Rationality Later, Climate Change Now

Pinker begins strongly in his new book Rationality, with the point “…among our fiercest problems today is convincing people to accept the solutions when we do find them." On climate, the solution that Pinker has pushed above all else via Op-Eds and mentorship is Karnkraft (nuclear power). “Nuclear power is the safest form of energy humanity has ever used,“ is an atypically short sentence from Pinker, but one he includes here and in his introduction to A Brighter Future, (2019) by Joshua Goldstein and Staffan Qvist. “Even if we accept recent claims that authorities covered up thousands of Chernobyl deaths, the death toll from sixty years of nuclear power would still equal one month of coal-related deaths.” Americans’ inability to see nuclear power for what it is, is largely irrational says Pinker, a product of scary images in our mind and the novelty of the small amount of risk involved.

Pinker points out a nuclear meltdown is a “dread risk,” in the words of academic Paul Slovik because the threat is novel, out of our control, human made and inequitable in its impact. Pinker suggests that it is graphic images of Three Mile Island, Fukushima, and Chernobyl that remain in our minds and crowd out our perceptions of the absence of risk and death. He has a point. I remember the 24-hour period after the Chernobyl meltdown and the starkly terrifying cover of the Economist magazine that came out that week: A photograph of flames with a single word in Cyrillic: FIRE. Although I am among the younger boomers who protested nuclear power at some point – though I did not attend the Doobie Brothers anti-Nuke benefit concert that Pinker mentions – I have come to agree with him.

I cannot imagine that we will make deep cuts in carbon without keeping our plants open and building many more. I am reminded that nuclear power is lowering my footprint every year when I update the slide show for The Five-Ton Life. When I finished writing my book, the 2016 figures indicated wind made up 7 percent of the electricity generated in Illinois and this source seemed to be on a steep upward slope, but the most recent numbers from the Department of Energy show it has edged up only slightly to 8 percent. Solar/PV contributed 0.3 percent. Then as now, most of my state's electricity comes from nuclear power, holding steady at 54 percent. In part due to Illinois legislation that is supporting nuclear power plants that might have closed, it is nuclear power and not anything else that is keeping a lot of carbon out of my electricity though I never hear any of the local environmental groups in my neighborhood talk about anything but solar, wind and geothermal.

Aside from this important advocacy point for nuclear power, Pinker does not put much weight on technological fixes and scoffs at the idea that he should undertake to reduce his personal emissions. A “Professor J” apparently made this irrational request of Pinker, and others, and he shares his reply with his book audience. “Only if everyone eliminated their emissions would anyone benefit, and the only way it would be in anyone’s interests to do that was if clean energy was cheaper for everyone.” That is a pretty sweeping point, and if he had put his mind out of the all-or- nothing options of the Prisoners Dilemma he might have written something more reasonable to the order that if the top emitters in the world reduced by a lot, while the rest of the world did very little, we would still be much better off than our current trajectory.

In Rationality, as in his earlier writings, Pinker describes energy consumption in beneficial terms and reducing energy use as unpleasant and requiring altruism. As he explains to the “good” Dr. J: “…the sacrificer would sweat in the summer, shiver in the winter, and wait for buses in the rain while her polluting neighbors stayed comfy and dry.” This is a point that in some cultural contexts is valid and in others, not so much. In many American office buildings, workers shiver in summer in rooms that are overly chilled by air conditioning. Conversely, many residents of multi-unit buildings broil in winter in a parallel problem of over-working furnaces. This is part of the overconsumption problem in the USA that is challenging to fix, but I think, worthy of rational attention from thinkers from all disciplines including neuroscience and linguistics. In a recent interview in the New York Times, Pinker divulged some details of his own consumption including the fact that, irrationally, he rode his bike in the city although rationally he knows that the risks of accidents are too great to justify this form of exercise. Yes, some forms of low-carbon options are enjoyable and if more people rode bikes, riding would be safer. Would I sound reasonable if I put this in the crude terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma matrix, like Pinker does in the previous example? It is unsafe to ride a bike unless everyone rides a bike.

While in The Better Angels of our Nature, Pinker lays out the reasons why humans have become less violent and more accepting of the other over time, he does not seem to think that the moral imperatives of climate change are a significant motivator of individual action. I think this is a real shame in that we do not know how empathy might evolve on climate change. As the plight of climate refugees becomes more graphic and recurrent, we might find that the empathy revolution that Pinker described related to race, gender and sexuality, materializes in valuable ways. Why not be optimistic about this and lend some empathetic wit to this cause?

Steven Pinker, himself, has been targeted by this “revolution” of acceptance. In 2020, hundreds of academics signed a letter seeking to remove Pinker from the list of “distinguished fellows” of the Linguistic Society of America. The signees stated that Pinker “…drums out the voices of those who suffer sexist and racist indignities.” These same voices are inadvertently fueling the doubt of climate skeptics, argues Pinker. “People don’t necessarily believe what scientists say because they correctly sense that within academia, a person can get punished for unorthodox beliefs.” In Rationality, Pinker clarifies that “on several occasions correspondents have asked me why they should trust the scientific consensus on climate change since it comes out of institutions that brook no dissent.” I think this is an interesting point, but a few letters make an anecdote not a rational compendium of evidence. Would Pinker venture to say that most climate skeptics have this view? Or is it 10 percent or 1 percent? Of course, it's hard to say, but it would be interesting to know the scale of this perspective and how academia could evolve to appear less monolithic. In earlier decades, a number of scientists had prominent places in American academia as climate sceptics or even deniers. MIT for many years hosted the climate sceptic Richard Lindzen and the University of Virginia likewise did not fire Patrick Michaels and others who were among the leading scientific doubters in the USA. These voices have declined as the scientific evidence has revealed their perspective to be untenable.

Pinker seems to be somewhat fascinated by the hot-button nature of some of his audience and in Rationality, the dust jacket is a type face only design with the word “Rationality” in cool blue and green tones, and “Pinker” in a larger font hued hot pink, an aspirational color for someone who has been accused of being too white and also a scary color on the temperature/heat scale. The book is more pessimistic about rationality and our agency on climate than his previous works, but since the author focuses on different questions than the psychology of individual motivation, it doesn’t take us very far in explaining what, rationally, humanity can do for itself. Rationally, I hope that we can do a lot.

#Rationality #climatechange #nuclearpower #Pinker