called blood sugar. You know, the, the idea was that people would stop using sugar, and they would paint the bags of sugar red to indicate the blood of the enslaved people who had been made to work to farm on sugar plantations. And in apartheid, there was divestment from South Africa. So one form this takes is public protest, and then a particular kind of angle is economic. And I think something like divestment works at several levels. Part of it is defunding fossil fuel companies. But it’s also it really is a kind of symbolic move to indicate that these are not socially sanctioned industries. And I will say in the case of fossil fuel companies that I mentioned earlier, it’s not as if they’re just, you know, innocently doing their work in the economy. And it just, you know, to their bad luck, they turned out to be working in an industry in which there are unfortunate negative side effects. The fossil fuel companies have actively funded climate denial, they’ve known since the 70s and 80s, that there was a risk of catastrophic climate change unless our use of fossil fuels went down. And they did their best to hide that and then to pour 10s of millions of dollars into misinformation, and sort of political distortion. So I do think it’s appropriate to think of fossil fuel companies, not just as sort of innocent bystanders whose businesses are unfortunately in trouble or should be in trouble. But as active protagonist of the injustice we need to fight against.

Ray Briggs
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today, we’re thinking about collective action and climate change with Kieran Setiya from MIT. Kieran, your mention of fossil fuel companies and climate denial brings up another kind of big question for me so. So like another reason why our climate crisis seems worse than just the classic tragedy of the commons is, in a classic tragedy of the commons, you don’t have anybody denying that overgrazing is a problem and actively trying to stop people from fighting the problem. And I guess like one, one thing that bothers me, it’s just like, how could anybody stop? Like try to stop people from preventing the world from burning? And I guess the other thing is, like, what do you do about the fact that we’re operating in this more hostile environment where there are people who seem to think they have an interest in climate denialism?

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, and throwing into that, I mean, what about the press? Right? I think that, you know, these fossil fuel companies have taken advantage of a relatively supine media, who just loved what they love to do. That’s their sweet spot is to report on both sides. Well, one side says the world’s on fire, and the other says, what’s nice and toasty. And you know, you’ve seen these waves of different kinds of denial. It isn’t happening. It isn’t the big deal isn’t manmade, our Tech’s gonna solve it or now there’s nothing we can do so let’s not bother and, and this, as you say, coming from these oil companies who are busy in you know, behind the scenes, raising the level of the oil platforms because they know it’s coming. They know sea level rise is coming. So That’s another question I have in this in this domain Kieran like, you know, is there a way we can collectively put pressure on the media to start covering climate change accurately? And right? I mean, it’s getting a little better, but the temptation of the media in this country to say, well, here’s an expert, or quote unquote expert, who says, everything’s gonna be just fine. Like, how do we can we put collective pressure on, you know, on the media to do better.

Kieran Setiya
So there’s a kind of huge issue here about the sort of both sides thing of many issues like the future of democracy, for instance, that should not be both sides in the way that the media kind of slips into doing. I think in the case of climate change, in particular, in terms of strategies. So if you think about bans on smoking, advertising for smoking, or every ad for cigarettes has to be accompanied with a health warning, there are things that could be done to change the way in which fossil fuel companies are able to represent themselves to the world. And, you know, one of the things they have done a lot of in recent years is disguised advertising. So they will pay for what looks like an article, but as in fact, an ad to appear in the newspaper, things like that could be regulated. But I will say I think I’m a little less person, I’m both more pessimistic and less pessimistic on this issue than one might be. There’s this wonderful project at Yale, the Yale climate communication project, which suggests that if you actually pull people, citizens across the political spectrum, at this point, most people believe climate change is caused by human activity, and real and something needs to be done about it. What the real problem is, in fact, I think the politicians who have been captured by fossil fuel company money, and whether they really believe what they say, is less important than the fact that they’re the ones who have the levers of power. So it might be a case where getting people to believe that climate change is real, and anthropocentric, we’ve got a long way with it’s just that there’s a disconnect between that and political change, which is where things like changing how people vote, making them think of this as a priority, deal breaker voting issue, and also, protest and sort of activity at a local level is what’s going to really make the difference. I think a lot of the politicians who say the things that climate denial is say, may not really believe them there, it’s politically expedient for them to position themselves in that way.

Ray Briggs
So Kieran, we have an email from Guy in Radford, Virginia. Guy writes, The UN has recognized a healthy climate as a right. But when is a right, also a responsibility? What new virtues do we need to realize this right?

