• Laudato Si’
• How to Think Seriously About the Planet – Roger Scruton

Dr. Mary Imparato

Welcome to conversatio the Belmont Abbey podcast. This podcast aims to form and transform our community so that each of us can reflect God’s image. I’m Doctor Marion Prado, chair and assistant professor in the Department of Politics at Belmont Abbey College. I’ll be your host for today’s episode. I’m joined by Doctor Matthew Seibert, associate professor of philosophy and chair of philosophy department at Belmont Abbey College, as well as Doctor Michael Watson, director of the philosophy, politics and Economics program, as well as assistant professor of economics.

 

00:32 – 01:03

Dr. Mary Imparato

We’re excited to talk about environmental ethics, politics and economics, but I’ll let our guests introduce themselves first. Doctor Siebert. 

 

Dr. Matthew Siebert.

great. Yeah, as as you mentioned, I teach philosophy, and I’m the chair of the philosophy department, and, I guess, my environmental interest, in this, in my background, interest in environment is something along the lines of I would think of myself as like a tolkien conservative , that I respect the wild.

 

01:03 – 01:29

Dr. Matthew Siebert

But I also really love the idea of humans living together, in nature, like the Shire or like the, when I lived in England. Like the Cotswolds, where they have the natural golden stone and they have stone fences, and people can walk in the fields and so on. so that’s that’s my intellectual background on this topic, I guess.

 

01:29 – 02:02

so I’m Michael Szpindor Watson. Matthew and I, we co-founded the PP major together. and, I believe we, the only authentically Catholic PP major there is, we’re integrating Thomas ethics, economic thinking, smashing them together to discuss statesmanship and public policy. We’re very proud of our politics professor. So we’re all I’m the director, but they’re the co-directors of the major.

 

02:02 – 02:35

Dr. Michael Szpindor Watson

And, my interest in environmental questions is that I’m a hunter. I’m a fisherman. Maybe a sportsman you could say. So I enjoy being out in the wild. my brother in laws are Polish scouts. I always wanted to be a Boy Scout, but that never was in the works. So I am concerned about the environment for my own interests, for hunting and fishing, but also, the instinctual bit and instinctual feel I have to protect the environment is that it is inherently beautiful.

 

02:35 – 03:10

Dr. Michael Szpindor Watson

And so as an economist, there are ways that we can think about how do we line up incentives so that human beings take care of the environment around them? 

 

Dr. Mary Imparato

I guess my interest in the environment, in terms of political science, is that it’s obviously a really hot button issue, in our political discourse. And it kind of breaks down along two lines where you have the right is generally more opposed to, environmental regulation and more in favor of business and even like clean coal, they’ll talk about, more favorite, you know, traditional ways of gaining, of getting energy.

 

03:10 – 03:30

Dr. Mary Imparato

And then the left tends to be more, you know, concerned about, climate change and capping carbon emissions and getting into, you know, green energy and retraining the job force. and so it seems like it’s less political football. and then you had Pope Francis come on the scene with Laudato Si and, like, kind of shine light on what Catholics should think about the environment.

 

03:30 – 03:45

Dr. Mary Imparato

and to me, that was like, it’s groundbreaking because we don’t want to just box ourselves as Catholics and into being there on the right or the left on this issue. Right. Like we are stewards of God’s creation. And what does that mean? So actually, I wanted to ask Doctor Seeburg about that, to talk a little bit about Laudato Si for us. 

 

03:46 – 04:13

Dr. Mary Imparato

Yeah, sure. I mean, of course, before Pope Francis, it’s not like popes hadn’t already cared a lot about the environment and talked about how important it is. But, with Laudato Si, you get an emphasis on just recognizing that even in the Old Testament already, God is showing that he cares about the oxen and cares about the birds and nature, for its own sake, so to speak.

 

04:13 – 04:40

Dr. Mary Imparato

and then that, that God has given us a dominion over nature, but not just to take advantage of it, but to till it and keep it, for the sake of human flourishing, for passing it on to future generations and to keep it as a kind of our home. So. Because it’s God. Because it’s God’s, the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it.

 

04:41 – 05:06

Dr. Matthew Siebert

it’s not just our own property. Exactly. And here I like to also reference Saint Thomas Aquinas this, that in his second part of the second part of the Summa Theologica, in question 66, he talks about the value of private property. That private property is something that is good for human society because it helps us to order things.

