Are Personal Actions a One Billion Ton Opportunity?:
With simple, inexpensive, changes in behavior, it is easy to cut our carbon footprints. On a personal level, these cuts can be significant, saving a ton or more of carbon annually. But on a larger scale, in the face of private jets and industrial agriculture, coal power and a hundred other things, can small changes in our everyday life really have an impact. Our inner cynic, Matt Eisenson writes, says no.
But, along with NRDC, Eisenson is taking action to defeat that pessimistic thread and prove, finally, that individuals have the power to make a difference.
Simple Steps is a program in which participants track their carbon expenditures. The goal is not to compete against one another, but instead to work together to eliminate one billion tons of carbon emissions in a year.
I have to admit being deeply conflicted over such programs.
Because of the seriousness of the climate chaos situation, I feel obligated to take personal action to reduce my CO2 emissions. I hypermile my Scion xA (which I drive as little as possible), minimize our use of heating fuel (even by hardy Rochester standards, our house is cool in the winter), we zone heat, I’ve insulated our hot water pipes and water heater, sealed our heating ducts, waged a near-maniacal war on electricity vampires, pay extra for 100% green electricity (from wind and small hydro), recycle everything we can, eliminate wasteful consumption (like bottled water), etc.
I don’t believe for a nanosecond that by taking these actions my wife and I are ensuring our nieces will inherit a better (or less bad) world. The numbers aren’t within orders of magnitude of suggesting we could have that impact on our global situation.
Similarly, I have no delusions whatsoever that enough other Americans will follow our lead to make a real difference, at least not until the economics of consumption patterns change dramatically. I hate to put it this bluntly, but there is virtually zero chance that a sizable portion of mainstream consumers in the US will make significant “lifestyle changes” for any reason other than brute economics. That force can come from the pull of incentives or the push of taxes, but it will almost surely have to be the source of motivation.
Am I being too pessimistic? I don’t think so. New Orleans being drowned, and the constant talk about the link between tropical storm frequency and/or strength and global warming didn’t change minds. Europe suffering 37,451 heat deaths in 2003 didn’t do it. Increasing water woes of various types–rising sea levels, droughts, reduced electricity output at thermoelectric plants–aren’t doing it. The increasingly strident warnings about ocean acidification are barely registering with my fellow greenies, let alone the mainstreamers.
There’s only one thing I can imagine that might have the kind of galvanizing effect we need without being an unmistakable sign that we’re so screwed only an all-out emergency effort could do any good. That’s a collapse of a truly immense piece of the West Antarctic ice shelf that could raise the worldwide sea level by 6 to 12 inches over a very short period, perhaps just a few years. That would cause so much pain for so many people around the world that it would be one of those rare events that turns the pathetic US media into a force for good. We’d have wall-to-wall coverage of the impacts, and genuine experts, including James Hansen, Mark Serreze, Gavin Schmidt, Konrad Steffen, et al. would be pressed into service for interviews and commentary, and finally (finally!) the media might understand that climate change deniers should be relegated to the same portion of the cutting room floor as the Holocaust deniers and the people who think Elvis is working the midnight to 8AM shift at a 7-11 in Memphis.
In other words, even at the horrific human and economic cost that such a rise in sea level would trigger, it might still be preferable to our current business as usual approach, where we continue to lock in ever more climate change because we’re too greedy or myopic or anti-science or lazy or complacent to do what science tells us we should out of nothing more than enlightened self-interest.
All of which brings me to the uncomfortable question: Should we be “hoping for” such an event if we’re convinced it would be the only way to force us to take action? What we “hope for” is meaningless, of course, and just as meaningless as the relentless desire on the part of the climate change deniers for the universe to behave in accordance with their views or my attempts to reduce my personal carbon footprint.
I honestly don’t know the answer to that one.
I agree, Lou. I hope for a tipping point event to raise awareness. Otherwise, as I’ve told my kids, the next 30 years will be like a disaster movie running in perpetual slow motion. And living as we have been accustomed will begin to slowly erode year on year.
