Stop buying bottled water
“How did we get to the point where we’re paying for bottled water? That must have been some weird marketing meeting over in France. Some French guy’s sitting there like, ‘How dumb do I think the Americans are? I bet you we could sell those idiots water.’”
That’s a little humor from Jim Gaffigan, but it’s not so far from the truth.
In reality, it was Frenchman Gustave Leven who convinced American Bruce Nevins to bring Perrier, a carbonated mineral water packaged in glass bottles, to the American market in1978.
Today, an average American drinks almost 30 gallons of bottled water a year, according to the Beverage Marketing Corporation, mostly from clear plastic bottles—about 50 billion clear plastic bottles, to be exact.
Go to your refrigerator and grab a bottle of water, if you have one. Dump out the water. You haven’t just wasted one bottle of water, but actually three. For every liter of water that is bottled, two are wasted during the filtration process.
Now fill it up a quarter of the way full with oil. That is approximately how much energy was required to get that bottle of water to your refrigerator. The Pacific Institute estimates that 17 million barrels of oil a year are required to package and deliver bottled water, enough to run one million cars for a year.
And please recycle the bottle. Only 20% of bottles are recycled, while 38 billion bottles wind up in a landfill where they will stay for the next 1,000 years.
Not only is bottled water unbelievably wasteful, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water, depending on the brand. And what do you get for it?
If you think you get cleaner, healthier water, you might be wrong.
Standards for tap water, set by the EPA, are more stringent than FDA regulations for bottled water, which it regulates as a food. For example, tap water cannot contain any traces of E. coli or fecal coliform bacteria. The FDA has no such provisions.
Of course, if a batch of bottled water turned out to be contaminated, it would be recalled. There have been 100 such recalls since 1990 for mold, benzene, microbes, and coliform.
Testing of bottled water in multiple studies has found bacterial or chemical contaminants, including carcinogens, at levels above state or industry standards. Twenty percent of bottled water has more chlorine than allowed by California state standards, according to a study by the Environmental Working Group.
And, in a recent study from Goethe University in Germany, water bottles made from PET plastic, marked with a No. 1 recycling code, leached estrogenlike compounds into the water, which could cause developmental problems in fetuses and children and reproductive disorders in adults. The study comes on the heels of others that have shown bisphenol A (BPA), a compound found in non-disposable plastic bottles, can cause similar problems.
But maybe you just prefer the taste of bottled water to tap water.
Bruce Nevins, the man who introduced America to bottled water, couldn’t identify his own brand of bottled water in a blind taste test with six others on a live radio show. Of the seven samples, he took five guesses to pinpoint his own.
I challenge you to try a taste test yourself. (Just so you know, in Fort Collins you’ll be going up against some of the purest water in the world.) If you can’t tell the difference, stop buying bottled water.
Read on:
Take a pledge to “Think Outside the Bottle”
Other articles on bottled water:
Is economic growth still beneficial?
The American economic juggernaut is growing again. Gross domestic product—the goods and services produced by people and property in the U.S.—grew at a rate of 3.5 percent last quarter, according to the Commerce Department.
Economists, politicians and pundits all agree: Growth is good.
In 1776, when Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations, economic growth—in the simple terms of increasing GDP—could increase quality of life by securing basic necessities for most Americans. That time has passed. Yet economists and politicians still blindly promote policies that aim only to increase the amount of stuff the economy produces.
Up to a certain point, growth has done us considerable good. But that point may be surprisingly far behind us. According to one analysis, extra income is correlated to increased happiness only up to $10,000. Past that, the correlation disappears.
In the developed world, more has very little to do with better.
Crime, divorce, alcoholism, depression and suicide have all increased along with GDP around the developed world. So has the gap between the rich and the poor. Growth has not necessarily caused these problems, but it certainly hasn’t alleviated them.
Most significantly, we are not any happier now than before. Since 1950, gross domestic product per capita has tripled. The average American family now lives in a house twice as big, owns twice as many cars, flies twenty-five times as far, and uses twenty-one times as much plastic. However, the number of people who say they are happy has decreased steadily since then.
We began this economic experiment with a 3.8 billion-year store of natural capital in old-growth forests, rich topsoil, fossil fuels and other natural resources. We are going through it like it’s free. In the accounting of GDP, it is free.
As The Economist put it, a country could increase its GDP just by cutting down all its trees, selling them as wood chips and then gambling the money away playing tiddly-winks. Some developing countries are actually doing something very similar.
