Our Free Will

Do you believe that you have free will?

I’ve been exploring the idea of free will over the last month, and I believe that you and I have the ability to be agents that exercise some control over our behavior. We can form an intention and then take actions that make us more likely to live by our intention. This exploration has led me to listen to other people who have thought a lot more on the topic (see two seasons of Free Will Matters podcast). I clearly come down believing that I have free will - though I also recognize and admit that I must put some effort into the process of living by my intentions and values. 

In exploring how to address climate change, it is interesting to explore what does not have free will - what can not be an agent of intentional change.  Clearly the car I drive does not have free will or any agency, nor the hot water heater in my house, nor my cup of warm tea. But there are other entities we often talk of as if they were human, as if they had agency. And i think we can get confused by who really needs to take action.

A company does not have free will. A corporation is an artificial person according to the Supreme Court - they are typically constructed to maximize value while limiting liability for the investors. So corporations remove responsibility while increasing value.  There clearly is no reason to believe that any corporation will act morally or that corporations even have morals in the first place. Personally, I hold that corporations are amoral - neither moral nor immoral. I recommend reading (or listening to) We The Corporations by Adam Winkler if you want to contemplate the rights and agency of a corporation a bit more. 

A government also does not have free will. Governments provide a means of ruling a population - where the will of a smaller group of people (often a family or a ruling class) frequently sets boundaries for the behavior of a larger group of people. And over the last few hundred years modern democracies have been experimenting with the idea that the people who are governed can be responsible for selecting the government and the rules we choose to live by. But still the agency lies with the people - though some people have more power to exercise their agency than others.  

At this point, you are wondering if you opened the correct blog post. You may be asking “What does this have to do with climate change?”

To mitigate climate change, to reduce our emissions in a Western democracy, I believe that we, the people, need to act first. 

We can not wait for corporations to decide that the quality of life for our grandchildren has a value, or that coastal cities are worth preserving, or that people on an island nation should be allowed to live out their lives in their country.  To the contrary, a real business decision would simply be to pull assets away from the coastal cities and seek markets for products and services that will still function as the world warms, precipitation patterns shift, people migrate, and coastlines shift inland. Increasing the value of the corporation has very little to do with addressing climate change or preserving the quality of life for Americans or people across the world or for our children and their children. And greenwashing and delay tactics sound like expected responses from a corporation making a profit in the current legal structure.

When we, the people, decide to purchase goods and services that cause less greenhouse gas emissions, then corporations will produce them - but not until this demand exists and we stop buying the current suite of high-emissions goods and services.  Alternatively, laws can be put in place by the government to mandate lower emissions or to place a price on emissions. But corporations have significant power and free speech rights to use their financial resources to influence US elections and fight new legal mandates that might threaten their core business models - and they have used these deep financial resources to delay meaningful action on climate change for decades. 

35 years after James Hansen testified in the US Senate about the impacts of climate change, we can no longer wait on an elected US government to act first either. While the government does not have agency or free will, certainly the elected representatives and senators do have free will. Some people expect these elected members of Congress to be the moral actors exercising their free will to reduce our emissions and abate climate change. But when members of Congress exercise free will, they often choose to act to get re-elected.  Until the people who are electing members of Congress are working to reduce their personal emissions, why would elected members of Congress tell us what to do? They respond to our actual demands, not to what we might write or say while continuing on with a lifestyle dependent on the open and unlimited emission of waste carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The good news is that I believe we, the people, do have free will. And in the 21st century, we have the technology to drastically cut our emissions of greenhouse gases. When we see a problem, we can act. And we can change our actions, reduce our emissions, change the social norm that currently accepts the unlimited disposal of waste CO2 into the air we breathe, and shift the market for goods & services. 

Climate change really is a problem of household decisions. You may have heard that there are 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions. But this is turned upside down - the oil and gas companies did not burn the gasoline and natural gas they produced. They sold it to us, and we burned it (or our utilities burned it to generate the electricity we use.) A closer look documents that 72% of our emissions are driven by household decisions. Our actions create markets and demand.

The decisions made by people across our city, our country and our world cause our emissions of greenhouse gasses. And we have the agency to change our behavior.

The first step is to state an intention to change. Then live by that intention.

Please commit to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions. Then start with that project. It’s not a one-day project, or even a one-year project.