Graduation Speech Essay You Need to Hear has Climate Response Implications

I think this marvelous Robert Parham essay deserves wide distribution.  It addresses the mis-placed pessimism of students in colleges today.  Parham is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. Witnessing firsthand the growing distress among college students, Parham originally published his essay “To the Class of 2024: You Are All Diseased,” in The Free Press.  This post addresses the parallels between his college concerns and the environmental movement.

The opinions expressed in this post do not reflect the position of any of my previous employers or any other organization I have been associated with, these comments are mine alone.

To the Class of 2024

I recommend reading the essay but will summarize it here.  The introduction states:

If you are graduating from college this year, I suspect you’re not too familiar with George Carlin. So before you become inflamed about the (intentionally) harsh title, let me tell you I plagiarized it from Carlin, who was one of the best American comedians of the last 100 years. His show You Are All Diseased is available on YouTube, and it is so good that I was willing to start by alienating you a bit just to plug it here. You’re welcome. It is especially recommended if you’re in any kind of altered state of mind.

Speaking of states of mind: I’m worried about yours.

Rates of anxiety, depression, and suicide among people your age in the U.S. are skyrocketing. I myself lost a student to suicide a few years ago—an experience I wish on no one. I’m here to tell you that I think it’s partly our (your professors’) fault. We, along with others, have been feeding you a distorted view of the world and your place in it, and I think this has caused a considerable part of the existential angst you all feel.

But I’m not just aiming to point fingers.

I want to lay a vision of the present and future, which I genuinely believe and yet know many of you don’t share. After all, exposing you to unfashionable ideas is a core part of a healthy education. My deeper hope in doing so is to start a conversation on changing this sad state of affairs and to get you on your way to a happy and healthy life. Isn’t that what commencements are all about?

The thrust of the article is that today’s college students are deeply pessimistic about the future despite, as he argues, the fact that human beings have never had it so good. 

Based on every objective measure of well-being—safety, health, wealth—if you are a college student in America today you are better off and wealthier than the king of England was 300 years ago. You have better access to education, entertainment, leisure, and healthcare. You have cleaner water and more abundant food. You have a significantly safer and longer life. And you have access to all of the world’s knowledge, including this piece, in the palm of your hand.

Then he states: “Which then raises the question: Why? Why is it that “everything is amazing and nobody is happy”? He explains that the reason why we don’t think of ourselves as better off than the King of England:

We economists call this phenomenon “relative wealth concerns” or “keeping up with the Joneses.” These are just fancy terms to describe a simple psychological fact: we are constantly busy comparing ourselves to our peer group, and feel bad when we fall short in that comparison.

He goes on to describe our peer group:

“Peer group” is an essential term in the previous sentence. No one cares that they’re enormously better off than their grandparents; they just care that they’re worse off than Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk. You don’t feel wealthy, despite the fact the median human lives on the equivalent of $5,000 per year. Yes, you read that right. Imagine if you lived in the U.S., but only spent $5K a year at current U.S. prices, and you’ve imagined the life of the median human today. Your “peer group” isn’t humanity; it’s social media influencers and billionaires, and you are deeply unsatisfied when comparing your lives to theirs.

You live in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, yet you feel economic anxiety. The late Charlie Munger summarized it succinctly: “The world is not driven by greed. It’s driven by envy.” And in this era of instantaneous communication networks and social media, envy has been put into hyperdrive.

Professor Parham is not a fan of the emphasis on equity or fairness.  He argues that envy is no longer a deadly sin, it has become the fairness virtue.  He points out fairness issues for American college graduates relative to the rest of the world:

The world is unfair. Deeply so. It’s just that you’re the lucky ones. You won the birth lottery.

In a truly fair world, any dollar you make or spend above $5,000 a year would instead be given to someone else. Maybe a poor Kenyan, or Bangladeshi, or Indian. But that’s not the kind of fairness and equity anyone talking about “fairness” and “equity” around you seeks.