Economists may argue that technologies will be invented to replace any natural resource if it becomes scarce enough. Empirically, this is not evident.
As Paul Hawken points out in the book Natural Capital, progress is not restricted by the number of chainsaws but by the disappearance of primary forests. Plywood may be a suitable substitute for sawlogs, but forests provide more than wood. Forests and other ecosystems provide services, such as recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen, that are difficult or impossible to duplicate technologically.
By some estimates, these services are worth $36 trillion per year—roughly equal to the output of the entire world economy. That is, if you can put a price on breathing. In economic lingo, the marginal cost of GDP may now exceed its marginal benefit.
In the American West this is becoming increasingly apparent. New developments impose greater costs on infrastructure and community services than those developments pay for in taxes.
In Larimer County and Fort Collins, residents are realizing this. Fort Collins has a growth management plan that will cap its size at 223,000 people. For the most part, this is because the city can only provide water for that many people. In Colorado, freshwater is a resource with no reasonable substitutes.
Larimer County residents have twice voted to levy a ¼-cent sales tax increase to fund the open lands program. It is an investment in smarter growth, the type of growth we need.
The Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) adjusts GDP for environmental degradation, loss of natural capital and other costs of growth. It shows a steady decline in America for the past 30 years. Adopting GPI as an index for social welfare can put an end to this uneconomic growth.
In the words of Bill McKibben, More and Better were once two birds perched in the same tree. Better has flown away, but we are still aiming for More.
Public discourse is in danger in America
Between contradictory poll numbers, rumors of death panels and town hall shouting matches, the debate on health care reform is unraveling.
Everybody has a poll proving that a “clear majority” of Americans agree with their position on the public option. Obviously somebody has bad numbers, right?
A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll asked Americans if it was important to give people a choice of both a public and private plan for their health insurance. A resounding 72 percent though it was.
The same poll asked a different group if they favor or oppose a public health care plan that would compete with private health insurance companies (emphasis added). Now, only 48 percent favored a public health care plan. The word “compete” changed the results completely.
Changes in the wording and question order of polls can influence how respondents feel about health care reform. This inconsistency suggests that people do not have strong opinions on a public option, or that the majority of Americans do not know enough to answer without being swayed by nuances in the questions.
(The most recent Rasmussen poll showed that only 42 percent support the recently-released House plan, for what it’s worth.)
Our uncertainty is understandable. The 1,990 page House plan is not light reading, and there is a lot of competing information out there.
There is a lot of disinformation, too.
As revealed by Tim Dickinson in the September issue of Rolling Stone, the multi-million dollar disinformation industry is up and running again.
If you’ve been exposed to the disinformation industry in the past, you won’t be surprised to hear that it all ties back to tobacco company Phillip Morris. (I covered it before in my column Manufacturing doubt a multi-million dollar industry, 4/14/09.)
Betsy McCaughey is the legislation expert that introduced the nation to death panels—bureaucrats that aim to deny life-sustaining treatment to the elderly. Health care reform would be financed by “shortening your mother or father’s life,” she proclaimed.
McCaughey was central to the demise of health care reform proposed under President Bill Clinton.
In her 1994 article for The New Republic called “No Exit,” she alleged that Clinton’s plan would prevent Americans from going outside of the system to purchase health coverage, despite provisions in the bill explicitly stating otherwise. The article was later recanted by The New Republic.
An internal memo of Phillip Morris claimed that they had worked with McCaughey on the article and two others that were published in the Wall Street Journal. (Phillip Morris stood to lose from Clinton’s plan because it was partly funded by a big increase in tobacco taxes.)
That same memo also stated that the company paid the group Citizens for a Sound Economy to create a “grassroots” movement to portray Clinton’s plan as a “government-run health care system replete with higher taxes…rationing of care and extensive bureaucracies.”
Sound familiar?
Citizens for a Sound Economy resurfaced to oppose the new health care reform as two different groups: Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. These groups helped orchestrate the first Tea Parties and town hall protests. Working with these groups was another, Conservatives for Patient Rights, founded by the former CEO of Columbia/HCA, the world’s largest hospital conglomerate.
Phillip Morris and other tobacco companies, while fighting a growing body of evidence that linked smoking to cancer, set up an industry of public relations masterminds and top political strategists that get paid big to manipulate public opinion anytime large corporations stand to lose from a change in the status quo.