Kieran Setiya
I think that’s a great and difficult question. And it raises very deep issues in in moral philosophy and political philosophy about whether and why to frame these kinds of issues in terms of rights and human rights. So, you know, the the, I share the worry that if we say people have a right to a good education, or a healthy climate or something, there’s the question, Who is that right against, like, who kind of owes that obligation to them. And it’s not always clear. So I’m kind of hesitant myself to frame the issues here in terms of rights, as opposed to the idea that we are collectively causing harm. And it’s just wrong for us collectively, to inflict serious home on other people, including future generations. But, you know, people predominantly in Asia and Africa who are going to bear the brunt of this for our own benefit. So I think I’d rather frame it in terms of just profound injustice that has to be stopped and prevented than a sort of picture of human rights myself.

Josh Landy
That seems fair enough. We also have an email from Rachel in Los Angele., Rachel says, I’m a philosophy grad student at Cal State LA. And for the past 14 years, I’ve been working in the labor movement in politics and policy. And I’ve had the privilege of witnessing 1000s of workers act collectively, my general experience has been that most people who believe that solving large problems is impossible give up too soon, they see the forest and not the trees and and they burn out because they see issues in terms of zero sum gains, acting collectively can be slow, cumbersome, confusing, it can lead to false starts. But when a person persevered through that confusion, they can track a victory and build from there. What do you think?

Kieran Setiya
I couldn’t agree more. I mean, I think there’s always this complicated issue of how to respond to pretty good news. So, you know, the Paris Agreement, a lot of the reporting afterwards was of the form, even if we did all of this, which we probably won’t, they’ll still be three degrees of warming. My response to the Paris Paris Agreement was more like Rachel’s, which was, it’s taken my entire lifetime, for the challenges of countries with very divergent interests to come up with an agreement at this kind of scale. And that there’s any agreement at all is an amazing starting point for further action, and I feel the same weigh about the Inflation Reduction Act in the US. It’s imperfect in all kinds of ways. But you know that it’s the largest climate action ever undertaken in the US in the world via

Josh Landy
USPS going electric, community solar. I mean, there’s a lot in there.

Kieran Setiya
It’s amazing. Yeah. So it could be better. But I think I think it’s right that if we’re perfectionist or purists, we think, well, we can’t have exactly what we want. So why even hope that is going to be totally self defeating?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, I guess this brings up a bigger question for me of like, where do we set the bar, and sort of what I’m hearing from you is we set the bar wherever is most motivating, like, we got to do the most we can to stave off as much of the problem as we can. So whatever gets you going,

Kieran Setiya
I think that’s exactly right. I mean, this connects with another reason why action on climate change is hard. I think if you’re trying, there were some causes where you’re trying to get a bill passed, or legalize X or end a war. And then if it happens, you can see it happened. Climate change, one of the big psychological problems is what we’re doing is making some bad things that are going to happen. sort of prevent as many bad things from happening, we’re not going to prevent all the bad things from happening. And all of our successes will take the form of something bad would have happened, and it would have been worse, but now it didn’t happen. And those are very, very hard things to celebrate. So yeah, and you know, what we’re trying to do is sort of minimize global warming, and its its effects. So, so I think, yes, any way you can attach your motivation that this is a small difference we could make, attach your motivation to those things. Because if you’re thinking about some giant victory, in which you know, all problems are solved, it’s just not the shape of this particular problem.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re thinking about collective action and climate change with Kieran Setiya from MIT.

Ray Briggs
Have you joined with others to tackle climate change? How do you convince people to band together? Are you optimistic about our future on this planet?

Josh Landy
Hope, despair, and doing our share—plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Black Eyed Peas
One tribe, y’all / We are one peoplek

Josh Landy
One tribe, one people one planet—a recipe for collective climate action? I’m Josh Landy. And this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, our guest is Kieran Setiya from MIT. And we’re thinking about collective action and climate change.

Josh Landy
So Kieran, with the powers vested in us by public radio, we’re going to make use czar of climate policy today with the power to enact big change. So so so what’s the first thing you’re gonna do as tsar to dig us out of this mess?

Kieran Setiya
Well, Oh, my It’s an honor, I’m delighted to have this power. And there were realistic things I could do right now. So I could end subsidies to fossil fuel companies that are hundreds of billions of dollars a year in subsidies to companies that should not be subsidized with, we should be trying to phase them out. And I would regulate greenhouse gases as a toxic substance. So we could immediately bring it under environmental regulation, and then we’d have real power to just sort of constrain how those companies operate. And those I think, are both realistic things that could happen in sort of the political environment we’re actually in, then there were more, you know, fantasy land things that I could I could speculate about.

