In January 2015, thousands of academic economists will gather in Boston for the Annual AEA Meetings. Dora and I will be there and we will be presenting new papers and discussing other researchers' work. I look forward to speaking to a few hundred friends of mine in the profession. The NY Times reports today that such meetings are selfish and dangerous for the health of the planet.
A bioethicist named Laurie Zoloth (she is the president of the American Academy of Religion) wants to cancel her organization’s conference for one year in order to reduce the globe's carbon footprint.
Am I impressed? Answer = slightly but let's think about the marginal sustainability impact of her well meaning proposal.
For everyone who would have attended her field's annual conference roughly 90% will fly in and flying is carbon intensive but the airplane still would have flown the same route even if the attendees were not on the flight.
The people who attend the sessions will be living in close proximity and walking around the convention center for the 3 days that this "new urbanist" city (the conference) exists for.
Think opportunity cost. The religion scholars who stay home are likely to be driving around in their home communities.
So, I actually would conjecture that the aggregate carbon footprint of holding the conference is lower than if the same people stay home. Again, I'm valuing the carbon footprint from flying at zero because the same planes would have flown even without the conference. I realize that this point can be debated.
I respect that her Society of Intellectuals is "making a statement" but is this a statement? Does the phrase "drop in a bucket" mean much to you? In the big scheme of things, the cumulative emissions of this elite group of scholars is really tiny.
People who know my work know that I'm quite interested in hypocrisy and internal consistency of choice. Here is one of my more highly cited papers on this topic. Greens do walk the walk but I believe it is important to tradeoff costs and benefits and face to face interaction still has value in early 2015!