 

05:06 – 05:46

Dr. Matthew Siebert

It helps us to take care of things properly and makes for a peaceful society. But nevertheless, private property is not absolute. It’s something that is natural because governments tend to affirm a kind of private property in one way or another, but it’s not absolute. So the other ethical thinker that we’ve used in our, in our class and that I’d like to reference is, Roger Scruton, who wrote a book called How to Think Seriously About the Planet.

 

05:46 – 06:09

Dr. Matthew Siebert

And what I really like in that is, he, he talks about how do you solve this problem of the tragedy of the commons. It’s called where there’s some common resource and people will just take advantage of it if there’s no particular person owning it. And I mean, one of the most obvious solutions is that someone does come to own it. 

 

06:09 – 06:50

Dr. Matthew Siebert

But the main, the main, more overall idea is that we should come to think of our environment as our home, and that that love of home is going to be the most reliable motive in helping us to take care of the environment. And so what we don’t want is to have is to kind of fly in, technocratic control paradigm as, as, the technocratic paradigm as, Laudato Si, talks about it where, there are these technocrats in charge, and they’re kind of treating everything as if it’s raw material.

 

06:50 – 07:16

Dr. Matthew Siebert

The oxygen and the birds are not just raw material, but, and it kind of reminds me of Sharkey in Lord of the Rings at the end of Lord of the rings. There’s this stuff that it’s not in the movies, but it’s in the book where this Saruman lackey comes into the Shire and takes it over and tries to make all these rules, these arbitrary rules that top down rules that weren’t really necessary because the the customs and the tradition of the society were already working well.

 

07:16 – 07:55

Dr. Matthew Siebert

So that’s that’s the thing that Scruton is pointing out, is that, top down regulations can very often undermine our sense that this is our home together and the traditions that we have and the way of life that we have, and that we want to pass that on in a healthy way to our children. so we don’t, we don’t want to fly in a kind of technocratic control, and we don’t want to have all of that home swept away by focus on some kind of secular salvation narrative that’s going to,

 

07:55 – 08:18

Dr. Matthew Siebert

Demolish our traditions for the sake of sacrificing it all to some one, kind of alarmist, approach to a problem that people are, are joining us up about in order to get our support for other things. So, yeah, that’s what I’d like to say.

 

Dr. Mary Imparato

 Laudato Si is subtitled, on the care for a common home.

 

08:18 – 08:36

Dr. Mary Imparato

Right. I think, and you immediately think of a common home. well, this must be some kind of collective responsibility, and. Well, who’s in charge of collective responsibility? It must be the government. Government has to introduce some regulations to take care of this. And, you know, kind of collectivize things and run it from the top down. And you’re saying bottom up actually works.

 

08:36 – 08:53

Dr. Mary Imparato

And I want to actually turn to Doctor Watson to ask about this. Like, is it a bottom, a bottom up approach or like, you know, should we just recognize that this is the earth is all of ours and lets handle it in a common way? That’s the best way to take care of the environment. The economists have different things to say about this, but as you.

 

08:53 – 09:17

Dr. Mary Imparato

Yeah. Your perspective.

 

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

It depends. Right. So, when economists think about environmental issues, we’re talking pretty much every time about a tragedy of the commons. We have a commons as open access where the lingo involved as we would say its rival, but not excludable. What does that mean? Rival. and non rival. Well, the Snickers bar is rival, I eat it, you can’t eat it.

 

09:17 – 09:53

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

The Snickers bar is also excludable. I pay for it. It’s mine. You can’t get access to it. Fish in the sea though, is rival and non excludable. once you catch it, it’s yours, right? I get the fish. I can sell the fish, but it’s not excludable just because I’m fishing, that doesn’t prevent you from fishing. And so, we get this, when we have a tragedy of the commons and the resource is valuable, we get a rush to overfish, we get a rush to overharvest rush to cut down as many trees, you’ll see this in the West, when the federal government on federal lands, it was badly regulated and there’s two

 

09:53 – 10:15

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

ways to cut down trees, right. You can select cut or you can, I’m simplifying, you can select cut or you can do a clear cut. Clear cut is awful for the environment. Select cut can actually sometimes, is often good for the environment, it makes the forest healthier, etc. so the way it worked is that the foresters would see land and they had a choice.