Ray Briggs
Yeah. So let’s give you a little bit more power. Go wild, Kieran.

Kieran Setiya
So there’s, I’ve got a now got a little bit more power. I’m not. So there’s a question of whether I’m getting to the point where I’m the czar of global capitalism. And then I start thinking about how we could achieve social progress and sort of decouple that from economic growth and capitalism altogether. Maybe that’s I don’t have that much power yet. There are there are things in between, like, in terms of the fossil fuel companies, you could nationalize the fossil fuel companies, take away all of the stranded assets absorb the stranded assets to prevent those companies from having the motivations they have to amplify the climate crisis. And then there’s things that are much more hopeful. So part of what I want as climate saw is to present a positive vision of the incredible opportunities for economic prosperity that would come from investing in green energy and green technologies in reforestation and less destructive agriculture, in reducing food waste and shifting to a more plant based diet and try to present a kind of a vision of a future that is more sustainable because really, what we’re part of how we get into the the situation we’re in is all of the costs of the economic growth of the last century, or many of those costs. took the form of environmental damage that was not as the economists say priced in, and now that is coming home to roost. And so if we really want to shift, respond to climate change, we have to be thinking about how to reshape our economy and our ways of using resources more generally. And so I think that’s another kind of very large issue in politics and political philosophy, that, really, you can’t fundamentally address the problem of climate change without tackling.

Josh Landy
Okay, but you know, let me push back a little bit, because my worry then is if we phrase it that way, about half the country gonna say no, thanks. Right? If you’re gonna say, Well, you have to, we’re gonna have to transform the entire economic slash political system in order to solve the problem. And, you know, if we want to, if we want collective action at a big scale, don’t we want the biggest tent possible? So, you know, that’s one of the things I think about a lot. How do we get more people into the tent? action against climate change, when unfortunately, it’s kind of being tribe? alized in this country, right. So, you know, the big oil pumped out the propaganda, and one of the political parties, kinda, as you said earlier, you know, often very cynically, they don’t believe some of the things they’re saying in many cases, but they, they, you know, re articulate that those those, you know, the piece of misinformation about the climate, we want them on board to right, so So can’t we expand the tent by saying, Look, actually, the the shift to sustain sustainable sources of energy is going to create jobs, it’s not going to be that big a hit to the economy, it’s going to give us energy independence. Those of you who enjoy hunting and fishing, the habitats are going to be increasingly protected, you know, can’t aren’t there, realistic, you know, genuine, honest things that we can say that would appeal, not just the people who are sort of already on board, which in this country tends to be people on the political left, but to other people as well, people in the middle of people on the right, so that we can make the tent of collective action as big as possible.

Kieran Setiya
I completely agree with all that. And I think I feel like you were the one who made me czar of climate change. And that’s, that’s, that’s the point at which I started these unilateral fantasies of radically reshaping the world. Now, I completely agree with you that realistically, the way to sort of frame these things partly does lean on the idea that things like the inflation Reduction Act, it’s it’s the first time it’s really been tried at scale. And my hope is the Economic and Employment consequences and social consequences of that will be good and peep as they are predicted to be and that that will help people see that this can be a win win. Or at least it’s not a zero sum game at all. There’s there’s a genuine gain in jobs and prosperity that would come from shifting to green energy and making, you know, the US a leader in that. And I’m encouraged about this partly because, you know, looking back at the kind of very difficult path to the passage of that bill, Joe Manchin, divisive polarizing figure was, was being lobbied in favor of signing on to a bill by CO unions in his home state, because they could see that it’s just the industry was not ultimately going to survive, and that their best bet was to find transition pathways to green jobs in green energy. And that strikes strikes me as a very hopeful kind of vision that people on the ground understand where, you know, whether which way the wind is blowing, and they want a way towards prosperity that doesn’t involve doubling down on these, you know, problematic industry so so I totally agree with you that there’s real real hope in that in that vision.

Ray Briggs
I like this idea and I want climate like action to be win win. But I also worry about like selling people a rosier picture than is actually plausible, like I don’t think that like climate action is going to leave my very pleasant life as pleasant as it is now like, I have tried to cut back on travel, but cutting back on travel is is like I should never taken other airplane in my life again. And he were I think, and you know, definitely like none of us should should be like enjoying a hamburger like the the meat industry is just terrible for the climate. And so I think I like I don’t want to make people hopeless, but I don’t want to sell them Fake hope that they can just like fix the climate crisis without like any harm to their lifestyles.

