Hobson's World

Public unrest over the TSA has finally boiled over. As someone who hated the TSA long before it was fashionable, it's been nice to see the general public finally voicing some outrage. Absurd that it took naked scanners and crotch-grabbing to stir us into action, but still nice. Please, continue to be angry with the TSA, and maybe someday we'll bring that whole farcical organization down upon itself. But that's not really my job here. My job is to explain to you that there are a lot of other things to be angry about, too.

Hobson, the story goes, operated a large stable with horses available for let. One could pay to use a horse from his stable, but you were not free to select any horse you liked. You could have the horse currently up for rotation, or you could shove off. This probably worked quite well for Hobson, ensuring that his most popular horses did not become overworked. At any rate, he managed some small measure of immortality; a "Hobson's Choice" is any choice where the only options are accepting all the terms, or none at all. There's nothing inherently bad about these types of choices. But what if Hobson's stable was the only one in town? And if horses were so heavily used that access to one was no longer a luxury? And what if his rotation wasn't a fair FIFO system, but something more sinister, like giving the worst horses to those least able to complain?

Hobson, the medieval stable master, would have found himself right at home on the internet. Whether you realize it or not, every trip through cyberspace is riddled with Hobson's choices. It starts at the plug in the wall; if you want anything coming down your wires you must agree to the conditions put forward by one of a handful or fewer ISPs available to you. Then almost every website you visit has a Terms of Service (I've touched on these before). And for every service you use, even the most basic like email, you've checked off your assent to a massive User Agreement. There's almost nowhere to hang your hat that isn't fenced in with thousands of words of legalese defining exactly what you are allowed to do. You don't often think about the presence of all this contractual weight, but it's there, every time you bring up a browser.

What's really appalling about all these terms is how much they take away and how little they offer. Most ISPs, if they so chose, could give you no connection at all, for as long as they pleased, and continue to bill you for it. The provider's side of these agreements is legal ass-covering, allowing them to give as little service as they please and still be within the terms of the contract, protected from litigation.

Here's Comcast stipulating that they can install software on any device you connect to their service (i.e. your computer), and that they are not responsible for any damage they cause by doing this (emphasis mine):

Customer Equipment consists of software or services that you elect to use in connection with the Services or Comcast Equipment (the “Customer Equipment”). You agree to allow us and our agents the rights to insert cable cards and other hardware in the Customer Equipment, send software and/or “downloads” to the Customer Equipment and install, configure, maintain, inspect and upgrade the Customer Equipment and Comcast Equipment.

Comcast User Agreement, Section 5.b

Comcast has no responsibility for the operation or support, maintenance, or repair of any Customer Equipment including, but not limited to, Customer Equipment to which Comcast or a third party has sent software or “downloads.”

Comcast User Agreement, Section 6.b.1

In case that's not enough, here's Comcast indemnifying themselves against anything short of gross negligence, and claiming that even in that case you cannot be entitled to more than $500 (emphasis mine):

CUSTOMER EQUIPMENT MAY BE DAMAGED OR SUFFER SERVICE OUTAGES AS A RESULT OF THE INSTALLATION, SELF-INSTALLATION, USE, INSPECTION, MAINTENANCE, UPDATING, REPAIR, AND REMOVAL OF COMCAST EQUIPMENT, CUSTOMER EQUIPMENT AND/OR THE SERVICES. EXCEPT FOR GROSS NEGLIGENCE OR WILLFUL MISCONDUCT, NEITHER COMCAST NOR ANY OF ITS AFFILIATES, SUPPLIERS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, OR CONTRACTORS SHALL HAVE ANY LIABILITY WHATSOEVER FOR ANY DAMAGE, LOSS, OR DESTRUCTION TO THE CUSTOMER EQUIPMENT. IN THE EVENT OF GROSS NEGLIGENCE OR WILLFUL MISCONDUCT BY COMCAST, SUPPLIERS, EMPLOYEES, AGENTS, OR CONTRACTORS, WE SHALL PAY AT OUR SOLE DISCRETION FOR THE REPAIR OR REPLACEMENT OF THE DAMAGED CUSTOMER EQUIPMENT UP TO A MAXIMUM OF $500. THIS SHALL BE YOUR SOLE AND EXCLUSIVE REMEDY RELATING TO SUCH ACTIVITY.