 

10:15 – 10:33

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

I can clear cut or select cut. But the problem is if I don’t clear cut it, then maybe you’re going to clear cut it or you’re going to clear cut it. And so there was this rush, the clear cut. And they created all sorts of issues, soil erosion, etc.. So, that’s, that’s the main issue, the tragedy of the commons.

 

10:33 – 10:53

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

economists, when we look at this, we use something called the Coast theorem, whereas why don’t we have property rights over this? when we have property rights, it is not an open access. Right? A fish is kind of hard to make into a private property. so Coast talked about, we get these issues, these environmental issues, for two reasons.

 

10:53 – 11:15

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

One, high transaction costs of transaction costs to make property rights, protect property rights, create property rights. Whether it be the government getting involved in helping out or not, government solutions also can be costly because you can have, what some economists will say there are distributional effects. Some people feel like the solution is unfair.

 

11:15 – 11:42

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

And so they’ll lobby their congressmen, they’ll write to their congressmen. You can also have, of course, special interest groups, and you can have corruption, which is why many third world countries and poor countries are going to have issues, dealing with environmental issues just because of corruption, in the United States too, but to a lesser degree. So when we see, what’s called a market failure, a market failure, there’s two ways to talk about it.

 

11:42 – 12:06

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

I guess we could say we have a negative or positive externality. That is, costs are being thrown on to a third party, resulting in overproduction, over pollution, overconsumption, overharvesting, etc. and that third party has no way to do anything about it. They have no property rights or whatever. So sometimes we can say market failure is simply a lack of property rights.

 

12:06 – 12:29

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

And then how do we go about getting those property rights? Well, you need the government to enforce the law, and we need a country of law and order and to decrease those transaction costs about, dealing with, those conflicts and, yeah. So the cost theorem provides us kind of a litmus test. How can we solve some of these issues?

 

12:29 – 12:50

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

We can solve them by decreasing transaction costs. And also, establishing property rights and making it easy to enforce. and there are other things we could talk about for, for instance, in the Shire what you were talking about is what Elinor Ostrom, a political scientist who won the Nobel Prize in economics, for common property resource management.

 

12:50 – 13:16

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

So in the Shire, you have trust. You have small groups, local, in a homogenous group where the norms and customs govern those commons and those work really well, but you need those things there. So everyone kind of owns it. But we all have customs that result in a good outcome. 

 

Dr.Matthew Siebert

You know, like one example of this, I think, was these Japanese fishers who all fish shrimp that are in that area and sort of may just agree with each other about how much they can fish.

 

13:16 – 13:52

Dr.Matthew Siebert

And if someone has to take the year off, then they’ll support that person. And or if someone is sick, you know, like they’ve got a whole arrangement of how they commonly together manage that. And so it doesn’t have to be like individualistic private property, but just that their community recognizes that they kind of own that fishing area. Then there’s not a tragedy of the commons necessarily. 

 

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

And often the Japanese government or whoever will give a rubber stamp of approval saying, hey, not only is this your common, your custom, but we are going to say we’re going to recognize it.

 

13:52 – 14:12

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

And so it is the, the, it’s enforceable through the law, but also the, you know, with those shrimp, it is, those are non migratory. So it works really well. Once we get into migratory fish it becomes difficult because then it’s not just the Japanese who are fishing. It’s also the Philippine, the Philippines are fishing and in China they’re fishing in and maybe in America.

 

14:12 – 14:32

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

And then you have to deal with treaties, and that gets really difficult really quickly. 

 

Dr. Mary Imparato

One thing that I think may be difficult to avoid the tragedy of the Commons on, it’s probably the most hot button environmental topic. and that is climate change because the atmosphere that surrounds our planet, is common as, as are the oceans.

 

14:32 – 14:55

Dr. Mary Imparato

and so that really doesn’t belong to anybody and nobody has responsibility over it per se. and so, you know, for a long time it seemed like, well, we can just kind of live our lives and use our luxuries as we see fit and just kind of whatever it goes into the atmosphere. No big deal. but yet at the same time, it’s not really a negative externality on other people.

 

14:55 – 15:24

Dr. Mary Imparato

It affects us as well. and so I’m just wondering, like, in Laudato Si, I know Pope Francis addresses this. Maybe you could talk about what he has to say about the issue of climate change and then, you know, through different energy alternatives. What have economists said about climate change? 

 

Dr.Matthew Siebert

Well, I mean, I don’t know that Laudato Si has a lot of specific policy recommendations on climate change.

