Sacrifice Zones

 If you were following the news these past few weeks exclusively through the mass mailings in your email inbox, you might be forgiven for thinking that there were two quite different climate bills pending before Congress. 

On the one hand, you would have seen news headlines informing you that the most historic, generation-defining climate legislation ever to pass a chamber of Congress had just become law. You would have been told that climate activists were thrilled at the bill, which was the most significant climate legislation in U.S. history and would likely slash U.S. greenhouse gas emissions by 30-40% by the end of the decade. Great news!, you would have thought. 

Then, you would have gathered from other e-blasts you receive from various climate advocacy coalitions that there was this other bill: its polar opposite. A horrible, destructive bill that was squandering billions of dollars on false techno-solutions while locking in decades of further oil and gas drilling that was going to cook the planet even further. Wow, you would have thought. I sure hope this bill doesn't pass; they should vote for that other one instead. 

Alas, they were the same bill. How could different people allegedly in the same climate movement come to such radically different conclusions about it? Well, because all the things asserted about it above are true. 

In order to get conservative Dems on board with the legislation, Senate leadership agreed to tie further renewable energy development to fossil fuel exploration in a quid pro quo. They also mandated lease sales for oil and gas drilling in parts of Alaska and the Gulf Coast that have already witnessed first-hand some of the worst impacts of climate change and the most destructive side-effects of fossil fuel exploitation. The bill really does require drilling that wouldn't have happened otherwise. 

But then there are the numbers on the other side: multiple credible independent analyses finding that the bill's clean energy incentives will vastly outweigh its negative side effects. These studies confirmed the bill will indeed reduce U.S. emissions by nearly 40% by 2030, just as its authors claimed. Every one of these climate advocates and policy analysts can agree the fossil fuel give-aways in the bill are unfortunate. But the pros outweigh the cons, they said, by a factor of ten to one. 

On the one hand, therefore, the bill seems like the quintessential example of the good that shouldn't be made into the enemy of the perfect. Here we have a planetary crisis endangering our shared future. We have the one realistic chance to pass some significant legislation to do something about it before the midterms. Sure, it requires compromise. But how could it not, in a 50-50 Senate that includes Joe Manchin? We're lucky it wasn't far worse. 

I agreed with all of this in my heart. I personally cheered for the bill and felt immensely relieved when it passed and was signed into law. It meant so many things: that our political institutions might not be as hopelessly dysfunctional and broken as we thought; that the collective action problems posed by climate change might not be as insoluble as we feared; that our representative democracy might still be capable after all of occasional long-term thinking. 

But I also see the moral dilemma that the bill's climate activist critics were in. I faced it myself, having the obligation to write a policy position for my own nonprofit employer. It is one thing to be glad in one's heart when a major climate bill passes, no matter its imperfections. But I and the other people writing these NGO statements are not the ones who will have to live with the direct consequences of its drawbacks. We—for the most part—don't reside in the Alaskan islands or the communities around the Gulf that will experience new drilling. Is it our role to say that it is worth sacrificing their interests for the sake of compromise? 

So long as major climate legislation scarcely seemed possible, this dilemma could not arise. One could advocate one's policies of purity and maximalism in peace, since even a watered-down version of one's proposal wasn't likely to become law. Once this bill actually landed on the Senate floor, the climate movement faced a crisis point it hadn't been accustomed to expect: the peril of its own success. 

Here was a bill that—by any mathematical measure—was an unambiguous net gain. And the stakes of not accepting the deal could scarcely be higher. But the price the bill seemed to demand in exchange was the creation of two new "sacrifice zones"—a term the Associated Press recently defined as "a place that destroys itself for the good of the world." Or, perhaps we should say, that is destroyed by others, without the consent of its inhabitants, for the sake of what those others judge to be the good of the world. (Alas, by the way, the AP article is not talking about fossil fuels, but about rare earths extraction—which will become more, not less, common, under a shift to clean energy.)

I don't, as a matter of policy, support sacrificing one person's interests to serve another's, at least not without their consent. The objection to such a procedure doesn't have to be deontological. I would endorse any number of rule utilitarian formulations of the same principle: we will all be worse off in the long run if we start sacrificing each other here and now. But overall, I do think the strongest reason to oppose "sacrifice zones" is still the Kantian one: it is not right to treat one person as a means to an end external to themselves. 

This might, of course, seem like an extreme position to take. Are we really going to say that there is no circumstance in which one person could not justifiably be sacrificed for the sake of innumerable others? If a planet is in danger, does not one life weigh relatively lightly in the balance? Suppose we up the ante even further, and imagine that all of existence is in peril: could saving a whole universe not justify destroying one life? 

Before we answer yes to that question—which seems so clearly to demand an affirmative—I urge us to consider the fact that each person is the whole universe, at least to themselves. Every person's memory, experience, their knowledge of the world and of existence itself—only persists so long as they are alive. This is the sense in which Schopenhauer was right: to take even one life is to destroy a whole universe. I don't think anyone has conveyed the same thought as eloquently as Thomas Hardy, in his Tess of the d'Urbervilles: 

Tess, Hardy writes, was no insignificant creature to toy with and dismiss; but a woman living her precious life—a life which, to herself who endured or enjoyed it, possessed as great a dimension as the life of the mightiest to himself. Upon her sensations the whole world depended to Tess; through her existence all her fellow-creatures existed, to her. The universe itself only came into being for Tess on the particular day in the particular year in which she was born.

This is true for each human being. So to say to any one of them: here is the proposal, I know it will destroy your life, or your home, or your future, or at least negatively impact it; but look—we ran the numbers—the bill would also reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly more in many other places, where you don't live. The person presented with this proposal could heroically volunteer for the sacrifice. They could say: take me, so that others might live. But it seems certain that no one would have the moral right to demand they do so. 

This is so because they would be within their rights to reply: I'm sorry, but to me, those other futures, those other lives and universes, can never be as important as my own. If I lose my world, I will have no knowledge of theirs either. An individual compromise I could accept. If you come to me and say, 'we will offer you this in exchange for that,' I might agree. But you are offering me nothing of the sort. You are saying: you get nothing; less than nothing. Other people get something at the price of your sacrifice. 

If an individual human mind could comprehend all other human experiences, and partake of them and continue in some form through them, then it might be just to speak of trade-offs and compromises between different parts of the body politic. But the fact is that each of us is enclosed within our own consciousness. We can see no further than our own perceptions and memories and experiences, for even that which comes to us from outside is mediated through this apparatus. We cannot lightly give up ourselves because, to each of us, we are all that there is. 

That doesn't mean, as I say, that I wasn't personally cheered by the bill. Nor, given the high stakes if it failed, could I bring myself to publicly oppose it. Eventually, I decided the stance with the most integrity for my organization to take would be to simply lay out what we liked in the bill, and what we opposed, and urge politicians to try to improve the negative aspects of it as much as they could before passing it into law. 

But the objections that some activists make to compromise legislation can't simply be waved aside as purity politics, either—dismissed as the sort of "well, at least I didn't get my hands dirty" attitude that Weber saw as the opposite of his "politics of responsibility." We must never forget that sacrificing one person—even if it could be justified under sufficiently extreme circumstances—is no small thing. It is sacrificing not just one thing, after all—it is sacrificing everything—for to each person, as for Hardy's Tess, they are everything that has ever or will ever exist.