Carbon taxes and mental health

The beautiful thing about mid-term elections in the USA is that apart from the “main elections” for senators, congresspersons and governors, there were also votes on “auxiliary issues” – referenda, basically, on issues such as legalisation of marijuana.

One such issue that went to the polls was in Washington State, where there was a proposal for imposition of carbon taxes, which sought to tax carbon dioxide emissions at $15 a tonne. The voters rejected the proposal, with the proposal getting only 44% of the polled votes in favour.

The defeat meant that another attempt at pricing in environmental costs, which could have offered significant benefits to ordinary people in terms of superior mental health, went down the drain.

Chapter 11 of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life is both the best and the worst chapter of the book. It is the best for the reasons I’ve mentioned in this blog post earlier – about its discussions of risk, and about relationships and marriage in the United States. It is the worst because Peterson unnecessarily lengthens the chapter by using it to put forward his own views on several controversial issues – such as political correctness and masculinity – issues which only have a tenuous relationship with the meat of the chapter, and which only give an opportunity for Peterson’s zillion critics to downplay the book.

Among all these unnecessary digressions in Chapter Eleven, one stood out, possibly because of the strength of the argument and my own relationship with it – Peterson bullshits climate change and environmentalism, claiming that it only seeks to worsen the mental health of ordinary people. As a clinical psychologist, he can be trusted to tell us what affects people’s mental health. However, dismissing something just because it affects people negatively is wrong.

The reason environmentalism and climate change play a negative impact on people’s mental health, in my opinion, is that there is no market based pricing in these aspects. From childhood, we are told that we should “not waste water” or “not cut trees”, because activities like this will have an adverse effect on the environment.

Such arguments are always moral, about telling people to think of their descendants and the impact it will have. The reason these arguments are hard to make is because they need to persuade people to act contrary to their self-interest. For example, one may ask me to forego my self-interest of the enjoyment in bursting fireworks in favour of better air quality (which I may not necessarily care about). Someone else might ask me to forego my self-interest of a long shower, because of “water shortages”.

And this imposition of moral arguments that make us undertake activities that violate our self-interset is what imposes a mental cost. We are fundamentally selfish creatures, only indulging in activities that benefit us (either immediately or much later). And when people force us to think outside this self-interest, it comes with the cost of increased mental strain, which is reason enough for Jordan Peterson to bullshit environmentalism itself.

If you think about this, the reason we need to use moral arguments and make people act against their self-interest for environmental causes is because the market system fails in these cases. If we were able to put a price on environmental costs of activities, and make entities that indulge in such activities pay these costs, then the moral argument could be replaced by a price argument, and our natural self-interest maximising selves would get aligned with what is good for the world.

And while narrowly concerned with the issue of climate change and global warming, carbon taxes are one way to internalise the externality of environmental damage of our activities. And by putting a price on it, it means that we don’t need to think in terms of our everyday activities and thus saves us a “mental cost”. And this can lead to superior overall mental health.

In that sense, the rejection of the carbon tax proposal in Washington State is a regressive move.