 

15:24 – 15:58

Dr.Matthew Siebert

I mean, he does encourage people to use less carbon, to aim for a simpler lifestyle and to, to work together with government to come up with policies that will help reduce pollution and other emitting carbon that might possibly, warm the Earth. I feel like another ethical principle to keep in mind here is just, is actually that people don’t think about very much is just truthfulness.

 

15:58 – 16:21

Dr.Matthew Siebert

So one of the problems with environmental policy, because it’s , as you were saying, when it’s migratory, it’s not just harder for it to be a common resource, but it’s actually even harder to measure as well. Like how many of these fish are there in the world? And there’s this very similar problem with the environment, or the atmosphere, or the climate.

 

16:22 – 16:58

Dr.Matthew Siebert 

It’s very hard to measure this over a lot of time. And so, I would want to remind scientists and politicians that when you’re putting a really hard spin on something, you’re actually undermining, you’re harming the environment indirectly because you are making it harder for people to believe you on that topic. And so just trying to be very truthful is really important from an ethical point of view, but also just a practical point of view.

 

16:58 – 17:16

Dr. Mary Imparato

Yeah I think that when people feel like the science is being politicized and wielded as a political cudgel, they’re less likely to trust it and go along with it. Well, that’s just the talking point of that side of the debate. and so. Right, I think the politics kind of get mixed in with the ethics and the science of it all.

 

17:16 – 17:35

Dr. Mary Imparato

but so Pope Francis didn’t kind of recommend any specific policy, you know, moves per se, but there are of course, people out there trying to devise them. and one of the things would be if we could kind of move away from carbon, if we could for, for producing energy. And so, I know you had some thoughts about nuclear power.

 

17:35 – 17:57

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

I do have some thoughts, but you both said two things that I found particularly interesting is you talk about negative externalities. And it’s true, the negative externalities today don’t matter because, yeah, we all get affected. But the negative externality of pollution is going to affect future generations. So that’s the point. and they have no recourse to hold us in court or something like that.

 

17:57 – 18:12

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

And then, Matthew, you brought up property rights. I did want to say with the migratory thing, property rights must be transferable, measurable, and bounded. That is the ability to exclude. If any of those don’t work, you are going to have market failure. You are going to have some type of tragedy of the commons or something else going on there.

 

18:12 – 18:34

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

So yeah, with migratory it becomes much more difficult, much more difficult. And well, if we can get those transferable, measurable and bounded property rights, we can solve the tragedy of the commons. So fishing, fisheries, and non-migratory fish very easily. Those are of course more micro, more local. We can find local solutions for that when it gets to climate change.

 

18:34 – 18:59

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

Yeah I’m pretty pessimistic on any of the treaties, the tides change. Political tides change someone like the Trump side of the Kyoto treaty, etc. but we also decrease some of our CO2 emissions because of fracking. So fracking of course has its own issues perhaps, but yeah. So when I’m looking to the future, if I was to bet money, it would be an innovation in new technology.

 

18:59 – 19:28

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

So I do think nuclear is very interesting. We’re seeing lots of something called modular nuclear energy where you don’t have to worry about the Japanese disaster at Fukushima or the Chernobyl situations. They’re smaller, they are easily cooled, you don’t need water. Pretty. They’re very, very safe. the other thing is, I remember reading about this, I was really just amazed.

 

19:28 – 19:47

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

But we can take all the uranium waste that we have, and we can make electricity from that, and it gets rid of the uranium waste or the vast majority of it. So that seems like a win win. We get rid of something that can really hurt a lot of us. We get, it’s, you know, the prediction I saw on CNBC was 100 years of energy from that nuclear waste.

 

19:47 – 20:12

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

so it seems like we can, that the negative externality that comes from nuclear would be this uranium waste that could leak. But now we have a way of using that that also gets rid of it. Most of it. So yeah, that is a solution.

 

Dr.Matthew Siebert

I tend to agree, I think that the West has actually reduced its carbon emissions, partly just due to having more energy efficient fridges and things.

 

20:12 – 20:38

Dr.Matthew Siebert

but India and China are constantly increasing and they’re vastly more emitting than, than the rest of the world. And they’re not going to, they’re just going to keep increasing. And the treaties are probably not going to hold them in check that much. And so, like Roger Scruton in his book, I kind of agree that some kind of innovation, maybe even fusion, would be ideal if that could.