You’ve been lied to. You’ve been told, by the media, social networks, and not least your professors, that this fantastic world we live in is evil. Not only that, you’ve been told it’s your fault. You’re too racist, too greedy, too white, too privileged, not sufficiently attuned to the plight of the marginalized. It is not enough to be non-racist, they say, you must be anti-racist. Anything less than that, and you’re complicit in evil. Some of you are better by default due to some accidents of birth; some of you are worse. Small wonder you feel suffocated, anxious, and depressed.

Any human, weighed down with this responsibility and guilt, would be just as down. The cognitive dissonance of being told colonialism is evil, American slavery is uniquely evil, that wealth and the markets that enable it are evil, while going to school at a top-tier U.S. institution built on “Monocan land” using slave labor would incapacitate anyone.

He includes an informative description of the concept of money and how that creates a transaction where both parties become better off because of it.  As society has evolved away from one-on-one transactions between people, now the transactions are between people and corporations.  People earn money and can purchase what they need and want.  He explains that when that happens: “We’re better off, the company we bought things from is better off, its employees and suppliers are better off, and so are their employees and suppliers. But in colleges today capitalism is frequently described as evil:

Without fail, at the end of the class a few students tell me that the content of the course was diametrically opposed to what they had been taught so far. Prior, they had class discussions about the exploitative nature of the market system and its inherent unfairness; the evil and greed of corporations; and the fight of exploited workers against oppressive capitalists.

In response he states:

I point out to them that these paradigms imply a zero-sum world in which wealth can only be created by taking it from others, whereas they live in the positive-sum world of markets, in which wealth is created by exchange. Markets have deposited a magic wand in their hands, which allows them to freeze moments in time, observe what is currently happening in foreign lands, and conjure loved ones for a face-to-face conversation out of thin air. Kings would have given half their kingdom for such a wand, but now anyone can have it for the low, low price of $69.99 per month. Or about five hours of student work. This is how we got wealthy.

He goes on to say:

My students arrive at my class steeped in zero-sum ideas, in which one person’s gain must be another person’s loss, and the only way to get a thing is by “oppressing” it from someone else. Then, they are shocked to hear heretical ideas about a world in which wealth is created, not stolen, and human interactions can be win-win and make all of us immensely well-off. The dissonance is severe, and they’re unsure how to deal with all the shame and guilt accumulated by years of accused “oppression.”

I hence want to close by telling you, the class of 2024: it’s not your fault. You are not evil. Being white / black / privileged / downtrodden / well-educated / illiterate / wealthy / poor / healthy / sickly / cisgendered / non-conforming does not make you bad (or good, for that matter). The sins of your forefathers are not your own. You did nothing wrong by being born. Yes, aiming to improve the state of human affairs is noble, but choosing instead to study, play games, and make out with the cute person you have your eye on does not make you bad. It makes you a normal, healthy human being. And no one seems to bother to tell you that. So there, I said it. You are not subject to the “original sin.” Go forth and have a happy and healthy life. There is still (much) room for progress, but things are currently better than they’ve ever been, and improving fast.

Or as Carlin put it, in his direct way: “Life gets really simple once you cut out all the bullshit they teach you in school.”

Environmental justice Parallels

I believe the environmental parallel is related to the “zero-sum idea”.  The common perception is that emissions from a power plant or a factory are exploitive and come at the expense of harm to others, especially environmental justice communities. The concept that, within limits, emissions have positive-sum benefits is ignored.

No where is this dissonance more pronounced than the environmental justice movement.   The EPA defines environmental justice:

“Environmental justice” means the just treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of income, race, color, national origin, Tribal affiliation, or disability, in agency decision-making and other Federal activities that affect human health and the environment so that people:

• are fully protected from disproportionate and adverse human health and environmental effects (including risks) and hazards, including those related to climate change, the cumulative impacts of environmental and other burdens, and the legacy of racism or other structural or systemic barriers; and
• have equitable access to a healthy, sustainable, and resilient environment in which to live, play, work, learn, grow, worship, and engage in cultural and subsistence practices

The difference between zero-sum and positive-sum environmental approach is in the definition of “disproportionate and adverse human health and environmental effects”.  The environmental justice position I hear most often is a demand for no health and environmental effects.

