Sweeping legislative proposals like the Green New Deal places virtually all of the burden on utilities and industry, rather than end-users like us, by imposing a price on carbon so high that these businesses will be forced to switch to renewable energy by 2050. But maybe I should maybe, in fact, I will be compelled to.Īm I being too alarmist? Possibly. I haven’t sworn off meat, even after reading the horror stories about the raising of poultry and livestock, and learning that an animal-protein diet is bad for the planet. “I would never have the strength to do that.” I wasn’t kidding. I asked which meal she’d indulge her vices in. In order to take account of human frailty, including her own, the student advocated something called “the two-thirds vegan diet,” in which you get to eat meat and dairy one meal per day. (In fact, the figure for livestock includes, among other things, the emissions caused by transporting meat and dairy products, which properly belongs under transportation.) She had learned that, thanks to the methane and nitrous oxide released by cows and manure, livestock is responsible for as large a fraction of CO2 emissions as the entire transportation sector (including air travel) - about a seventh. I was working with a young woman who had written an essay weighing the evidence that we could reduce global warming by switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet. I first started fretting over this question a few weeks ago, when I went to a Manhattan high school where I serve as a volunteer writing tutor. What would Mill have said if England had had then, as it does now, a public health system in which everyone shared the cost of treatment for alcoholism? What would he have said about smoking if he knew about the effects of secondhand smoke? Indeed, secondhand smoke is rapidly becoming a metaphor for our time. The filaments that bind people to one another are incomparably stronger today than they were in Victorian England. But there’s a problem with this formulation: Even in his own time Mill was criticized for drawing a largely artificial distinction between behavior which does and does not impinge on others. At the foundation of classical liberalism is John Stuart Mill’s principle that every individual must be free to speak and act as he wishes “so long as he refrains from molesting others in what concerns them, and merely acts according to his own inclination and judgment in things which concern himself.” For instance, drinking to excess, Mill said, deserves reprobation, but not prohibition it’s a self-regarding act. But what if you were also told that you had to eliminate most or all of the red meat from your diet? What if Greta Thunberg persuades President Sanders that we need to ration jet travel? At some point you’ll begin to think that the increasing globalization of bad things like climate change and infectious diseases is threatening liberal society. I, for one, would bristle I can’t stand being hot in summer. The principle is the same: Your freedom to live as you wish turns out to jeopardize public well-being. Now, let’s ratchet up the sacrifice: Suppose you were required by law to turn the thermostat up to 75 in the summer, and down to 66 in the winter, in order to reduce your carbon footprint. Two weeks subtracted from my life! Still, I’d accept the justice of my confinement because I would recognize that my liberty had come to pose a real danger to my fellow humans. I know that being locked away like that would drive me nuts. As the coronavirus continues to spread, the chances that any one of us will be placed in quarantine goes up considerably.
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