 

20:38 – 20:59

Dr.Matthew Siebert

Who knows how many. It’s always a decade away, so maybe it will never come about. But maybe we are only a decade away from fusion. something like that. And then we can also adapt, we tend to, I think, think of climate change as something that is just the end of the whole planet.

 

20:59 – 21:26

Dr.Matthew Siebert

But that’s not one of the most likely scenarios according to the IPCC. more likely, according to the IPCC, is just that things will get warmer, sea levels will rise, we maybe have more hurricanes and things, and so we can, in accordance with like Catholic social teaching about solidarity, that we should be caring about the common good of everyone and trying to take care of the poorest among us, the most needy among us.

 

21:26 – 21:53

Dr.Matthew Siebert

We should be also trying to help people who are displaced by climate change in Malawi or people in Bangladesh try to help them build better dikes, kind of along the Dutch model. and, and there are ways that we can also adapt. but innovation might in the end just solve the problem and make carbon emissions.

 

21:53 – 22:12

Dr.Matthew Siebert

Not, not that much of a problem in the future. 

 

Dr. Mary Imparato

As the political scientist, I love that you’re throwing out different innovative ideas like nuclear energy and just that’s great. But then like where the rubber meets the road is actively actually getting those innovations implemented. Right. Like we need some sort of regulations and, you know, there’s a future of climate change when it comes to climate change.

 

22:12 – 22:29

Dr. Mary Imparato

It seems like there’s a few different levels, right? There’s the international level, and we don’t really have an international governing body with any sort of like teeth, as it were, to sort of impose punishments on those who don’t comply. And then you have the national level United States, and then you have the state and the local level.

 

22:29 – 22:48

Dr. Mary Imparato

and because of federalism. Right. In our Constitution that states have a certain amount of sovereignty and making their own policies, there’s limits to what the federal government can do. So there’s like different levels and you mentioned the IPCC, which is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the UN empowered in 1990. And they made it up of like 2000 of the world’s premier experts on climate change.

 

22:48 – 23:09

Dr. Mary Imparato

And they’re the ones who are telling us these, you know, predictions that the Earth’s temperature is going to increase by 3 to 8°F. You’re going to see more severe weather events like droughts and hurricanes and wildfires. So some of those things are starting to happen polar ice caps melting. And, and so people are you know, I think there’s this kind of a consensus, right, that this is this is a problem.

 

23:10 – 23:29

Dr. Mary Imparato

What’s to be done about it is another issue. And so, I just wanted to kind of bring in here one of the theories that we’re gonna be working with in class, which is, the multiple stream theory of policymaking, which is, advanced by John Kennedy in 1980. But he says that when policies come about, when change is made, that there are really three streams that have to come together, in sort of a synergy.

 

23:29 – 23:44

Dr. Mary Imparato

And one of those is the problem definition, which I think has happened through the work of things like the IPCC, defining the problem of climate change and what, what the reality is, where it came from, what we can do about it. and then there’s the problem. So, you know, figuring out the solution to the problem.

 

23:44 – 24:04

Dr. Mary Imparato

And that’s where you have scientists and policy innovators, policy entrepreneurs stepping in and NGOs stepping in, coming up with solutions. But I think the thing that the stream that really is sometimes a trickle is a tough one to work with is the political conditions. and that seems to, especially in this country, go back and forth.

 

24:04 – 24:31

Dr. Mary Imparato

So like you had, you know, Bill Clinton signed on to the Kyoto Accords. but the Senate refused to ratify it because they said that developing countries were not included in those restrictions. And at that time it was like 44% of carbon emissions were coming from developing countries like China and India. So it’s like, well, why are we going to impose this on ourselves if these other countries that are also big players and, you know, carbon emissions are not restricted in the same way.

 

24:31 – 24:51

Dr. Mary Imparato

and then we had the Paris climate accords that Obama signed on to. but then again, they were never ratified. Actually, Trump backed out of it in 2017. and this was more of sort of, of inviting all the countries and even helping developing countries to get out, get on board as well, but sort of inviting countries to define their own goals for carbon emission reduction.

 

24:51 – 25:21

Dr. Mary Imparato

And Obama said he wanted about by 25% he wanted to reduce carbon emissions in ten years. but it seems like, again, the political conditions as a new administration comes in, the goals change. And, it’s like we can’t, you know, we never stick in one direction. And now I guess where we’re at now is in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act passed by the Biden administration, includes 300 billion in funding and what they call environmental justice block grants, to really fund, you know, innovators and green energy technology.

