 I'm Salvatore Bogonas and today's lecture is the Sociology of Global Warming. Global warming is usually thought of as a scientific or technical problem, but really it's a full spectrum social sciences problem driven by culture, economics, and politics. A sociological point of view is useful for integrating these multiple dimensions into a single social science of global warming. Whereas physical scientists and social activists generally prefer to broaden the problem to talk about climate change. They do so for technical or strategic reasons. Scientists because it can be easier to demonstrate or prove specific aspects of climate change are occurring, or activists because they feel they can motivate people to be concerned about local manifestations of climate change. But I think when you get down to it, the root global social problem to be solved is runaway greenhouse gas emissions, runaway atmospheric pollution that results in runaway global warming. The world is getting hotter due to human activities. At this point there's really no debate about this simple proposition. For the last thousand years or longer the earth was on a slight cooling trend and then suddenly about the beginning of the industrial revolution the earth started to warm and that warming accelerated dramatically after the 1950s. As carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen, so has the global temperature. And there's no reason to think that it's going to be over anytime soon. On its current trajectory the earth has increased one degree Celsius in temperature over the last 50 years. Projections are that it will increase another degree in the next 30 or 40 years. But then the projections usually end. There's no reason to think that in the year 2050 or the year 2100 human beings carbon dioxide and greenhouse gas emissions will suddenly stop. I think all the evidence points the other direction towards runaway global warming of 5, 10, 20, 40 degrees Celsius. At some point the earth could become an uninhabited venous like hell hole of a planet. And that's really the problem to be addressed in thinking about global warming is how to change the trajectory of our societies so that we don't reach that kind of future for the earth. The warming of the earth is associated with a host of related and catastrophic climate changes. But the master process behind them is this runaway global warming. Now global warming has only reached at this point about one degree Celsius yet we already have aerosol emissions from atmospheric pollution that are causing local drying of the atmosphere in places like Africa's Sahel region where long term drought seems to be related to air pollution thousands of miles away. There have been changes in ocean circulation which impact monsoon rains and cause either droughts or floods in South Asia impacting hundreds of millions of subsistence farmers. There's sea level rise which is inundating coastal areas both in developed countries but also more catastrophically in places like Bangladesh and submerging island nations especially in the Indian Ocean. Visibly there's been the melting of the Arctic ice cap which is changing the very geography of the Arctic Ocean and of course leading to the extinction of the polar bear which is maybe one of the most visible macro species impacted by global warming. Of course there's also ecosystem destruction which is causing the extinction of millions of species literally millions of species not just macro species like polar bears but millions of micro species that have never even been discovered or documented that we don't even know exist that are disappearing before we can discover them due to ecosystem destruction climate change and ultimately through global warming and I should reiterate this is all from one degree Celsius imagine the impacts of two degrees five degrees ten degrees or a hundred degrees Celsius warming on the earth's environment. All of these destructive tendencies all of these aspects of climate change are tied together by a single technical driver atmospheric pollution the stuff we put into the environment and atmospheric pollution is caused by societies we human beings organized into societies live our lives in ways that result in either lower or higher levels of atmospheric pollution and the higher the level of atmospheric pollution the higher the rate of global warming. Atmospheric pollution is often viewed as the unavoidable consequence of modern life but in fact it reflects choices cultural economic and political choices culturally some societies choose to pursue high energy consumption ways of life but other societies don't and seem to prefer to experience lower energy lifestyles economically some societies externalize the costs of pollution making the world pay for their own pollution while other societies make people pay for the pollution they themselves cause politically societies can stand on national sovereignty and only attempt to solve those environmental problems that directly affect them or countries can take a more the global citizen approach in which they make decisions responsibly based on the good of all of humanity these cultural economic and political choices can have a dramatic impact on how much people in each each given society contribute to overall global warming. First cultural practices can have a dramatic impact on greenhouse gas emissions even at similar levels of income for example in on the left are is a picture of an office district in Germany in which offices are located in a center city served by mass transit on the right is an office building in the United States which is located in a suburban district where people reach it by automobile. Obviously organizing our social lives that we work in center cities results in lower overall greenhouse gas emissions than organizing our social lives so that we all have to commute out to suburbs. This is not an inevitable decision both Germany and the United States are very modern societies yet one has tended to make the decision to centralize economic life in cities while the other is tended to make the decision to decentralize economic lives life in suburbs. Similarly living stacked above each other in high rise apartment buildings is far less environmentally destructive than living in our own little patches of green lawns houses on green lawns in the suburbs. Again this is not an economic difference you know the the apartments on the left in Hong Kong are actually much more expensive than the houses on the right in the United States. It's not that rich people automatically prefer