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It's true that climate change is an unprecedented problem so it's not surprising that it's so difficult to address.

Dale Jamieson

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Dale Jamieson
Age: 77
Born: 1947
Born: October 21
Academic
Jurist
University Teacher
Sioux City
Iowa
Problem
Unprecedented
Address
Addresses
Surprising
Climate
Difficult
True
Change

More quotes by Dale Jamieson

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Since we're not very good at something as basic as controlling our reproduction, life is really bad for more people than ever before.
Dale Jamieson
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We think of history as another specialization, like philosophy of language, rather than as something that informs everything we do and think.
Dale Jamieson
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Philosophers (and probably most intellectuals) are more interested in pursuing what they see as the logical implications of their theories than they are in paying attention to the shlumpy diversity of defensible values that people actually have, and then trying to figure out how these might be negotiated in the life of an agent or community.
Dale Jamieson
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When I first started studying climate change back in the 1980s, I was struck by how difficult it was be for people to understand this issue.
Dale Jamieson
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Ethical systems are fundamentally conservative and primarily directed towards regulating interactions within communities.
Dale Jamieson
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The Enlightenment dream is a good one. The idea that people should rationally appreciate their place in nature, assess threats and possibilities, and regulate their behavior in response is inspiring.
Dale Jamieson
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The Enlightenment is not a nightmare, nor is it something that comes easily to us. It is an aspiration - and a good one!
Dale Jamieson
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In this era of globalization we are witnessing struggles within individual states about what their identity and interests consist in.
Dale Jamieson
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A great deal of our math, science, philosophy, and everyday behavior presupposes that stability and equilibria are the default states, and everything else involves some perturbation. This is a mental model, a conceptual frame, a tacit belief, a presupposition - whatever you want to call it.
Dale Jamieson
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In trying to develop an impartial, expansive ethic we are trying to get ethical systems to do something which they did not evolve in order to do. This doesn't mean that it can't be done or that we shouldn't try to expand the reach of our ethical frameworks, only that there are reasons to be skeptical about its success.
Dale Jamieson
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Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as reduce suffering) and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.
Dale Jamieson
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The only way major change in environmental policy is going to happen, the only way, is if there is a very strong, very active popular movement that demands it and such a movement would be unparalleled because it would be a popular movement that says, Raise our taxes so that we change our behavior.
Dale Jamieson
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Some philosophers have begun writing sympathetically about predator elimination as a way of reducing animal suffering. From an environmental perspective this is somewhere between naïve and potentially disastrous.
Dale Jamieson
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Many environmental questions are in a deep way philosophical, despite our penchant for treating them as if they were only technological, economic, or whatever.
Dale Jamieson
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Climate change involves behaviors that are individually negligible, whose impacts go far beyond the spatial and temporal constraints that define our sense of community.
Dale Jamieson
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The erosion of agency has consequences for our politics. As a result of all this, the fundamental ethical challenge of the anthropocene is the recovery of agency, or alternatively to come to terms with its loss and to understand how to go on.
Dale Jamieson
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When it comes to climate change it's all the usual barriers: greed, mendacity, ignorance, short-sightedness and so on, manifest in the extreme power of corporations, the weakness of government, and the indifference of citizens.
Dale Jamieson
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Climate change is not going to be prevented. It's not even going to be mitigated to the degree a rational person would want. As a result we're going to have to live with climate change and try to reduce the extent and rate of change as much as possible. This is not an inspiring or sexy project.
Dale Jamieson
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If you have a flat, fixed view of state interest then it is difficult to understand why some states adopt aggressive climate change policies, even when that risks economically disadvantaging them, and other states do not even when it would be in their economic interests to do so.
Dale Jamieson
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If we're interested in the continuation of the human experiment we need to focus on resilience and coping with change (whether natural or anthropogenic) rather than living as if God or nature has given us a nice, orderly, calm, Babbit-like existence.
Dale Jamieson