Comcast User Agreement, Section 10

Meanwhile, your side of the terms may contain any number of constrictions on what you are allowed to do. Many create licensing terms that cede everything you create to the control of the company, to use however they please. Here's Facebook:

For content that is covered by intellectual property rights, like photos and videos ("IP content")... you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook ("IP License").

Facebook ToS, Section 1

Notice that they may license your content out to others if they wish. To Facebook's credit, they no longer claim the license to be "perpetual" and "irrevocable". They briefly added those terms in 2009, and backed off after facing considerable backlash.

Many of these documents state that the terms may change at any time, with no warning, and that your continued use of the service will be bound by these new terms. Here's Comcast again (emphasis mine):

Subject to applicable law, we have the right to change our Services, Comcast Equipment and rates or charges, at any time with or without notice. We also may rearrange, delete, add to, or otherwise change programming or features or offerings contained in the Services, including, but not limited to, content, functionality, hours of availability, customer equipment requirements, speed, and upstream and downstream rate limitations. If we do give you notice, it may be provided on your monthly bill, as a bill insert, e-mail, in a newspaper or other communication permitted under applicable law. If you find a change in the Service(s) unacceptable, you have the right to cancel your Service(s). However, if you continue to receive Service(s) after the change, this will constitute your acceptance of the change.

Comcast User Agreement, Section 4

Then, of course, are the terms that are simply absurd. When Grinnell College rolled out their new alumni network, John Stone noticed that The Loggia Terms and Conditions disallowed, among other things:

Reproducing and storing data in a retrieval system (electronic or mechanical)

From a technical standpoint, one cannot view a webpage without storing and reproducing data locally, making it impossible to actually use the service and still be in compliance with this rule.

To do even the most mundane tasks online, you are forced to relinquish a great number of rights, but in return you receive absolutely nothing except the optimistic hope that the company will provide something to you. You are signing a contract for empty air, and if you're lucky the company will choose to bestow upon you some favors. If these are legally viable is a bit of an open question. Most notably, these agreements could be considered contracts of adhesion and may be unenforceable due to the doctrine of unconscionability. Vagaries of the law aside, it should be apparent that this type of agreement, wielded without oversight, is morally wrong.

At first blush, the TSA situation seems far removed from that inflicted on us by private companies. After all, the government is the one entity that can compel us to obey certain rules, whether we choose them or not. You don't get to opt out of the legal system, even if you want none of the benefits.

But let's examine the TSA's role. Flying is, in the end, a purely voluntary activity. You cannot be compelled to endure an unconstitutional body scan or enhanced patdown if you simply choose not to travel by airplane. Another Hobson's choice. Like many of the others, this choice is a coercive force for many of us. Some people depend on air travel to perform their jobs. Others have no other way to see relatives or friends in far away places. While it's admittedly a middle-class pursuit, air travel is nearly a necessity for many of us who can afford it.

Much of TSA's power, as it turns out, stems from this choice. There has been some bluster during the recent opt-outs about levying a civil fine for leaving the airport after the screening process has begun, but it's unlikely those threats will ever be made good on. And that's a civil fine, the only kind TSA has the authority to level. This fascinating account is written by a man who refused to submit to the new policies as a condition of being allowed through customs. The best part is when actual police offers get involved, officers who have been trained on constitutional rights.

I clarify, “Well, like I said, I’ll do whatever you say is mandatory. If you tell me that you have to touch my balls—“

“—I said no such thing. You’re putting words in my mouth.”

“OK. I apologize. If you say that a pat-down is mandatory, and that as a condition of that pat-down, I may have my genitals brushed against by your hand, even though you don’t want to, I will do that. But only if you say it is mandatory.”

“I’m not going to say that.”

The TSA has no real authority. Their power stems only from the fact that they control access to a service that is nearly ubiquitous and seriously disadvantages those who refuse the terms. So they can present a Hobson's choice, safe in the knowledge that almost everyone will submit. Sound familiar? TSA is nothing more than another abusive monopoly.

Let's take one final step back. I said earlier that a government is the one entity that can compel you to obey certain rules without any agreement on your part. Enter Hobbes (a very different and much more famous man than our titular Hobson). His most enduring idea is that government is a social contract:

I authorise and give up my right of governing myself to this man, or to this assembly of men, on this condition; that thou give up, thy right to him, and authorise all his actions in like manner.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
We give up some of our rights, like the right to beat other people over the head with big sticks, for the goal of living peacefully and prosperously, safe from the constant danger of being beaten over the head with a big stick. Being governed is a voluntary act (let's ignore Hobbes' autocratic leanings for the sake of simplicity), undertaken because it's to our long-term benefit.

