We've Lost Something Valuable But Difficult to Quantify

Today I read a story about a 12-year-old Saint Paul boy who was shot and killed by his 14-year-old brother. There are no details yet on how this came to happen (was it accidental, or in anger?), but it was said that the adults in the family didn't know the gun was in the house. If the gun wasn't there at all, obviously, the boy would be alive. Just a few days earlier, another young man in Saint Paul was shot and killed by his friend while the two of them were horsing around with a gun. Again, he would be alive if they had been horsing around without a gun.

Both of these came to mind when I read this on kottke.org today:

Andrew Dessler, a climate scientist at Texas A&M, says that the most likely way people will be impacted by the climate crisis won't be with some big disaster but with a bunch of small changes that add up to something unmanageable.

Let me give you an example of a tiny impact that I just heard about. My wife told me about a new group of members at her gym: active 70-ish-year-olds who used to go on walks around their neighborhood. Due to the unbearable heat in Texas, though, they joined a gym and now walk indoors on treadmills. This story embodies several aspects of climate impacts that everyone should understand.

First, this is an example of non-linear climate impacts. Although temperatures have been rising gradually over the last century, it was only recently that they crossed a critical threshold that made outdoor walks literally unbearable for these people.

Second, this is what adaptation to climate change looks like. Contrary to how it is typically portrayed by climate dismissives, adaptation is not free. These people are paying $50 per month for the gym membership that is an inferior replacement for something they used to get for free: an environment cool enough to walk in.

So these people are worse off financially and not getting as good of an experience as they used to. And they're the lucky ones — they have the opportunity and resources to do this.

There's also the non-monetary costs of adaptation. When it's too hot to go outside during the day, you are a prisoner of air conditioning instead of going outside and getting fresh air and exercise. We've lost something valuable but difficult to quantify.

Some great points here. Reading it made me think of the gun problem here in the US. The focus is often on the immediate damage that guns do (mass shootings, suicides) but there are hundreds of other ways, large and small, in which guns make Americans' lives worse. For many people, the number of guns in this country and the hard-line views held by those who own them add up to a general vibe of feeling unsafe and under threat. For me, it definitely seems like "we've lost something valuable but difficult to quantify" by allowing so many guns to exist in our communities.

The deaths of people like these young boys and men in Saint Paul are the most obvious. Their families are suffering and grieving. But the harder-to-quantify effects are many. A few I can think of immediately:

• The fear of children and school staff every day, whether of mass shooters or smaller scale violence from hand guns brought to school by a student. 
• The substantial increased security cost to hold large public events, which means fewer public events and the decrease in community connection that results. 
• The fear cops have that everyday people will be armed, which ratchets up their violent response even more than it has been when there were fewer guns.
• The suppressing effect on our would-be democratic society when there are hundreds of millions of guns in the hands of people (mostly) on one side of the political spectrum.

Some of those things have direct financial costs and others are more intangible. But they're all negatives. 

As with fossil fuels, the only people who benefit from more guns are the ones who make the guns and bullets, and they have enough money. Let's stop giving it to them.