In that regard I think my career is an instructive positive-sum example.  When I completed my master’s degree in 1976 the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was only six years old and corporate America was just coming to grips with environmental management.  I worked for five years for three different consulting companies that did contract work for EPA.  In 1981 I started to work for Niagara Mohawk Power Corporation a vertically integrated electric utility.  The environmental progress since I started working in the New York electric generating business has been astounding but is ignored by environmental justice activists.

One of my responsibilities at Niagara Mohawk was to prepare and submit emissions data to regulatory agencies.  I recently found annual emissions data back to 1984.  One of our facilities was the coal-fired Dunkirk Generating Station in Western NY.  The facility had two 100 MW units and two newer 200 MW units.  In 1984 the facility emitted 54,709 tons of SO2 at a rate of 3.26 lb per mmBtu and 10.020 tons of NOx at a rate of 0.598 lb per mmBtu.  Over my time supporting the station, they installed controls for SO2, NOx, particulates, and mercury.   In my last year with responsibilities for reporting at the station (2010) the facility emitted 7,380 tons of SO2 at a rate of 0.505 lb per mmBtu and 2,342 tons of NOx at a rate of 0.160 lb per mmBtu.  Since then, the facility has been shut down.  In 2023, the total electric generating sector emissions in the entire state of New York were 645 tons of SO2 at a rate of 0.003 lb per mmBtu and 7,488 tons of NOx at a rate of 0.030 lb per mmBtu.  That is astounding progress.

Despite this tremendous reduction, environmental justice activists carry on about the egregious harm caused by power plants and claim numerous health effects from existing sources.  However, if their health effect claims were true then there should be enormous observable improvements from the improvements made since 1984.  I have not seen any such analysis. The other counter narrative is that the reason for the improvement is that natural gas became the cheapest fuel source and that occurred because of the fracking revolution that the environmental justice activists love to hate.

Discussion

My takeaway from Parham’s speech is that things are much better than portrayed by many academics.  “There is still (much) room for progress, but things are currently better than they’ve ever been, and improving fast.”  That sentence sums up the status of the environment in the US.  There are environmental issues that still need to be addressed.  However, the health of the environment has never been better in this country.  There has been tremendous improvement over the last 40 years.

My concern is that as is the case with the academic focus on pessimism there are those who ignore environmental improvements and focus on current much smaller environmental risks all the while ignoring the benefits of a reliable electric system.  The New York City peaking power plant issue is a prime example.  Even though direct emissions from those plants comply with all existing environmental regulations, activists claim that they are the “most egregious energy-related example of what environmental injustice means today.”   The activists paid a consultant to give them that answer and have been promoting the issue ever since.  However, the presumption of egregious harm is based on selective choice of metrics, poor understanding of air quality health impacts, and ignorance of air quality trends.  In fact, analyses for the New York Cap-and-Invest have shown that was that the inhalable particulate emissions claimed as a particular problem are primarily from other sources.

Nonetheless, environmental justice activists are demanding that those facilities shut down.  This is a problem because we do not have a zero-emissions technology that can replace them and maintain the same levels of reliability.  If they are shut down too soon then blackouts are inevitable that will cause real impacts rather than the conjured impacts used to argue for the shutdowns.  Their efforts would be better served by promoting inhalable particulate emission reductions from diesel trucks.  Environmental justice advocates are arguing that would be appropriate but imagine that a zero-emissions solution is necessary.  There could be a tremendous improvement using existing technology that only needs development of infrastructure but compressed natural gas has emissions and the natural gas used would be fracked so this practical solution is ignored.

Conclusion

Parham’s essay stands on its own as a great message for today.  The difference between a zero-sum society in which wealth can only be created by taking it from others, and a positive-sum society in which wealth is created by exchange is being improperly ignored.  Worse academics are promoting the zero-sum concept to the detriment of their students.

In my opinion, I think there are zero-sum versus positive-sum environmental parallels.  The United States has developed a comprehensive set of environmental standards and there have been unquestioned overall environmental quality improvements over the last several decades.  The sum of benefits and costs are positive.  Regarding emissions in isolation, focusing only on the negatives and disregarding any benefits is an approach like the zero-sum concept of wealth. It creates an unnecessarily pessimistic outlook, hinders growth, and could lead to unintended consequences.