## Metadata - Author: [[Dale Jamieson]] - Full Title: Reason in a Dark Time - Category: #books ## Highlights - Climate change poses threats that are probabilistic, multiple, indirect, often invisible, and unbounded in space and time. Fully grasping these threats requires scientific understanding and technical skills that are often in short supply. Moreover, climate change can be seen as presenting us with the largest collective action problem that humanity has ever faced, one that has both intra- and inter-generational dimensions. Evolution did not design us to deal with such problems, and we have not designed political institutions that are conducive to solving them. ([Location 1371](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=1371)) - Science is centered on understanding the diversity of nature; policy is focused on the singleness of action. Science can point to trends, identify thresholds, and establish links between variables leading to probabilistic beliefs based on the accumulation of evidence. The political systems within which policy-making is embedded act on the basis of up or down votes, with no middle ground, and always with an eye to political and legal liability. ([Location 1734](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=1734)) - Science and policy-making are tethered to different clocks. Scientific understanding unfolds over centuries or millennia; political decisions often have to be made in a relative heartbeat. Scientists, freed from the demand of timeliness, can institute orderly, long-term research programs and incorporate strong standards of proof and evidence. But when the world is on fire and a cacophony of voices demands action or forbearance of one kind or another, decisions must be made on the basis of whatever is available. A clash of clocks is at the center of the climate change problem. ([Location 1737](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=1737)) - Still, policy-makers and the public often demand too much from science. While improvements can surely be made in linking science to policy, it must be recognized that there will always be some lack of fit between these practices since they have different goals, purposes, methods, concepts, and vocabularies. ([Location 1766](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=1766)) - Climate change will cause the deaths of many people, but there will be no obituary that will say that Dale Jamieson (for example) died yesterday, cause of death: climate change. While we can be very responsive to individual victims, we have difficulty empathizing with statistical victims. ([Location 2180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=2180)) - The most powerful motivators that we have for solving collective action problems are economics and ethics. They ask the central questions: How much does it cost? Is it the right thing to do? Economics leads us to think in terms of rational self-interest. Ethics pushes us to think expansively, collectively, and impartially. ([Location 2202](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=2202)) - Various arguments can be given for and against the supposed economic benefits of the tax cuts and the wars, but similar arguments can be made for climate protection as well. When seen comparatively, it seems surprising that the smaller investment in climate protection would not have been made, especially since the aggregate economic benefits of this investment seem much less risky than military invasions or tax cuts. It is even more puzzling in light of the common presumption among economists that people are economically rational. The supposed irresistibility of economically rational action is brought out by the old joke about why an economist never bends down to pick up a dollar (“if it were really a dollar someone else would have already picked it up”). ([Location 2240](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=2240)) - the changes to our way of life that are being envisioned seem so massive and systematic that it is difficult to believe that they would not entail huge costs. A century-long project to decarbonize the global economy sounds about as world-historical as the Russian Revolution. How could that come cheap? ([Location 2258](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=2258)) - Most of the differences between Nordhaus and Stern are due to the different discount rates that they adopt. Nordhaus42 applies a discount rate of 5.5% for the first half of the century, averaging out to 4% over the century as a whole, while Stern’s discount rate is 1.4%. As Table 4.1 suggests, this difference has large impacts over long periods of time. On Nordhaus’s discount rate, future costs and benefits halve in less than 13 years, while it takes more than 50 years for them to halve on Stern’s discount rate. Nordhaus’s discount rate implies that the Indians got a good deal when they sold Manhattan for $24 in 1626.43 Stern would not agree. ([Location 2455](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=2455)) - The legitimate power of economics is in its ability to provide instruments and tools for furthering our aims. If we want to reduce poverty, smoking, or carbon emissions, economics can recommend systems of incentives that may produce these results. It can tell us how to do things but not whether we should do them. Economics has much to say about incentives and costs, but little or nothing to say about “optimal” policies. ([Location 2995](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=2995)) - What we do matters because of its effects on the world, but what we do also matters because of its effects on ourselves. The balance and relations between what is world-affecting and self-affecting are important to determining life’s meaning. ([Location 3745](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=3745)) - Other ideas that have currency in contemporary America also had their analogues in the Greek world. The idea that success, fame, or celebrity is what is most important in life is reminiscent of the Greek idea that it is honor that gives life meaning. While honor is not the same as celebrity, fame, or success it is similar to them in one important respect. No one has it within themselves to be honored, famous, or successful. Whether one succeeds in achieving any of these goals depends on luck and the attitudes of other people. Thus, to suppose that the meaning of our life consists in such things is to take it out of our hands and make it contingent on luck or fate. Socrates, Jesus, and the Buddha were unanimous in rejecting the idea that the meaning of life should be held hostage entirely to fortune. ([Location 3768](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=3768)) - Under conditions of extreme material deprivation, when each day is dominated by the struggle for bare survival, questions about climate change are not at the forefront. But most of you who are reading this book are, like me, living in an affluent society in comfortable circumstances. Despite what we may sometimes say, life for us presents itself as a field for choice, decision, and action rather than as a set of imperatives required for survival. It is against this background that each of us must decide how to live. ([Location 3783](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=3783)) - From the beginning of human morality, ethics has been primarily concerned with the proximate: what presents to our senses and causally interacts with us in identifiable ways. However, what is proximate is flexible. Stories, music, relics, sacred space, and even the establishment of a common language are all ways of bringing into view what would otherwise be remote. The expanding circle of ethics (which to a great extent coincides with globalization) has made the distal proximate through new living arrangements, forms of travel, and kinds of imagery enabled by technological innovation. However, there may be a limit to what can be made proximate. ([Location 3796](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B00I7V0USG&location=3796))