Of course, few of us actively take part in any kind of contractual ceremony agreeing to these terms. We fall under the government's jurisdiction by the circumstance of being born where we were born, living where we live. In fact, land ownership is the source of a government's authority. You may decide to "opt out" of the laws of a country, but you should not remain on that country's land and expect to escape punishment. Conversely, if you leave a country's land, you are no longer subject to their laws. Extradition feels like an exception to this rule, but it's merely an agreement between countries. Extradition does not work when the host country refuses to play along.

So! The government controls access to a desirable resource (land). This allows them to require adherence to a stringent set of rules from anyone wishing to gain access. Even if the rules seem unfair, a choice between that or nothing at all leads almost everyone to obey. Hopefully by this point you're drawing your own parallels. That's right, I see governments as nothing more or less than the biggest corporation around, one whose services we all consume. We pay a subscription fee. We reap tangible benefits. All the elements of a contractual agreement are there.

And yet, there's one thing the government offers us that no consumer relationships do: the ability to negotiate. The system is horribly inefficient, riddled with bureaucracy, and easily derailed. But in the end, we the people do get a say in the rules that are applied to us. More importantly, we see the idea of a government that answers to the people as obvious and absolutely necessary. So why don't we apply this same expectation to corporations? Why do we insist that corporations are accountable only to their shareholders, instead of to the collective public whose lives they so deeply affect?

Looking to the future, I don't think the government will be the one to relieve us of our freedoms. Sure, there will be battles. But the Bill of Rights has survived two centuries more or less intact, and I expect it will keep on truckin'. We won't lose our rights at gunpoint. We'll lose them in bits and pieces, so slowly as to be nearly imperceptible. We'll sign them away one after another in the name of new services or free beer or just following the crowd. Technically, they won't be gone, but a right that we are not free to exercise in the most frequented arenas of public discourse isn't much of a right at all.

Epilogue

My slow blogging habits caught up to me once again. I hadn't even started putting this post into words before the furor over the TSA scanners had been totally eclipsed by the Wikileaks controversy. It's a complex affair, and I could write an incredible volume on the details of the various events surrounding Cablegate, but I think I'll leave that to others, and draw two small connections instead.

The intentions of the government towards Wikileaks, as far as we can divine them, are rather serious, and in some ways conflict with what I just said. The organization, of which our government was at least tolerant — perhaps even fond — when it was dishing out leaks from third worlds and no particular friends of ours, has become a thorn in the side of some very powerful interests. The Obama administration seems intent on finding a way to declare Wikileaks' actions illegal, though there seems to be no law that fits. There's no attack on Wikileaks as a whole that isn't a dangerous attack on free speech, and it's being perpetuated by our own government. If this comes to pass, it will be one of the battles I predicted, perhaps a very important one.

In other ways, however, the assault on Wikileaks has made plain for the first time how much power corporations wield over our speech. The threatened legal action has not materialized, and may never come to pass if those in power can't find a good story to tell about why silencing Wikileaks is no cause for concern. In the meantime, however, direct and damaging action has been flowing in from the private sector. In the space of a few days, Wikileaks experienced cutoffs by hosting services, domain name services, and at least four financial services. All of these cited vague "terms of service violations", but there's little reason to doubt that these shutdowns were incited and choreographed by political interests. As Richard Stallman opines, "It is as if we all lived in rented rooms and landlords could evict anyone at a moment's notice."

It remains to be seen whether the government's feud will be derailed by legal protections we have put in place, but there's reason to be optimistic. In the private sector, though, it's been made clear just how great of a blow can be dealt to our freedoms when they become inconvenient to the powerful. We shouldn't need a "use case" for retaining our basic freedoms. For me, idealist notions about the value of freedom for freedom's sake are enough to compel resistance to these Hobson's choices. But if you're of a more pragmatic mindset, I can't think of a better spectre than government and corporations cooperating to stifle political dissent.

Avatar and Fetishizing The Other

Fair warning: This post may contain spoilers. However, I also feel I must point out that the foreshadowing in Avatar is so clumsy that the first half of the movie contains spoilers for the second half. So really, how much damage am I going to do?