Kieran Setiya
So I think there’s both questions about how bad and how different It’s gonna be and I think we just don’t know, at this point, how bad how bad things are gonna get. There’s also a kind of rhetorical challenge here, which is it which is precisely which one has been debated among client by climate activists a lot, which is whether the the right messages are emphasize the positive and the hopeful or frightened people into action by writing the uninhabitable Earth. And I don’t know the state of the social science on that. My My hunch is that the answer is something like, it takes all sorts, like different people are motivated differently. And often, all of these messages are valuable, and you have to think about who is receptive to them. But no, I think you’re right, that, you know, some of the things that I look forward to a future in which it’s not clear that chocolate and coffee are going to be readily available. And I think, you know, in my privileged life, that’s a big deal. But I also look forward with horror to a world in which floods are the kind we see in Pakistan are going to keep happening. And so you know, there are going to be very difficult things in the in the future due to climate change, and some sacrifices are going to have to be made to try to prevent them sacrifices that I think are thoroughly justified. But I agree that I, I think part of my thought in response to Josh’s question was, we don’t have to sell this as part of a package of, you know, anti capitalist changed the world, we’re all communists now, kind of kind of it, you know, those larger social issues are going to be addressed one way or another in the next century, they don’t have to be tangled up with treating with addressing climate change now, and I can see there are strategic advantages in sort of decoupling climate action so far as possible from the more contentious aspects of those larger social issues. But But I agree that without suggesting that the change is going to be painfree.

Josh Landy
So Kieran, I wanted to come back to something that Ray was properly making me feel ashamed of earlier in thinking that my actions are going to make a real difference when they’re kind of a drop in the bucket. I mean, that, that I heard that reduce your carbon footprint slogan was coined by BP. And that’s, you know, that’s pretty sobering. But here’s, here’s my pushback against that it gets cancer goes back to the French thinker, cuando se, in the 18th century, in what we now think of as the paradox of voting, right that, you know, any given person’s one vote, you could think of as a drop in the bucket. But what you’re going to tell everyone not to bother voting. So isn’t there a similar thing here? When should we really be telling people don’t bother, you know, switching to electric or, you know, just putting a solar panel on your house? I mean, maybe we need collective action, but don’t we also want to encourage individual action to?

Kieran Setiya
Yes, and so I think that’s right. But we also shouldn’t think of as just individual. So I think there’s a, you know, if you do those things privately, that’s good. But you can also talk to your friends about doing them if you get solar panels, and it’s easy, you can tell your friends, I did it, it’s easy. Here’s the company’s number. They worked really well for me. So I think that the lines between social activism and communication and getting people to care about this collectively, and what you do privately needn’t be so so sharp, so So yes, and and also they really overlap is sort of my thought there.

Josh Landy
Those all sound like great suggestions. And I’m really hoping we can all implement them and bring about at least a slightly better world, less terrible world. And on that note, Kieran, I want to thank you so much for joining us today.

Kieran Setiya
Thanks for having me. It was great.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been Kieran Setiya, professor of philosophy at MIT, and author most recently of “Life Is Hard: How Philosophy Can Help Us Find Our Way.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
So I have been thinking about like things that I can do as parts of organizations. So one thing as a philosopher, there’s a group called philosophers for sustainability who have signed a public pledge to make all conferences available online to do something like as a group to try to reduce the amount of air travel that like academics do, which I think is a really great idea. I have signed that pledge a little later than I probably should have. But I signed it and I went to other people to sign it. I’ve also like another small thing is that whenever I organize an event, I just I get vegan food and I don’t tell people that I’m getting vegan food. I just do it because there’s lots of good vegan food and there’s no reason to be serving meat at events.

Josh Landy
Yeah, this is great. I mean, I found the same thing. I think since you know, reading Kieran on this subject, I started thinking, Okay, what else? Right, what are the other places where I’m part of something that’s bigger than just me?

Ray Briggs
Yeah. And like I feel a lot like Kieran said at the beginning, like, I’m not an especially like fancy activist, but doing my bit seems better than doing nothing. Set the bar where it motivates you. Yeah, but

Josh Landy
I’m still keeping my LEDs. I’m not. I’m not trading. For light bulbs. We’ll put links to everything we mentioned today. Maybe except the LEDs. On our website philosophy talks about ORG, where you can also become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 550 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And if you have a question that wasn’t addressed in today’s show, we’d love to hear from you. Send it to us at comments at Philosophy Talk dot ORG and we might feature it on the blog.