Now every time we’re ankle-deep in progress, some half-wit with a Hitler effigy jumps up and starts shouting invectives across the room. These people don’t know it, but most of what they are shouting was scripted in focus groups and PR offices. The American public is being lobbied without even realizing it.
Public option or no, we can all agree health care needs reform. If we continue to let corporations dictate the terms of debate, any and all progress in America can be considered dead on arrival.
Read on:
Frank Luntz is again writing the propaganda playbook for Republicans. For the uninitiated, see my column Manufacturing doubt a multimillion dollar industry, 4/14/09
Watch Betsy McCaughey try to defend her position to Jon Stewart on the Daily Show
Women are now half of the American workforce
While headlines have been fixed firmly on unemployment and Wall Street, a new era in the economy has been quietly ushered in.
Half of all workers in the United States are women, according to a recent report by California first lady Maria Shriver and the Center for American Progress.
In 1961, former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt headed an official inquiry into the status of women in America. The final report stated that the most accepted role for women was in the home, but also that the climate of opinion is turning against the idea that homemaking is the only form of feminine achievement.
Today, only one in five families still conform to the traditional model of a male breadwinner and female homemaker. Fully two-thirds of mothers work to support their families and 40 percent are the primary breadwinners of the family.
This marks a milestone in what has been a steady reorganization of the family, the basic unit of American society. But, our domestic policies and employers are still lagging far behind.
We are the only major industrialized nation without comprehensive child care and family leave policies. The Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993 allows for 12 weeks of unpaid family or medical leave, but it only covers half of all workers. Women are often forced to take sick days or vacation days to give birth. Men, who increasingly share in the child-rearing duties, also struggle to get the necessary time off.
Some employers have realized the value of adopting family-friendly policies. Women represent half of all available talent, and recent research has shown companies that work to incorporate women in their workforce actually improve their bottom line. Employers that fail to adapt to the modern family risk losing good workers both women and men.
Nevertheless, women still earn only 80 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn, despite holding an increasing number of managerial positions and earning 60 percent of all college degrees and half of all advanced degrees.
I grew up in a family where both of my parents worked full time. My mother took time off from work to raise my siblings and me, but it affected her career. She had to find new jobs instead of returning to the ones she left, and never achieved the advancement that my father did.
Once she went back to work, my siblings and I became just a few in a large population of latchkey kids in my neighborhood and across the country. We spent much of our childhoods in private daycare and after-school programs to keep us out of trouble until our parents got off work to pick us up.
Women’s entrance to the workforce in such numbers is arguably the most fundamental change our society has ever seen. Juvenile delinquency, drug use, teen pregnancies and the millions of latchkey kids like me will continue to increase if we fail to appreciate the change society is undergoing.
As a society, we need to decide whether we value the sacrifice women and men must make to raise our nation’s children. Politicians talk about family values, but it is not apparent that they actually value the family in its present form. Our labor policies, social security and even our tax code all need to be redesigned with the modern family in mind.
For all of you future (and present) mothers and fathers, bosses and executives, understand that the workplace and society have changed, for the better. Workplaces are more diverse, families are enjoying dual incomes and men have more opportunities to be involved in their children’s lives.
However, we need to revise outdated policies in order to nurture the new American family.
We must think beyond oil drilling
When Ronald Reagan moved into the White House in 1981, one of his first official acts as president was to take down the rooftop solar panels installed by Jimmy Carter. It was a clear message to environmentalists after a decade of progress on environmental legislation: Progress was over.
By itself, however, it made little sense. Why was a self-purported fiscal conservative choosing to spend more on the government’s electricity bill?
Reagan was reacting to the passage of legislation like the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, which expanded government regulatory power. He was distrustful of the federal government’s intrusive role in industry – a distrust that has since guided most conservatives in America.
But in the past 30 years, these conservatives have failed to offer alternatives to regulatory legislation for an ever-increasing array of environmental issues.
For example, during this time period, CFCs were depleting the ozone layer, leading to a hole that scientists found in Antarctica’s atmosphere. James Watt, Reagan’s Energy Secretary, responded by advising the American people to wear stronger sunscreen — a move that gained national notoriety.
Fast forward to last year’s Republican National Convention, and this same adversarial attitude toward environmental issues is obvious. The crowd at the convention furiously chanted “Drill, baby, drill!” a call to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration for lower gas prices and energy independence.