So, James Cameron spends a decade working on his opus, and here it is. Truth and beauty in dazzling 3D, right? Wrong. I think this film is rubbish. Worse, I think this film is insidious rubbish that is a pro-establishment screed dressed in sheep's clothing of weak Iraq war metaphor. I think that continued success of rubbish like this adversely affects any hope of achieving a truly tolerant and egalitarian society.

It has already been pointed out that Avatar is another take on the classic white guilt fantasy. But the sci-fi setting gives it a weird undercurrent that I find more even more unsettling. By setting his non-whites as aliens, Cameron accidentally distills all the assumptions Hollywood makes about race, and then forces them into the cold light of day by pursuing an interspecies romance.

The Na'vi are a mish-mash of characteristics from just about every well-known "primitive" culture - feathers like Native Americans, Maori skin markings, African accessorizing (all African people are one big homogeneous tribe, if you didn't know), the hunting habits of Amazon tribes, and so on. This provides the framework for a bland allegory about evil white people - it's like indigenous peoples Malt-O-Meal. In the creation of this hunter-gatherer everyman, Cameron has provided a glimpse into the machinations of ignorant white men's minds.

Neytiri's introduction is as a howling dervish who shoots arrows mid-leap. She embodies the exotic, the mysterious, the untamed. When perturbed, she hisses like a feline (displaying her sharp, animal-like teeth). She views animals as kindred spirits. And see, what makes this a problem is that us white people have this really obnoxious habit of dressing dark-skinned models in animal prints and posing them with animals. We like to portray them as exotic, mysterious, and untamed. When we control the image, they are the Other.




Let's talk about Otherness. The idea started with Hegel, who said that consciousness cannot become self-conscious until it meets another consciousness and learns to define itself as separate from that other. Since then this idea has cropped up time and time again, because it seems to accurately describe a component of our psychology; humans have a tendency to define ourselves in opposition to other humans. Nationalism, racism, sports fans; we love to forge our identities by labeling Them and Us. It's not enough to have just an Us - if we find ourselves in a situation where there is no Them, we will quickly manufacture one.

Now, usually we take the straightforward route and just vilify the Other. Simply bicker over the prophet's cousin, or riot over those immigrants daring to live in "your" country, and get to fighting. But there's another method of oppression at which Americans in particular are becoming very adept. You declare your tolerance for the Other and talk about how much you like Others and how you have all sorts of Other friends. Meanwhile, you continue to marginalize the Other, but you make it subtle. You appropriate bits of their culture, but be sure place them in a one-dimensional box that leaves no room for growth. You pay lip service to equality but don't make any sacrifices of your own. In this way the Other can find no adversary to combat, and you can convince yourself that their failure to better themselves is due to some innate cultural deficiency. This is how we end up with black models dressed in leopard print.

What Cameron has created is the authoritative example of being ignorant and white. Not only is the appearance of the Na'vi built out of superficial elements of human ethnicities, but their entire culture is a slurry of half-baked ideas, the kind an ignorant white guy gets from paging through a National Geographic without bothering to read the articles (they are kinda long, after all). He's actually come up with some ludicrous explanation about neurons in plant matter to take the idea that "native peoples are really in touch with nature" to an extreme that has them literally talking to their ancestors through the trees or something.

There's neotribalism, and then there's this. This is not just yearning for simpler times or showing appreciation for low-impact lifestyles. This is fetishizing the Other. The Na'vi as a people are presented as strange, unknowable, yet utterly desirable. And creepily, Jake Sully plays out in concrete terms the fantasy that Cameron is playing out in the abstract. Sully is so enchanted by the Na'vi that he seeks to know, to possess, to dominate, and he consummates this quest by exerting his mastery over the natural world, hijacking control of the tribe, and having alien sex with Neytiri. And he is the protagonist because this is how ignorant white men understand desire.

We've been analyzing the movie in terms of the racial Other, but in fact the most famous application of Hegel was by Simone de Beauvoir, who applied the concept of the Other in The Second Sex, her book on the status of women:

Thus humanity is male and man defines woman not in herself but as relative to him; she is not regarded as an autonomous being... She is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her; she is the incidental, the inessential as opposed to the essential. He is the Subject, he is the Absolute – she is the Other.