 

25:22 – 25:40

Dr. Mary Imparato

but then again, opponents will say that that’s like picking winners and losers, putting your thumb on the scale in favor of technologies that might not work. It’s just giving contracts to your friends in a way, who are, you know, pursuing things that maybe like wind farms that they’ve turned out to be, you know, eyesores and really hard to dispose of those wind turbines.

 

Dr. Mary Imparato

Right. And so, that’s kind of where we stand today, right? Where we just have these political conditions that the issue, it’s a salient issue. People are concerned about it. But, it seems like it’s become such a political football. I don’t know, what the future on this is. Is there a common ground to be found, on the issue of climate change?

 

26:01 – 26:34

Dr.Matthew Siebert

Well, I think the Inflation Reduction Act also sponsors innovation on these things. And, and there is some need, as I understand it, if something is like research often needs to be sponsored by the government, not just by companies, if there’s not some relatively immediate benefit, if you can’t see a benefit in the next ten years or something, then it’s going to be hard to get research done on that unless you get some kind of, government funding.

 

26:34 – 26:53

Br.Matthew Siebert

I don’t know. What do you think of that? 

 

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

You know, when I was talking about the climate change, there’s a lot of economists who work in tradable markets so that they will if you, the folks who are creating carbon CO2 and put it in the environment, they put a cap on and they give, they allocate the cap to different companies.

 

26:53 – 27:15

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson 

And this is how much you can produce. And the more efficient ones who don’t use up their cap and sell off, the extra to the ones who to other companies who use more CO2. And so you’re incentivizing companies to reduce their CO2 output? If governments get it right in terms of how much tradable allowances they should allow or how much CO2 they should or they don’t, that’s fine.

 

27:15 – 27:34

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

And, you know, then theoretically it could work. We could also tax CO2, but that’s not the only greenhouse gas. Methane is also a greenhouse gas. So then you have to come up with all these different rules for every single one. And maybe that’s a way to do it. Those experiments have had very mixed, very mixed outcomes.

 

27:34 – 28:02

Dr.Matthew Siebert

So, well, I remember from the economics that we were doing this in this class, they also pointed out that sulfur dioxide, there was a cap, there was a kind of cap and trade system like this that was working. but then in order to reduce particulates, the government under Bush decided to just impose a new regulation, without thinking about what the consequences would have on this cap and trade system. 

 

28:02 – 28:27

Dr.Matthew Siebert

And the result was that whereas previously, the units that they had been trading were pretty reliable, although they weren’t tight, not ideal, not what economists would really like in terms of property, where it’s sort of permanent and transferable, and equal. But the regulations made it so that actually these units were totally differently valued in different parts of the country and by different companies.

 

28:27 – 28:51

Dr.Matthew Siebert

And, eventually the market just fell apart. And, and so where you previously had a good incentive to reduce this so that the companies themselves were trying as hard as they could to reduce it in order to make money. they just lost that incentive due to a regulation that interfered with that market. 

 

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

Yeah. When, I should have added when property rights are insecure and we’re mimicking property rights with these tradable allowances.

 

28:51 – 29:20

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

The moment property rights become insecure, that’s an incentive. And people start thinking about the short run very quickly. And they stop thinking about the long run so you don’t get the good outcomes you want. 

 

Dr. Mary Imparato

I’m thinking of political realities and politicians, like Joe Manchin, who have, you know, coal country. and a lot of the the word on the, on the right typically is that, you know, you’re going to pull all these people out of work, you’re going to trash this whole industry for what?

 

29:20 – 29:38

Dr. Mary Imparato

In the name of this sort of science that we’re not so sure about? So that’s, you know, just to kind of simplify the rhetoric around that, but, let’s, how do we do what the jobs question? Because it seems like if we’re really serious about reducing carbon emissions, we are going to have to move away from coal and oil, right?

 

29:38 – 29:55

Dr. Mary Imparato

And through innovation. But that means that there’s a whole industry of people who are really going to be left out. 

 

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

Similar things happened with free trade when we opened up trade with Mexico, NAFTA, China, etc.. I tend to be a free trader, although the way I tend to think about this is, is there our national security question?

 

29:55 – 30:13

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

I think there were a lot of national security questions we didn’t think about then. Also, how is it going to affect local communities? Some of these communities are totally dependent on one industry that an industry goes away, and then you’re going to have all sorts of unemployment. And unemployment leads to all sorts of social pathologies. Right. just drive through Rust Belt America.