Interestingly, earlier that year the Energy Information Administration, an arm of the Department of Energy, published a report about what drilling in the ANWR might accomplish. Its findings? Production would not begin for 10 years and would peak just 10 years after that. The amount of oil produced would be too insignificant to affect oil prices by more than $1 a barrel. OPEC could easily offset that gain by restraining its production even slightly.
Even if we decided to exploit all of our offshore oil, it would take about five years to get the permits, find the reserves, dig the wells and start pumping. By 2030, domestic production would only increase by 3 percent, still not enough to significantly affect oil prices.
That drilling in ANWR was even considered a solution to the looming energy crisis was a testament to how out of touch the party was with reality.
Environmental problems pose a special dilemma to conservative ideology. Ecosystems do not recognize political boundaries or private property. Addressing problems like pollution and habitat loss generally requires restricting the liberties of people on private property.
Furthermore, many environmental problems are caused by what economists call “market externalities,” or when the market fails to assign the costs of a detrimental activity to the responsible party. The free market, a favorite tool of conservatives, is actually the cause of the problem in these cases.
The response to global warming from many conservatives is an illustration of this ideological dilemma. Instead of focusing on solutions, the GOP’s response has been to deny that it is actually happening. The fear is that this type of problem will inevitably lead to a global governing body controlling access to a resource as basic as energy. This, however, is just a limitation of the current conservative imagination.
When conservatives reacted to scientists’ warnings about global warming with denial, they effectively walked away from the negotiating table, leaving liberals to make all of the policy decisions. As we near the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December, the right risks seeing a whirlwind of change happen while they still have their heads buried in the sand.
This is an opportunity for conservatives to make themselves relevant again by offering fiscally responsible solutions like investment in research and development of alternative energies and market corrections before it’s too late.
Experiencing northern Colorado at harvest
Over the past week I have been looking for ways to opt out of the global food economy and eat instead from the northern Colorado foodshed.
Food is often produced in this country at great expense to our soils, air, water, our farmers and our health. The true origin of our food is hidden behind idyllic imagery of family farms and open pastures, and we are happy to buy the illusion.
I was looking for more honest food—food plucked from familiar land, still clinging to the soil it was born in. I wanted short, gnarled carrots and turnips just because they were in season. I wanted tree-ripened peaches that would have been smashed to pulp if they were shipped the 1,500 miles an average food item travels in America. I also wanted the dollar I paid for my food to go to the farmer who grew it—not the eight cents that typically does.
I’m happy to report that our foodshed is both vibrant and very accessible.
The Food Co-Op, locally-owned Beavers Market and even my neighborhood Safeway all offer locally grown fruits and vegetables. For even fresher produce, outdoor farmers’ markets run through mid-October; indoor farmers’ markets begin in November. A year-round facility to bring farmers and customers together called the Community Market is also being developed.
Another option is to buy a share in a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm. A share will get you a season’s worth of vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, or various other offerings delivered weekly. The CSA model is a way for the community to fund a farm’s activities while sharing in the risk of farming.
Growing a garden is an obvious alternative. There is no more trustworthy food than food you grew yourself. If you don’t have a yard or a planter box, you can rent a plot at the community gardens on Spring Creek or in Timnath.
Finding natural, grass-fed beef from the Northern Colorado foodshed is less easy. Most ranchers nearby send their cattle away to feedlots. What they do sell is sold by fractions of a whole cow, usually quantities over 100 pounds. Buying individual cuts is next to impossible.
A rancher I spoke with explained why: U.S. Department of Agriculture regulations, which are designed for industrial slaughterhouses that process 400 cattle per hour, are not suited for smaller operations. A processing plant that would cater to Northern Colorado ranchers would likely not be able to support enough volume to be worth a regulator’s time, so it would be shut down.
Ironically, regulations intended to protect public health have instead promoted a system that is breeding antibiotic-resistant food-borne illnesses like E. coli that are being found in everything from spinach to peanut butter.
Vast regulatory bureaucracies are less important when the meat you buy is raised locally and processed nearby. For the same reason, most farmers around here don’t bother to be certified organic even though they use organic practices—they would rather just tell you themselves.
Across America, the number of farmers’ markets and CSAs is growing steadily; so is the population of small farmers according to a recent USDA census.
Researchers at Columbia University are investigating the feasibility of an integrated national network of foodsheds. Preliminary analyses demonstrated that the Northeast, including New York City, can meet 100 percent of its dietary needs from its network of foodsheds. That is evidence that foodsheds are capable of replacing modern agriculture.