Josh Landy
Now a man with more hot air than a warming globe… It’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoales, My first year in high school, Dad got a new job and we moved to a new town. A Welcome Wagon hostess came by, with a basket of goodies– tickets to local roadside attractions, dinner theater drink comps, two for one dry cleaning vouchers, a piece of paper shaped like a tooth you could exchange for a free teeth cleaning, and more! You could see right there, in this modest little gift from a housewife, just like my Mom, moonlighting for pin money, the vast undertow of capitalism, churning. It was the tip of the iceberg. Soon, the hostesses were gone. Why bring baskets to homes when nobody’s there, they have jobs now. Remember the Chamber of Commerce? Local businesses bond for discounts in the Yellow Pages. They too had welcome packets. And lists of realtors in case you wanted to stay! Everything diamond certified! Walmart devoured downtowns. Chambers of Commerce shrunk, as the US Chamber of Commerce became powerful, aligning itself with the oil companies, the car companies, the worker was only a customer, really, big business can help you pay for things with a loan, but not decent wages, that’s communism. Reagan was their god. In a secular kind of way. Golf courses ate up resources by the bucket, but looked nice if you liked lawns, and America did. Towns became suburbs, no stores, no center, just houses and garages, and the mall sprang up. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce cared not about the furniture store, the carpet installation business, the tri county plumber consortium. It was go ahead GM, expand from cars to credit cards, we’re with you. Walmart, Starbucks killed the donut shop, neo liberals killed liberalism, and it all merged into strident confusion as Newt Gingrich paved the way for take no prisoners give all the money to big money and step back. Don’t be toxic. Get out of the way. Until real toxicity became too damaging to ignore. But even now, America is resentful about what’s going away. Movie theaters okay, but guns? Cars? Whither America? Says the left, wokely, the Cuyahoga River caught fire! Something must be done! So finally California says we all have to have electric cars. Game on! Texas, made out of Stetsons and oil, passed a law barring the state from companies that “boycott” fossil fuels. Already problems! Texas hired a finance rating firm that has commited itself to carbon neutrality by 2040. Who knew? In the meantime, the Chamber of Commerce, the anti-labor bastion of fair trade, came up against Trump, who claimed to be a friend of small business, became president. Focus shifted, Chamber of Commerce even endorsed a couple Democrats. The love affair with the GOP ended in tears. The COC now knows that green is big, so they are now helping fight climate change, and at war kind of with the very entities, well, after layoffs and mergers, they helped thrive! So either way good news and bad news for Texas. But if you think about how mutual commons cooperation might save the planet, well, there it is. We don’t see the percentage in helping each other out any more. Quarantines! Will do, til this plague is back in the lab where it started! Gimme that needle doc, Polio ends right here. Where do I sign up, Mr. President? If giving back half my salary pays pay for the rubber soled shoes of even one nurse on the front lines of triage, I am there! We don’t have that spirit. We think oh well, even if the system fails us, we’ll invent a new climate, just in time for the holidays, for just pennies a day. My advice. Elon Musk, who wants to bring us all, or some of us, to Mars, and start over. Maybe we can make it to Mars before this planet burns down. That would be great. Start all over again, on Musk world. Welcome Wagon Baskets await, with breathing apparatus discounts, ray gun chargers, tube sock bundles, and your very own dogecoin, depending on your good credit. Free hydration for your first six swallows, and to help adjust to life on Mars, a free Elon Sand Blaster– you no longer need water, not to brush your teeth anyway, it keeps your teeth sparkly white and saves you gallons per minute. At some point, unless you’re an ace landscaper used to working in extreme weather, you’ll probably have to prove Martian ancestry before you’re allowed to migrate. Sorry. But it’s going to get kind of crowded up there. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
Philosophy Talk is a presentation of KALW local public radio San Francisco Bay Area and the trustees of Leland Stanford Junior University copyright 2022.

Ray Briggs
Our Executive Producer is Ben Trefny. The Senior Producer is Devon Strolovitch. Laura Maguire is our Director of Research.

Josh Landy
Thanks also Yiqi Shi, Merle Kessler, and Angela Johnston.

Ray Briggs
Support for Philosophy Talk comes from various groups at Stanford University and from the Partners at our online Community of Thinkers.

Josh Landy
The view expressed or (mis-expressed) on this program do not necessarily represent the opinions of Stanford University or other funders.

Ray Briggs
Not even when they’re true and reasonable!

Josh Landy
The conversation continues on our website, philosophy talk dot ORG, where you can become a subscriber and gain access to our library of more than 550 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.

Bill McKibben
The most important thing an individual can do at this point is be a little bit less of an individual. You can’t make the math work one household at a time, one lightbulb at a time.