‘Anthropocentric Indirect Arguments for Environmental Protection,’ Kevin Elliott; Anthropocentric Indirect Arguments: A Risky Business?
Energy scientist Amory Lovins is fond of pointing out that in the late 19th century, it was not picketing environmentalists that saved the whales being slaughtered en masse for oil used for lighting; it was the engineers and venture capitalists that made electricity a viable and scalable power source (Lovins, 2012). To put a finer point on it, humans adopted a practice that benefited the environment (to stop killing whales for oil) neither for nonanthropocentric reasons (e.g., that whales have rights) nor for direct anthropocentric reasons (e.g., that whales provide aesthetic benefits). Rather, the environment was unintentionally benefited (whales were preserved) because of a practice that was beneficial to humans (electricity was cheaper than whale oil). Today, support is gathering around the notion that environmental concerns and goals are most likely to be addressed and achieved through actions and policies that put humanwelfare first and incorporate the concerns of sectors of society to which environmentalists have traditionally beenopposed.Environmentalists, so the thinkinggoes,must becomefluent in the languages of energymarkets, economics, and finance; they should adopt a less hostile attitude toward capitalism and technology; and they must cease to reflexively regard words like ‘growth,’ ‘nuclear,’ and ‘development’ as, well, dirty. The movement, sometimes referred to as ‘bright green environmentalism,’ is spearheaded by the Break Through Institute, a think tank led by Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger (2007). Kevin Elliott notes that his argument for Anthropocentric Indirect Arguments (AIAs) builds on their proposals. I think AIAs are probably the least worst strategy for nudging the needle on environmental and energy policy, and Elliott’s defense of their usefulness is sensible and timely. It is sensible because of the reasons he lists in Table 1. It is timely because, in addition to the examples Elliott cites, the momentum that has recently gathered around efforts to combat climate change seems to be fueled, in large part, by explicit or implicit AIAs. For instance, much attention has been devoted this summer to a report on climate change commissioned by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg, former
Air sampling reveals high emissions from gas field
When US government scientists began sampling the air from a tower north of Denver, Colorado, they expected urban smog — but not strong whiffs of what looked like natural gas. They eventually linked the mysterious pollution to a nearby natural-gas field, and their investigation has now produced the first hard evidence that the cleanest-burning fossil fuel might not be much better than coal when it comes to climate change.
O2 constraints from Paleoproterozoic detrital pyrite and uraninite
Redox-sensitive detrital grains such as pyrite and uraninite in sedimentary successions provide one of the most conspicuous geological clues to a different composition of the Archean and early Paleoproterozoic atmosphere. Today, these minerals are rapidly chemically weathered within short transport distances. Prior to the rise of oxygen, low O2 concentrations allowed their survival in siliciclastic deposits with grain erosion tied only to physical transport processes. After the rise of oxygen, redox-sensitive detrital grains effectively vanish from the sedimentary record. To get a better understanding of the timing of this transition, we examined sandstones recorded in a scientifi c drill core from the South African 2.415 Ga Koegas Subgroup, a mixed siliciclastic and iron formation–bearing unit deposited on the western deltaic margin of the Kaapvaal craton in early Paleoproterozoic time. We observed detrital pyrite and uraninite grains throughout all investigated sandstone beds in the section, indicating the rise of oxygen is younger than 2.415 Ga. To better understand how observations of detrital pyrite and uraninite in sedimentary rocks can quantitatively constrain Earth surface redox conditions, we constructed a model of grain erosion from chemical weathering and physical abrasion to place an upper limit on ancient environmental O2 concentrations. Even conservative model calculations for deltaic depositional systems with suffi cient transport distances (approximately hundreds of kilometers) show that redox-sensitive detrital grains are remarkably sensitive to environmental O2 concentrations, and they constrain the Archean and early Paleoproterozoic atmosphere to have <3.2 × 10 –5 atm of molecular O2. These levels are lower than previously hypothesized for redox-sensitive detrital grains, but they are consistent with estimates made from other redox proxy data, including the anomalous fractionation of sulfur isotopes. The binary loss of detrital pyrite and uraninite from the sedimentary record coincident with the rise of oxygen indicates that atmospheric O2 concentrations rose substantially at this time and were never again suffi ciently low (<0.01 atm) to enable survival and preservation of these grains in short transport systems.