What is missing from modern agriculture is a sense of place. We have divorced our food from the soil and the sun, growing it instead with fossil fuels and fertilizer. In doing so, we have turned our back on the land and our cultural heritage. This is our harvest—a time once celebrated by the entire community, but now all but forgotten. Experience northern Colorado at its best, eat some of it.
Read on:
Experience the harvest with a downtown local tasting tour, sponsored by Beet Street
Putting ‘health’ back into the American health care debate
The latest news from the health care debate is a proposed tax on soft drinks to help pay for the $774 billion plan unveiled by Sen. Max Baucus as well as fight a burgeoning American waistline.
Until now, the health care debate has largely ignored the growing health crisis linked to the American diet, despite its mammoth contributions to the rising cost of health care. A recent study showed that 30 percent of the rise in health care spending in America over the past two decades is due to obesity alone.
Diabetes is another major contributor. The Center for Disease Control estimates that one in every three children born after 2000—children who consume 10 to 15 percent of their daily calories as soft drinks and other “empty calories”—will develop Type 2 diabetes. Each of those children will cost $6,600 more per year in doctor visits and medical equipment.
If Americans were as healthy as Europeans (as we were thirty years ago) we could save over $1 trillion by 2050, according to a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
A tax on soft drinks, however, is a lazy approach to this problem. America desperately needs a revolution in how we produce food.
The farm bill dictates how food is produced in this country. It was originally designed during the New Deal era to protect farmers by stabilizing the price of commodity crops like corn and soybeans. Since then it has been reengineered to drive down the price of commodity crops by paying farmers directly to produce them.
Farmers have abandoned fruits and vegetables—termed “specialty crops” by the farm bill—to free more land for commodity crops. The cows and chickens that lived on the farms have been sent to feedlots and factories, where they are fed corn that is now sold for far less than the cost to grow it.
The government policy of subsidizing commodity crops has replaced an ecological model of farming with an industrial model of food production, with corn and soybeans as the raw materials of production.
High fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils from soybeans and CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) have become the machinery of converting corn and soybeans into what we now call “food.”
Many of the products available in grocery stores are really just complex rearrangements of corn, with added color and flavorings. If you can’t pronounce the ingredients in what you’re eating, there’s a good chance it is derived from corn.
On feedlots cattle are fed corn, instead of their natural diet of grass, because it makes them grow bigger, faster and fatter. A pound of hamburger is the product of applying the bovine digestive system to eight pounds of corn, plus growth hormones and antibiotics.
Subsidized corn is the reason you can buy a double hamburger and a soft drink at McDonald’s for a dollar each. It’s also the reason fruits and vegetables seem so expensive by comparison.
In a way, farm policy in this country has been very successful. Today we spend only 10 percent of our income on food, down from 25 percent in 1929.
However, the cost to our health has been enormous. We spend over twice as much on health care as we do on food.
Health insurance companies, facing new regulations that would make it harder to deny coverage, are taking a sudden interest in farm policy. Recently, insurer UnitedHealthcare asked a team of researchers at M.I.T. and Columbia to develop an approach to curbing the rise of childhood obesity in America.
The researchers recommended “foodsheds” as the most promising solution. A foodshed is a diversified regional food economy—in contrast to our simplified national one—where food is produced and consumed all in one locality.
Fort Collins has been quietly developing its own foodshed. Next week I will explore what it means to eat from our foodshed.
Read on:
A damning special investigation of the absurdities of the farm bill by the Washington Post
The Cato Institute’s economic argument against the farm bill
The Environmental Working Group tracks who receives farm subsidies (you may be surprised)
Calling for A 50-year Farm Bill by Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry
Overview of chronic diseases such as obesity and diabetes in America
Swine flu, in memoriam
If you have not devolved into a flesh-eating, half-pig zombie yet then the H1N1 flu virus, formerly known as swine flu, has not materialized into the pandemic the news media originally reported. After a week of apocalyptic front page headlines and 24-hour cable news coverage, the virus appears to be in decline.
World Health Organization officials announced over the weekend that the H1N1 flu virus is a mild strain, with a mortality rate comparable to the seasonal flu. There is also no evidence that it is spreading in a sustained way outside of North America.