 

30:13 – 30:33

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

I tend to, you know, if we can plan about this for the future, we should do this slowly. Right? And it should be very predictable and very certain so that all the players involved, the employers, the employees, the investors, etc. realize, okay, over the next 20 years, this is for sure going to occur. We have 20, 30 years to make the changes.

 

30:33 – 30:53

Watson

And so it can be done properly where folks, you know, some of the people who are older, who can’t, there’s not much of a payoff and it doesn’t make sense for them to switch industries. They can continue living out that. And then younger people say, well, I know this is not going to be a career when I graduate, so I’m not going to study petroleum engineering, which is the highest making major in the country.

 

30:53 – 31:11

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

But, you know, maybe I’m not going to study that or I’m not going to, I’m going to look for different industries outside of coal mining and things like that. And, you know, new jobs, of course, will open up if it’s nuclear or whatever. But that’s a totally different set of skills. Set of skills. I know you have to mine coal.

 

31:11 – 31:31

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

You have to mine nuclear. It’s a little bit of a different safety thing. So maybe those skills are transferable, but those are going to be in different areas of the country. People don’t like to move. Americans are pretty mobile relative to other places in the world, but even then it’s still a costly endeavor. If we were very mobile, which is not necessarily a good thing because it does destroy communities and then you have to rebuild.

 

31:31 – 31:51

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

And that’s not something that happens overnight. yeah. So I tended to like we’ve identified the problem. Let’s try to figure out solutions that results in a slow transition, and is not shock therapy. But. Well, but if you end up in a scenario where there’s a crisis, then you have to do shock therapy, which is no fun.

 

31:51 – 32:29

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

Right? And so we want to avoid the shock therapy. 

 

Dr.Matthew Siebert 

So would you be in favor of something like, you know, identifying these industries that are hopefully going to go away if we would, if we would reduce regulations on nuclear so that it would be more practical, more feasible, more viable economically. and including in our laws, something that would help coal miners either, either help pay for them to move somewhere where they could have a job or just support them, because they were in that industry, support them a bit more or 

 

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

so in our federal system.

 

32:30 – 32:45

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

This is actually going to be much of a state question. A lot of states have bad labor law and where do we open factories in the United States now? Car factories. It’s mostly in the South, unless the unions in the North can involve them, but it’s mostly in the South. If you’re going to open up a business. North Carolina and where is everyone moving to?

 

32:45 – 33:05

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

North Carolina, in fact, it’s creating its own environmental issues that so many people are moving down here so fast. Indiana should be a rust belt state, but it isn’t. Why? Because they have good economic and labor laws. Good economic regulations. So part of this is West Virginia needs to get its act together, for instance, and say, hey, coal isn’t the future.

 

33:05 – 33:37

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

We need to think about how do we rewrite the laws that have been under the control of the coal industry and its unions for so long to say, we need different industries here. I mean, just to show you the power of the coal lobby or whatever in West Virginia is that if you have I was speaking to a forester managed thousands of acres in, West Virginia, and she told me that if the coal mine ends up polluting in a manner that destroys the forest above it, no compensation.

 

33:37 – 33:58

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

 

Dr. Mary Imparato

Wow. 

 

Dr.Michael Szpindor Watson

Which is for an economist who believes in property rights. I’m like, I don’t know, you know, in rare environments that property rights are inviolable. So I don’t think, the destruction of property rights right there to me. 

 

Dr. Mary Imparato

The state legislature in West Virginia, I’m sure, wasn’t too familiar with their environment. They were more familiar with the coal industry lobbyists and their demands.

 

33:58 – 34:16

Dr. Mary Imparato

so I really appreciate this is an amazing conversation where we kind of touched on, like, more local, environmental issues as well as the grand one that kind of occupies a lot of our political discourse. and so, yeah, this is just a taste of what we go through in our class, just these different perspectives. And the students have really responded, I think, well, to it.

 

34:16 – 34:36

Dr. Mary Imparato

so I’m looking forward to seeing their policy proposals for various different environmental ills. and yeah, you know, as we conclude, I want to thank our audience for joining us. Thank you to Doctor Siebert and Doctor Watson, for this wonderful conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe and tell your friends that Conversatio is available on Spotify, Apple and Google Podcasts.

 

34:36 – 34:53

Dr. Mary Imparato

And until next time, God bless you.