Earth Day, 2024, April 22

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Environmental researcher Tony Walker: “When the cost is a disincentive to do an activity, people change their behaviour.” She was talking about reusable bags when shopping. 

            It’s a bit disconcerting to speak of people—or to be spoken of—as if one were a member of an enormous flock of sheep. It implies that reason alone won’t be enough to get individuals to break habits, to cooperatively join in a campaign to save the planet, for instance. But we need only look to ourselves to see how tenaciously we cling to present patterns of behaviour, even when our reason tells us the sloppy use and disposal of plastics, for instance, is like a poison to sea life on which so many people depend for food.

             It’s this tendency in human nature that makes Pigovian punishment/reward incentives like the carbon tax necessary. When tobacco-caused lung cancers overburdened oncological healthcare and cost thousands of lives annually, tobacco was heavily taxed, as is liquor. When I drive sparingly, car pool, park my fossil-fuel burning pick-up, my carbon tax rebate exceeds my travel costs, a Pigovian incentive reward. If I make no changes, the tax punishes.

            Granted, these incentives/disincentives must be reasonably applied: until alternate energy sources reach full development, goods must be transported, people need to get to work, food must be grown using the means at hand.

            Isaiah 53:6 says, “We all, like sheep, have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way ….” The simile is problematic given the little I know about shepherding. The most basic impulse of sheep is to flock, to be and move with their collective. It’s not to be individualistic, to “go each astray.” But for our purposes, Isaiah’s point about “going our own way” becomes prophetic about the tension between individual rights and responsibility to “the flock.”

Pigovian incentives are like sheepdogs—to be more crass, possibly, than necessary. They bring us up short when we “stray,” when we cater for our own pleasure and convenience without considering the well being of our flock.

         It’s no surprise that sheep hate dogs. But a seasoned shepherd will tell you that without them, it’s not the “each straying” that poses the greatest danger, but the destruction of the entire flock if it should follow an “each” over a cliff.  

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