to live in houses rich people may prefer to live in high rise apartment buildings given a cultural preference for high rise living over distributed living. And of course you know people can choose either to walk or bike to work and live in ways that allow them to walk or bike to work or they can try flaming sports utility vehicles to work as they do in the United States. Now maybe this example of an SUV is an especially environmentally polluting SUV but you can also see in this photo a pickup truck to the side and in fact this is cropped from a larger photo that showed other SUVs in it as well. Every car in this photo was actually a truck or sports utility vehicle of some kind. This is a choice we make. The people on the left are commuting to work by bicycle even in horrific climactic conditions I mean dealing with the cold and the snow and still out on their bicycles. That's a cultural choice people make that they would rather live out in nature than live in an air conditioned climate controlled or burning as the case may be a sports utility vehicle. These are not automatic functions of modernization these are choices people make when they can afford to do either one they want. Economic systems also have a big impact. This includes taxes, government spending, market regulations, all sorts of structures that can either encourage or discourage pollution. Australia briefly flirted with a carbon tax. A carbon tax will obviously reduce the emissions of carbon dioxide as people don't want to pay the tax. If you tax something people use less of it. In the United States there are notoriously low levels of gasoline taxation so compared to other developed countries in Europe and even Australia the United States has very low gasoline taxes and as a result people drive much bigger cars because they're less worried about the cost of gasoline. In countries that have high gasoline taxes people choose to drive smaller cars and thus have lower carbon emissions. Many countries actually subsidize gasoline resulting in more driving than there would otherwise be. This is actually regressive from the standpoint of carbon emissions and for example Argentina in Latin America has much higher carbon emissions per capita or per unit of GDP than its neighboring country Brazil. Primarily because Argentina subsidizes gasoline and has anti-environment economic policies whereas Brazil tends to have relatively pro-environment economic policies for a developing country. And then maybe the worst example of economic regulation causing massive levels of pollution is the fact that all over the world countries allow ships to buy unregulated oil. So oil to be burned inside the country things like gasoline and diesel fuel have to meet environmental standards but oil burned at sea is nobody's problem. And so cruise ships and much more importantly container ships and cargo ships of all kinds burn what's called bunker oil the lowest quality dirtiest oil there is and they burn that oil because no one tells them they can't. Now every ship that buys oil has to buy it in some country. If countries had regulations against the selling of bunker oil ships would have to burn cleaner oil but for some reason countries don't allow cars and trucks inside their borders to burn dirty fuel but they do allow ships visiting them to buy dirty fuel to then go burn at sea. And this brings us to political decisions. Political decisions can focus strictly on national costs and benefits or can take the good of the whole world into account. This is a still from the Chinese documentary Under the Dome detailing the causes of air pollution in Beijing and China and one of the scenes from Under the Dome was a checkpoint for trucks entering Beijing at night checking their environmental qualifications and this truck had the environmental standard for that it was it was rated at a high enough environmental level to be entering Beijing yet the truck didn't have any of the basic equipment any of the emissions controls equipment that would give it that would make it a standard for truck. Now China has you know incredibly state managed economy with very high levels of government surveillance and virtual police state certainly China could control what kind of trucks are sold in China yet China allows its state owned truck companies to manufacture trucks for export that do not meet environmental standards and inevitably those trucks made for export still also get used in China itself so instead of China and other countries mandating that all trucks have to have pollution control equipment they simply mandate that trucks for sale internally inside the country have to have pollution control equipment but trucks for export don't have to as a result millions of trucks made in China are exported to Africa the Middle East and South Asia with no environmental protection whatsoever and as the documentarian of Under the Dome discovered they also get used in China as well. One place where political decisions have a massive impact on the rest of the world is Brazil. Brazil is if you will a guardian of the world's largest remaining rainforest the Amazon basin but the Amazon basin is increasingly being lost to deforestation and that deforestation has continued right up until the present day. The rate of deforestation seems to be slowing in the last ten years since 2006 but it's still occurring and can you blame Brazil for that. From Brazil's standpoint deforestation is good for incomes in Brazil it generates lots of export revenue of rainforest trees but the global warming impact the lack of oxygen being returned to the atmosphere by Brazil's trees is externalized to the whole world so like everyone else in the global warming debate Brazil faces a classic public goods problem why should it pay for this fantastic public good for the whole world the Amazon rainforest when the rest of the world does not contribute to its maintenance. We can see similar kind of logic in Canada it's not just poor countries that have these problems this is an oil mine in Canada. Now you may think that oil is something that's pumped out of the ground but in Canada there are massive deposits of what are called tar sands of sandy soil that is impregnated with oil and it is literally mined out of the ground and the oil is blasted out of the sand with high pressure steam it's an incredibly energy intensive process to mine and process the oil it's considered the least environmentally friendly or I should say the most environmentally destructive source of oil in the world yet it's the foundation of China's sorry of Canada's