Free Will And Climate Action

My actions cause greenhouse gas emissions. A fundamental question related to climate change is: Do I control my actions?

Do I control my actions, or are they predetermined - by my genes, by God, by physics and chemistry, or maybe by others around me like my boss, my parents, my spouse, my peer group? Do corporations control my actions through the consumer choices they offer me? Maybe the government controls my actions through laws and enforcement actions.

A rather fundamental question that deserves some thought. And I don’t think the question has a simple answer.

I hold that you and I have free will.

I believe that you and I have the ability to be agents that control our behavior… within limits and with effort. I can form an intention, and I can take actions that increase the likelihood I’ll accomplish my intentions.

At the same time, I recognize that it takes effort to accomplish my intentions. When I write out my goals, and when I review them daily, I am much more likely to accomplish them. But it’s not a sure thing. I often set goals I never accomplish and I make commitments I break.

I can fully intend to write part of a post in the morning, and when evening comes, I haven’t written a word yet. The same goes for trying to avoid an action like not eating that doughnut someone put in front of me, or not opening social media or YouTube today. I have lists of New Year’s Resolutions to look back on and wonder what ever happened to my commitments. Last year’s list of resolutions can be a good starting point for drafting next year’s list.

None the less, I hold that I have the ability to change my behavior. I can create an intention and then to follow-through and act. I can face a choice, chose a path, and take the action I chose.

What does not have free will?

In exploring how to address climate change, it is interesting to explore what does not have free will - what cannot be an agent of intentional change. Clearly my hot water heater does not have free will, nor the cup I’m drinking coffee from. But there are other entities we often talk of as if they were human, as if they had agency. And with the development of large language models (LLM) artificial intelligence (AI) systems and agentic AI, the boundary may be both more important to explore and also more difficult to define. But AI is not the focus of today’s post.

Do large collections of people acting together have free will? Or do the individuals maintain free will? In the United States, the Supreme Court has expanded the rights of “any person” enumerated in the Constitution to apply to the rights of any corporation - implying that corporations are people. But this interpretation does not align with my observed reality.

I hold that a corporation does not have free will. A corporation is an artificial person under US law - corporations 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. Personally, I hold that corporations are amoral - neither moral nor immoral. Corporations allow us to pool capital, resources, and labor to produce an amazing array of goods and services that can improve the quality of our lives (or can sell us addictive substances like cigarettes). But corporations are not living entities out to do good in the world. And, if corporations have morals and free will, they clearly do not have the morals of a person. They do not value life or value a livable world or value a family the same way a person does. To explore this idea further, try reading (or listening to) We The Corporations by Adam Winkler.

A government also does not have free will. Governments provide a means of organizing society, protecting citizens and managing the economy. Historically, governments have allowed the will of a smaller group of people (often a family, a dictator, or a ruling class) to set and enforce boundaries for the behavior of a larger group of people. And over the last few hundred years we 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, and that the individual people have inherent rights. But still the agency lies with the people. I will admit that under different forms of government some people (or classes of people) have more power to exercise their agency than other people. But free will resides with the individual.

Free will and climate action

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

To mitigate climate change in the United States, to reduce our emissions in a Western democracy, individual people need to change behaviors and purchase decisions. You and I need to act differently than people have over the last 50 years. We need to pass laws, but fundamentally even these laws are setting boundaries on individual behavior (and corporate behavior too). For any path forward, we need to change our behaviors and reduce the emissions our actions cause.

We should not wait for corporations to value the quality of life for our grandchildren, or value coastal cities and countries as worth preserving. To the contrary, a rational business decision for a corporation might be to just pull assets away from the coastal cities that will be lost to flooding and to expand into markets for products and services that will be in demand 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 or any future generation.

Supply or Demand Side Responses

Demand side responses occur when people buy more of something and corporations adjust to make more of the demanded good or service. More people want air conditioning, and corporations will build and sell more air conditioning units. Supply side growth is, as it suggests, when production happens before the consumer demands the service. The world did not know it wanted an i-pod, instead it took the genius of some individuals at Apple to recognize that with advancing technologies they could make an entirely new class of gadget that we would all want, once we understood how superior an iPod was to a tape player or a CD player.

Demand side climate action follows a straightforward proposition: when people buy goods and services that cause less greenhouse gas emissions, then corporations will produce these lower emission goods and services - and maybe even surprise us with some low emissions goods and services we haven’t thought of. If people do not stop buying the current suite of higher emissions goods and services (airline seats, beef, gasoline) then these goods and services will continue to be produced and sold.

Alternatively, laws can be put in place by the government to mandate or provide incentives for lower emissions. But corporations have significant power and free speech rights and they use their financial resources to influence US elections and fight new legal mandates that could threaten their core business models - and they have used these deep financial resources delaying meaningful action on climate change for the last 40 years. Also, if people don’t buy the lower emissions goods and services, corporations will work to find ways to get around or repeal the new laws.

We Have The Freedom To Act Now

Over 40 years after Dr Carl Sagan testified in the Senate explaining climate science and 38 years after James Hansen testified in the Senate about the impacts of climate change, we can no longer wait on our elected government to “solve” climate change for us. We can and should continue to work with our elected officials to create meaningful laws to lower emissions, but we cannot wait on those laws to take personal actions.

While the government may not have agency or free will, 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 are acting for other complex priorities like getting reelected or showing loyalty to a party. We have been through multiple sessions of Congress when Republicans controlled the House, the Senate and the White House - and when Democrats controlled all both chambers and the White House. Both parties have failed to prioritize and pass legislation that drives United States greenhouse emissions down.

The good news is that we can change our actions, reduce our emissions, and change the social norm that currently accepts the unlimited disposal of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Low emission choices are already available for us, frequently costing less than higher emission choices.

The first step is to accept that our choices matter and that we control our choices.

Create an intention to change, and then start the process of changing your actions. Just like any other attempt at personal change, the path requires focus, discipline and a clear intention.

As a next step on your own journey, I recommend exploring this writing on six disciplines that are meaningful for cutting personal emissions by exercising our free will.

And explore some of this link regarding behavior change related to habits which directly relates to maintaining personal changes that lower our emissions.

“The time is always right to do what is right.” (Martin Luther King, Jr.)

Jim