As the earth’s atmosphere continues to warm up, so political leaders from around the world head to Glasgow for the 26th Conference of Parties. There will be no shortage of hot air, but unfortunately there is unlikely to be an immediate step-change in public policy, which is what we need.
By coincidence the UK’s annual budget for the next financial year was announced last week, which included a measure to lower the rate of tax on domestic air travel and another to defer a planned rise in the rate of tax on petrol. These measures were both aimed at pleasing the travelling public, lowering the cost of short-haul flights between, say, London and Cardiff or Edinburgh and Belfast, and avoiding additional costs for drivers at a time when oil prices have risen steeply. Given the choice between long-term virtue and short-term popularity, it is perhaps no surprise that the politicians choose the latter. But it is important to recognise that they do so because they understand that many of us share their preference for instant gratification. We might not have the politicians we say we want, but we mostly get the politicians we deserve.
With few exceptions, in the modern world political leaders govern by majority consent. Sometimes this consent is secured through open elections. In other cases, the elections are rigged to protect the incumbents, but nonetheless even these politicians must retain the support, or at least the resigned acceptance of a large segment of the population. If a substantial proportion of the population becomes disaffected with their leaders, then regime change becomes possible; if there is a plausible alternative leader, such change becomes likely. Therefore, even autocrats make strenuous efforts to keep the majority of the people contented, or at least docile. We might call this “the bread and circus games strategy”, after Juvenal’s description of Roman politics: so long as stomachs are full of cheap food and minds are distracted by novel forms of entertainment, the citizens will likely remain quiescent, and the rulers can sleep easily in their beds each night.
It is easy to see why climate change has become an intractable political problem. It is not that we don’t know that there is a problem, or that we don’t know the cause of the problem, or that we don’t know the solution to the problem, although there are a handful of eccentrics who deny each of these. Almost all informed people – including those in government – know very well what needs to be done and why. The problem is not lack of knowledge but lack of resolve, a condition described by Aristotle as ‘akrasia’ which is usually translated as ‘weakness of the will’. Generally speaking, when we have two or three options, whose costs and rewards are contemporaneous, the choice we make accurately reveals the preference we have. However, when the costs and rewards are differentially located in time, it is possible to value more highly the option with the immediate cost and the delayed benefit compared to the option with the immediate benefit and the delayed cost, and yet still to choose the latter. Confronted by the choice between Irish, Scotch, Bourbon, and Japanese whisk(e)y, all priced the same, it is reasonable to suppose that the whisky I select is the one that I want. However, when the choice is between another glass of whisky now or a clear head tomorrow morning, however much I prefer the latter I still regularly opt for the former.
We are weak-willed creatures, although some of us are more susceptible than others. It is a human trait – no doubt some sort of genetic explanation is available from evolutionary biology – to which behavioural economists have given the name ‘hyperbolic discounting’. (I referred to this phenomenon in a recent text.) We tend to give a heavy discount to costs and benefits that lay in the future, whereas we take much greater account of costs and benefits that are immediate. Pleasure now at the price of pain tomorrow appears to be our default setting. We can, for sure, teach and train ourselves to behave differently, as Aristotle and other moral thinkers have been quick to emphasise, and there are plenty of examples of human actions and institutions that illustrate this fact. Whether we consider Joseph persuading the Pharaoh to store food during seven years of plenty so that the people would not go hungry during seven years of famine (Genesis 41), or modern corporations establishing pension funds for their employees, deferring a portion of their wages earned while they were of working-age, to be paid to them when once they had retired from work, in these cases and others, we find ways to pay costs up-front for benefits that we will enjoy later. Collectively we can overcome the weakness of our wills.
The pension example is interesting, because modern corporations are required by law to fund the future liabilities in their pension schemes with real current assets, to make sure there are sufficient resources to pay the pensions when they fall due. Many government agencies in the UK do not do bother to do this. They pay current liabilities out of current income, meaning that there are no resources held in reserve to guarantee that future liabilities can be paid. Those who rely on the state pension also rely on the solvency of the state for the remainder of their lifetime. I suspect that one day this will turn out to be a gross error of judgement, and many Western states, under fiscal pressure from demographic changes, will be forced to renegue on the pension promises they have made to their ageing populations. I hope the coming crisis will not happen in my lifetime, but I wouldn’t bet against it.
All of which helps to explain the lack of serious action that will follow from the Glasgow Conference. Governments know what needs to be done to stabilise atmospheric temperatures, as do most of their citizens or subjects, but the costs must be paid now, in the form of higher taxes on fuel, certain foods, and other commodities that consume carbon in their creation, and in the form of substantial investment in renewable energy, better insulation for homes and offices, and the switch to zero-carbon products and services. We must pay up front to achieve a sustainable future. But humans are mostly weak-willed, and politicians are human. Given the choice between popularity now versus admiration by the historians of the future, most politicians prefer the former, not least because they know that the people whom they represent also prefer cheap travel and cheap food today, compared with a sustainable environment for their descendants.
The weakness of the wills of the people reinforces the weakness of the wills of their leaders. We know what we should do but we find it hard not to prefer what we know we should not do. And our leaders find it convenient not to help us overcome our weaknesses. For the next two weeks at Glasgow there will be lots of talk about what needs to be done, and many promises, commitments, and resolutions to do the right thing, just as there were in Rio in 1992, and again in Paris in 2015. But the politicians will not take drastic action quickly, which is now required. The years of bread and circus games will continue. We are living through a pandemic of akrasia, and there is little prospect of a vaccine against irresolution.
The best hope for the future comes not from the politicians but those social movements that are mobilising citizens to demand a change in energy production and consumption and those corporations that are prepared to take long-term views on their future sustainability. Paradoxically, we need an alliance of green campaigners with businesses leaders, particularly from finance. We need a mass movement to persuade populations to change the way they live, and financial innovation rapidly to create the products and services that make these changes possible. We need Greta Thunberg and Larry Fink to work together, because if we wait for Boris, Vladimir, Jinping, and Joe we will be waiting for ever. And we don’t have that long.