-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

I'd like to argue that the Na'vi are not only racial Others, but collectively they represent the sexual Other, Beauvoir's female.

It's no accident that Neytiri is the only prominent Na'vi in the film. Sure, Tsu'tey is the chief warrior, but he is practically eating out of Sully's hand by the end of the film, despite having spent the entire movie being cuckolded by Sully. He is the weak, ineffectual man next to Sully's raging pillar of testosterone. Neytiri is the only character to display any depth at all, and she is the only one who sees a considerable amount of screentime.

The support of life became for man an activity and a project through the invention of the tool; but in maternity woman remained closely bound to her body, like an animal.

-- Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Neytiri is fierce and capable, yet she displays no volition of her own. There are some weak attempts at connecting her to her land and her people, but she seems to have no personal desires, no ambition or selfishness. She spends the film at the mercy of events around her, captive to her emotions. Her involvement with Sully only further strips her of will - by the climax, she is a Harley babe riding bitch on the gigantic symbol of virility, Toruk, clutched between Sully's manly thighs (but it's okay, she's helping the war effort by cheering).

Sully definitely has the largest... dragon.

Oh sure, she turns Colonel Quaritch into a pincushion at the end. But to what end is his death? The battle is already over; the Na'vi have clearly won. So even the vague desires that Neytiri has expressed for herself - preserving her land and people - are not at stake. The only threat Quaritch poses is to Sully, who he is happily trying to murder. Her sole motivation for killing Quaritch is to save her man, and in fact, this display of devotion is the only real thing Neytiri accomplishes all film. She has cemented her own subjugation.

Now, I'm not saying Cameron tried to make a movie that was obliquely racist and anti-feminist. But he did, and he is as guilty as anyone. His crime is intellectual indolence; using superficial fairy tales instead of seeking any true understanding. Our crime is that we keep throwing money at bullshit like this instead of exploring anything that we might find difficult or uncomfortable. A movie that grosses $77 million in the first weekend is part of our culture, whether we like it or not. And if we can't even stop producing this shit, how are we ever going to flush it out of our system? Why ask ourselves tough questions about equality in this country when we can indulge our white male guilt with useless tripe? It's useless tripe, but in 3D!





Bonus: Now that I've spoiled this movie, allow me to spoil the plot of Avatar 2 as well. The humans come back. This time they just drop the bombs from space. All the Na'vi die. The humans congratulate each other and wonder why they didn't think of that sooner. The End.

Pascal and Global Warming

"Global warming?" I hear you ask. "Why bother? The scientific community has already delivered a verdict." Well, yeah. But big names like George Will are still churning out the occasional piece on how global warming doesn't exist, and while they generally get slammed in certain online circles, the big names aren't losing their jobs. This suggests that a significant portion of the population still likes hearing about how the sea ice is totally not melting at all.

And there is one facet to the global-warming-doesn't-exist camp that I acknowledge as having some merit. This is the argument that we humans don't know shit. Despite all our jetpacks and holograms, there are still a lot of things we don't understand, and how the climate works is by and large one of those things. Meteorology is hard, and you don't have to go farther than the local news to see how poorly we have mastered it. So yeah, the planet's been a bit uncomfortably warm lately, and we're kinda thinking maybe it has something to do with us, but we don't know that. We can't prove it. We can't even prove that cigarettes cause cancer, so of course we can't prove that our dirty habits are causing the North Pole to become the world's biggest EZ-Bake oven.

Take one step more moderate, and you can claim that we don't know what course global warming will take. This is hard to argue against because, well, we don't. Maybe things will level off again and we'll only lose Florida. Maybe the Great Filter will turn out to be something totally unrelated that wipes the floor with us long before we get too warm. Maybe Xenu just bumped into the thermostat dial on his way to the office and is gonna straighten things out as soon as he gets home.

What I'd like to do is advance an argument that doesn't demand wholesale acceptance of global warming. Leave facts and statistics out of it, since there's not much we truly know on the subject. All I ask is that you acknowledge that global warming, in the human-created worldwide-catastrophe sense, is a possibility. The "we don't know" argument works both ways, so it's certainly conceivable that the pinkos are right and we're on the first SUV to Sweatyville, right?

