The problem with Pascal's Wager: which God and thus which set of rituals and rules do you follow? You've got quite a selection to choose from. You go from having a simple Yes/No choice to having thousands of choices.
In the case of action against climate change, the downsides of doing something are minimal compared to the downsides of inaction. It's a much more binary choice than what Pascal put forward.
Not to criticize taxing CO2 emissions (which has a solid case), but there is indeed an analogous dynamic here to Pascal's Wager: just as you ask "which God", one could ask "which emergency?", sampled from the set of events that respectable scientific movements have demanded immediate action on.
In the 70s, for example, one respected movement held that there would be an overpopulation crisis that justified drastic measures to halt the birth rate. There have been similar movements against nuclear power.
Alternatively, if we took immediate action on the crisis global poverty and got everyone up to Western living standards, that would conflict with the goal of reducing our environmental load. (Just as taking Pascal's Wager for God one conflicts with God 2.)
there is indeed an analogous dynamic here to Pascal's Wager: just as you ask "which God", one could ask "which emergency?"
Is it an analogous dynamic if the cure for almost all of the emergencies in the basket is reduction in harmful levels of pollution including inefficient farming/manufacturing/transport methods, noting the associated benefits such as food security that comes with unpolluted waterways in poor villages, not acidifying oceans, not tainting arable land with heavy metals etc? Belief in a certain God among many seems more variable than reduce pollution, aim for zero.
if we took immediate action on the crisis global poverty and got everyone up to Western living standards, that would conflict with the goal of reducing our environmental load
You make an interesting point - the big one is India which needs cheap energy to bring itself up from having no clean running water, no integrated sewerage system and severe poverty to competing with Europe and the Americas who have reaped the benefit of cheap [polluting] energy for a long time and before emissions were taxed.
But I see it as a benefit, at least in the long term, to start from this stage. Just as African countries have benefited from mobile networks and services like M-Pesa money transfer and microfinancing, never having to deal with maintaining an aging wired telecom infrastructure - India could reap the benefits of starting with a peer-to-peer energy network using residential solar, similar to what Germany has implemented. Of course this would need to be supplemented, however using fewer base load power stations than if it were purely centralized energy production.
>Is it an analogous dynamic if the cure for almost all of the emergencies in the basket is reduction in harmful levels of pollution including inefficient farming/manufacturing/transport methods, noting the associated benefits such as food security that comes with unpolluted waterways in poor villages, not acidifying oceans, not tainting arable land with heavy metals etc? Belief in a certain God among many seems more variable than reduce pollution, aim for zero.
But what you really want is a method of weighing the harm of a given amount of pollution against the benefit. "Reduce it" doesn't translate into a heuristic for deciding which uses should be targeted first, and regresses to the original problem of "for which crisis is it okay to emit an additional unit of pollution to emit in service of fighting?"
An obvious difference is that we do have scientific models of global climate change that give us at least some evidence, but we lack any such information for the case of the existence of a god.