According to the most recent WHO information, 1085 cases have been reported in 21 different countries. Mexico has had 590 cases with 25 deaths. The only other death from the virus was a Mexican toddler who died at a hospital in Texas. The U.S. has reported 286 cases in 36 states.
In comparison, the seasonal flu infects up to 20 percent of the population and claims 250,000 to 500,000 lives worldwide each year.
Humankind’s predictably irrational response to fear has led to a hilarious circus of overreactions and political posturing. Here’s a look back at the swine flu, in memoriam:
The first absurdity was the debate over the name “swine flu.” An Israeli health official proclaimed that the name was offensive to Jews and Muslims, for whom consumption of pork is forbidden, and should be changed to “Mexican flu”—apparently with little consideration of what may be offensive to Mexicans.
(I have proposed the more scientifically rigorous “man-bird-pig flu.”)
The name was officially changed to the H1N1 flu virus after a lobby by the pork industry, and for good reason—despite zero evidence that eating pork can infect a person with swine flu, countries around the world have banned imports of pork products from the U.S., Mexico and Canada.
Egypt went as far as to slaughter all 300,000 of its pigs, even though there have been no cases of swine flu in the country. The government’s decision was met with public outcry from pig farmers, who are a Christian minority in a predominantly Muslim country.
In an effort to stop the spread of the virus, international airports have started using thermal scanners to screen travelers from Mexico for signs of fever.
After swine flu was confirmed in one traveler who had flown from Mexico to China, some 400 people from his flight and hotel in Hong Kong were quarantined by the Chinese government. A Mexican ambassador was denied access to Mexico’s quarantined citizens, sparking an international row between the two countries.
Mexico, where the virus originated, was hit hardest. For the past five days Mexico City has been shut down to contain the spread of the virus. Trade embargoes and travel restrictions to Mexico imposed by some countries have harmed Mexico’s agriculture and tourism industry.
In the U.S. political sphere, swine flu has been exploited by almost everybody with an agenda, from proponents of immigration reform to animal rights activists. In the spirit of partisanship, Rep. Michelle Bachmann (R-Minn.) even pointed out the “interesting coincidence” that this swine flu has emerged during Obama’s presidency, insinuating he was somehow to blame.
If we have learned anything from this outbreak, it is that we do not learn very well.
The last swine flu outbreak occurred during Republican Gerald Ford’s presidency in 1976. Following a period of public hysteria, the government reacted by immunizing 40 million Americans, leading to 25 deaths and 1000 cases of ascending paralysis from the vaccine. The immunization program killed more people than swine flu did.
Based on too little information and too much hype, the media turned just another addition to the 1,161 known variations of the flu into a potential pandemic. In a world where plane travel between countries is a daily occurrence, every new strain of flu can be a pandemic. In most cases, as is the case for swine flu, the fear is actually more devastating than the disease.
On Morality and Politics
Let me ask you a question. Hypothetically, there are two dogs up for adoption. One is independent-minded and relates to its owner as an equal. The other is extremely loyal and doesn’t warm up well to strangers. Which of the two would you prefer to adopt?
Now what if I told you that based on your choice, I could predict who you voted for in the last election?
That is the assertion of Jonathon Haidt, a researcher at the University of Virginia. Based on a survey of over 30,000 people, Haidt has concluded that liberals and conservatives differ in a fundamental way—they do not share the same morality.
To liberals, morality is based on two principles: fairness and not harming others. Conservatives agree with those two principles, but also hold in-group loyalty, respect for authority, and purity or sanctity as moral virtues.
Everybody is concerned with issues of fairness and harm to others. However, liberals tend to reject the conservative virtues because those are often the justification for oppressing others or restricting their rights (think gay marriage).
When a conservative uses arguments based on those virtues to persuade a liberal, the two will never understand each other.
Here’s an example Haidt uses to illustrate this. Imagine a woman standing on the corner of College and Mulberry holding a sign that says “Cable television will destroy society.” You ask her to explain, and she says that cable television is an affront to the god Thoth and that cables radiate theta waves that make people sterile. You think, obviously here’s a candidate for Thorazine.
Now imagine a man holding a sign that says “Gay marriage will destroy society.” He explains that homosexuality is an affront to God and that gay marriage will undermine the institution of marriage, which our society is built upon.
He can’t be schizophrenic because many people agree with him; but to a liberal, he’s just as crazy as the first lady.
This fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals creates a chasm into which most moral arguments are lost. In the end, conservatives get painted as bigoted fascists and liberals as idealistic whack-jobs. In reality, both are probably rational human beings with the sincere intention of doing what is right. They just have very different ideas of what that is.
Conservatives are willing to sacrifice the well-being of some people at the margin to preserve social order. Liberals will risk anarchy and chaos to promote fairness for everybody. As you can imagine, these two strategies can butt heads often, but neither strategy is necessarily wrong.
Civilizations were not built on fairness and caring for others alone. To get people on the plains of Africa or in the jungles of South America to cooperate required a combination of all moral values. What mixture of those values is optimal at this period in our history is for you to decide.
By rejecting the conservative values outright, many liberals have overlooked the great conservative insight—order is hard to achieve and can be lost easily. However, social order is not always at risk. There’s a time for protecting order, and a time for promoting fairness.
Many of the issues of our day require us to bridge the chasm that separates us and see the world from the other person’s point of view. We need not forever be enemies in the battle of good and evil. We can step outside of the cosmic battle and appreciate each other as fellow moral beings. Then we can get to the work of changing each others’ perspective.
You can take the survey at yourmorals.org and find out where you fit in the moral/political spectrum. You can also sign a pledge to promote civil discourse on political issues at civilpolitics.org.
Read on:
Watch an 18 minute presentation by Jonathon Haidt at Ted.
Haidt presents his findings in this article.
More research on the differences between liberals and conservatives.
U.S. ready to regulate for global warming
The showdown has begun. On Friday, the Environmental Protection Agency announced its intention to declare the six principal greenhouse gases—carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride—to be air pollutants that pose a risk to public health and welfare.
After a 60-day public comment process, the EPA’s findings will be made official. It will be the first step for the U.S. towards regulating for global warming.
Five years ago, several states and environmental groups sued the EPA to force it to define greenhouse gases as air pollution under the Clean Air Act. In turn, the EPA argued that it did not have the authority to regulate for global warming. The suit was appealed to the Supreme Court. In 2007, the Supreme Court ruled in Massachusetts v. EPA that the EPA was obligated to evaluate whether greenhouse gases were a danger to the public and the environment.
Based on the science of the IPCC and the U.S. Climate Change Science Program, the EPA determined that greenhouse gases’ contribution to global warming makes them a threat to the public.
The EPA’s findings are significant because they put pressure on Congress to develop legislation that will comprehensively address global warming and the transition to a clean energy economy. The EPA did not include any regulations or emissions targets in its announcement, but it will soon begin regulating motor vehicles for emissions of greenhouse gases. In the future, regulations may expand to include power plants, oil refineries, and factories. Both Obama and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson have called on lawmakers to guide the regulatory process.
The work in Washington has already started. The American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 (ACES) is draft legislation proposed by Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) and Edward Markey (D-Mass.). The bill includes provisions for increasing energy efficiency, developing clean energy, and establishing a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon dioxide emissions to 83 percent below 2005 levels by 2050.
A cap-and-trade system in the U.S. has been a highly contentious issue, criticized by opponents for being costly and harmful to American competitiveness in the global market.
The European Union (EU) established a cap-and-trade system in 2005 to meet the goals of the Kyoto Protocol. It estimates that compliance with the Kyoto protocol will cost about $4 billion per year, which is less than 0.1% of its GDP. While that’s not much, it has caused energy prices to rise and generated some turmoil in industries there. The cap-and-trade system is appealing however because it is the most cost effective way of regulating carbon emissions.
The announcement Friday marks a milestone in the debate in America about global warming. Some are even calling it the end of an era. “These findings will officially end the era of denial on global warming,” exclaimed Edward Markey, coauthor of the ACES legislation.
Well, not yet actually.
The 60-day public comment process is the last opportunity for global warming skeptics and those opposed to regulating for global warming to have their voices heard. Only 34 percent of voters in the U.S. think that global warming is caused by humans. Even fewer are willing to pay a tax on electricity or gasoline to reduce emissions.
If you think you can debunk the theory of global warming or prove that greenhouse gases shouldn’t be regulated, contact the EPA at regulations.gov and make your case. You have 60 days.
Read on:
Read the 133 page report issued with Friday’s announcement
Learn more about the EU’s cap-and-trade program
Learn more about the global carbon market
In December, The UN will likely develop a new climate change treaty at the Copenhagen Climate Conference. Expect the U.S. to have an influential seat at the discussion table.