This is where Pascal comes into play. You've probably come across his triangle at some point or another. But never fear, we're not doing math today. Pascal was a well-rounded dude, so besides being a skilled mathematician, he was a bit of a famous philosopher too. He's best known for a theological argument that has since become known as Pascal's Wager. To make short work of it (the hardcore philosophers out there are already wincing), Pascal reasoned as follows:

We don't really know if God exists. But if he does, the stakes are high (eternal life, Hell, all that jazz). And if he doesn't, the believers aren't any worse off than the non-believers - we all cease to exist in the same way. So it's a good gamble to be pious regardless of any proof of God's existence.

I'm not so sure that Pascal's claims of no cost were true - I would argue that the effort of regular church attendance is a cost, not to mention possible financial losses from behaving like a pious Christian rather than an opportunistic capitalist. And since Pascal probably wasn't happy with an entirely risk-return based belief - "I accept Jesus into my heart because it makes good economic sense" might not cut it with St. Peter - you'll be needing to convince yourself that you truly believe, which sounds like a lot of emotion work to me (bam! sociology blindside!). But the reasoning still stands with a non-zero cost - a little bit of piety during one's lifetime doesn't seem like such a sacrifice when compared to an eternity in Hell.

Scott Adams (yes, the author of Dilbert) has taken the wager and run with it in some interesting directions, including the conclusion that we should become peace-loving Muslims. Of course, I have yet to convert (as does Adams), so maybe it's not as convincing as all that, but it's at least a good read. For me, the interesting next step of Adams' musing is this: Can we apply Pascal's argument to other avenues? I don't see why not.

Pascal's argument is dealing with theoretically infinite values, but I am convinced that humans cannot actually conceive of the infinite (that really is a topic for another day). My position is that our conception of infinite is the same as our conception of really, really big. I like Adams' framing of the argument in mathematical terms, because I don't think we have to actually hit infinity for the probability to tilt in our favor. Think about the math that considers what happens when a value is infinite, like limits or Big O. It's all couched in terms of "as x approaches infinity" because all we need is for x to get big enough that the numbers behave in a predictable way. We can't actually model infinity in math, but once we see a definite trend, that last step is easy to infer. This isn't math we're doing here (trust me), but I argue that we can approach it the same way. If a reward is large enough, and the costs small enough, we can apply Pascal's wager to it.

Sure, if you're already being a pedant about it, I'm bet you could trot out some claims about the types of logic involved. But frankly, if you're using phrases like "epistemic probability," I think you're already missing the point. Pascal's argument is just numbers. Adams gets this, and it's what helps him hit some interesting points without sounding like a pretentious windbag. The strength of the argument lies in pointing out some very big numbers and some not-so-big numbers, and from there any bookie could tell you which horse to bet on.

So, the argument:

If global warming exists, preventing it earns us the reward of continued existence. Worst case scenario: if the Earth keeps warming up, it's going to stop supporting human life sooner or later. We're remarkably fragile creatures, and our technological prowess will only get us so far, especially when we will have to cope with not only climate change but all the wars, famines, and tempests that spring up as a result. We'll probably snap and bomb each other into oblivion long before the last corn crop fails, but the end result is the same - we cease to exist, Darwin declares us the weakest link and sends us home. The water bears trundle along happily, and the universe quickly forgets about us.

What are the costs of preventing global warming?

• We might have to start driving cars that get more than 8mpg. Yes, I know you love your Expedition.
• We should probably insulate our houses our houses and use fluorescent bulbs. Quickly recouping your investment in monthly utility savings is a big sacrifice, I'm aware.
• We'll have to research and improve alternative sources of energy. People, we're going to need to do this eventually, because the oil is going to run out, warming or not. I don't see why getting a head start on this is such a bad idea.

The costs come down to this: we'll have to spend some money now. There are some more factors that mitigate this further, especially for Western society - we'll be creating local jobs, we'll be reducing our dependence on other nations, and so on. I'm not qualified to judge the strengths of all these arguments, nor do I feel the need to. I'm satisfied that the costs of reasonable action on this front are not ridiculous or unachievable. We don't have to sacrifice any sons or clean the Augean stables, so I think this is doable.

So in one corner, we have a significant but manageable financial investment. In the other corner, we have the possibility of extinction of the species. Even if this possibility is somewhat remote by your reckoning, it's there, and it's a near-infinite value. Balanced against the low cost, this is a wise investment by the Pascal/Adams metric.

Even if you don't think global warming exists, you should still buy a hybrid. Or, y'know, bike to work.