energy policy for the future. These kinds of differences cultural economic and political are not merely theoretical put them all together and as a result Western European countries tend to emit about half as much carbon dioxide per capita as Anglo-Saxon ones so countries like France Germany Ireland and Spain have half the levels of CO2 emissions as do countries like United States Canada Australia New Zealand. Interestingly in this regard the original Anglo-Saxon country England has relatively low levels of carbon emissions similar to those in Western Europe and this international variation is not simply due to differences in economic standards of living. These are cultural and political choices this map shows levels of carbon dioxide emission per unit of GDP per unit of economic output and as you can see the lowest some of the lowest areas in the world are Western Europe and also I mentioned Brazil as well as the very poor countries of Central Africa. The highest polluting countries per unit of economic activity are again North America but also virtually all of Asia plus Australia and New Zealand. The kinds of societies that choose high levels of environmental pollution and greenhouse gas emissions are the same kinds of societies that choose high levels of inequality within the country and this is a really interesting connection that high inequality countries countries where the richest 20% are 10 times as rich as the poorest 20% places like Singapore and United States have much higher levels of carbon dioxide emissions than countries where there's relatively low inequality so for example in countries like Sweden, Norway, Finland, Japan the richest 20% are only four times as rich as the poorest 20% of society and their levels of greenhouse gas emissions are less than half as high as those in the US, Australia and Singapore. From a statistical perspective it's almost impossible to say that that relationship is causal. It's almost impossible to tease out the specific causes of the polluting society, what makes a society polluting and the problem there is we just don't have enough countries to cover the number of possible explanations that have been proposed but some general patterns are pretty darned obvious. First, rich countries pollute much more than poor countries. No matter how moral a society may be, no matter how committed European Union countries may be, for example, to low greenhouse gas emissions, the incentive to externalize costs is very strong. When people want to decide how much they want to spend how to live and the cost of living in a high carbon way and a high pollution way is externalized to the whole world because all of your pollution is spread over the entire world. You don't have to breathe the air coming from your car's tailpipe, the entire world has to breathe it. Well, that incentive creates high levels of pollution everywhere. High income levels don't require pollution but high income levels enable pollution. So we might say that people in Central Africa are not more moral than people in Europe. They're not living a low pollution lifestyle because they don't believe in pollution but the fact that people have high incomes in Europe enables them to be higher polluting and almost inevitably if they're able to, they're tempted to and they do pollute more. But that doesn't mean they have to pollute more. Second, among rich countries those societies in which people demonstrate a strong sense of social cohesion seem to be the kinds of societies that pollute less. Culturally they tend to prefer low pollution lifestyles. It's in the well integrated, highly cohesive societies of Western Europe where people like to live in townhouses with a tram stop outside and like to walk or bicycle to work. On the other hand in countries where people want to own guns and live separately in individual houses not knowing their neighbors, those countries also seem to have high pollution lifestyles. Economically countries in which people demonstrate a strong sense of social cohesion seem to be willing to make polluters pay more of the costs of pollution. To name, shame and charge people who want to pollute whether through congestion charging on roadways, through gasoline taxes, through carbon taxes, there are all sorts of ways to do it but some countries are more willing and more interested in making people pay who want to pollute. And politically it's possible that countries that have a greater sense of cohesion, that have lower inequality and stronger belief in the state that these countries maybe behave a little bit less like citizens of their own countries and a little bit more like citizens of the world. Look there's no technical solution to global warming, there's no one technology that will solve it but historical data suggests that it would be relatively easy to, well if not solve global warming at least to reduce the threat dramatically. If we could bring greenhouse gas emissions back down to 1950 levels that wouldn't, well it wouldn't save the planet, there would still be global warming but it would buy us a few hundred extra years instead of the levels we have today. Is that possible? I think it's very possible. Obviously the world has developed very rapidly since 1950, we have much greater levels of economic output but we have also much greater knowledge of how to reduce emissions. So imagine a very efficient small hatchback car of 2016 and compare it to an enormous gas guzzling American car of 1956. In the last 60 years we've really learned how to make cars energy efficient. We've learned how to make power plants much more efficient. I think that if we wanted to we could pretty easily have the entire world living at contemporary levels of income but emitting at 1950s levels of emissions. The primary reason we have such high and rising greenhouse gas emissions is that we choose to live in incredibly wasteful ways simply because we are able to, not because we have to. Key takeaways. First, cultural practices, economic systems and political decisions can have massive impacts on countries' levels of greenhouse gas emissions. Second, on average Western European countries, including England, emit half as much CO2 per person or per GDP as do the Anglo-Saxon countries of North America and Australasia. Finally, rich countries tend to externalize the costs of carbon emissions and thus global warming to poor countries and the planet as a whole. Thank you for listening. I'm Salvatore Bobonis. You can find out more about me at SalvatoreBobonis.com where you can also sign up for my monthly newsletter.