As for individual action, in some ways they actually make it worse. I’m not saying don’t conserve, because you also save money and it’s the right thing to do. But every bit of energy you save, every plastic bottle you don’t buy, makes it that much cheaper for those who waste. As long as the economy is based on cranking out the maximum product at the minimum cost, and ignoring externalities, this equation will hold.
A personal note: The broken US immigration system has caused me to spew about an additional 20 tons of C02 over the past 2 years. Since my wife cannot travel to the US until the process completes, I have made five long haul round-trip flights to Australia in the past 2 years, with probably 3 more to go (for a total of 8 flights or 32 metric tons of carbon released) before she gets approved. All but two of those flights would have been eliminated if not for their stringent post-9/11 requirements. And we see that none of that kept a bomber with a radical Islamist ideology from getting a 2 year multiple-entry visa in 2008.
That aspect of conservation–my being good makes it cheaper for others to be bad–is one of those perverse side effects of our situatoin that makes my head hurt. (And being an economist there’s not much along those lines that does make my head hurt; after a while ou become immune.)
“Slow motion disaster movie” is probably a very accurate description of where we’re headed. Little by little, coastal cities and farmland will flood, droughts and heat waves will get worse, etc., and we’ll never hear the ringing of the alarm bell thanks to the steady drumbeat of creeping impacts. Once again, it’s a timing issue–the rate of change is slow enough compared to our collective attention span that it doesn’t register as an emergency. If climate change looked like a giant, hungry tiger we would have taken serious steps to stop it decades ago.
I think a SSLR is probably going to happen within the next 10yrs. However, it will be too late by then. It probably is too late even now.
Wonderful post, Lou. It really resonates.
1) In a recent post I’ve posited that perhaps the only realistic way out at this late hour is through some kind of “ecotechnic dictatorship” that harnesses the administrative and coercive power of the state in a two-pronged mission to 1) preserve as much as possible of the remaining biocapacity and 2) upgrade the embodied technology in our industrial civilization to a sustainable bases. This will require short-term and medium-term disruptions and a drop in consumption that are very unlikely to be tolerated by the electorate. Furthermore, left to business as usual, we’ll get dictatorships before the crash anyway, but probably ones that couldn’t care less about the long-term future and will instead use coercive measures to further tax the future to support the present interests of the corporate groups behind it. Soon after, the Crash.
So another ethical question you may want to consider – bearing in mind the general apathy on the part of “free” societies to doing anything, is it moral to hope for the coming of an “ecotechnic dictatorship”?
2) Another part of our dilemma. I yammer on about ecotechnic dictatorship. You hope for dramatic climatic disasters to arouse the people from slumber, like in Crichton’s novel State of Fear. ;) Let’s hope not too many deniers are reading this, it would certainly make their day in terms of propaganda!
3) I probably have a low carbon footprint by average US standards, though not through virtue of any sacrifices that I make but simply because atm I have no reason to have a car or to fly anywhere. I suspect my most substantial contributions may come from skiing trips. But I also know that (hopefully) when I start making real money, my carbon footprint will most likely skyrocket; it’s not that I have any wish to be a hedonist, but nor do I particularly wish to self-tax my quality of life, when it will never benefit me personally and 95%+ of the population either totally doesn’t care or merely pays lip service in their own personal lives. And I doubt I’m exceptionally rare in holding this viewpoint either. Meh… perhaps just another argument for ecotechnic dictatorship.
Forgive me, paulm, but what is an SSLR?
On the other point that we’re witnessing a slow motion disaster movie, I agree. At least, on the time scale of the self-centered and myopic human mind. From a geological and paleoclimatological perspective, the rate at which this is occurring is likely unprecedented outside of the climate change wrought by an extraterrestrial impact event. As I like to say to those who will listen, we are in effect taking a massive carbon sink (coal and oil) that took many millions of years to form and dumping it all back into the atmosphere in a blink. A rather scary experiment.
I’m less optimistic. As you said, if 35,000 deaths doesn’t prompt Europe to do something, what will? It’s sad to say but if your grandparent’s death doesn’t do it, I don’t think 35 million deaths in conveniently distant lands will make the difference, for the same reason that fund-raising for one local child in need of chemotherapy is much easier than raising the same amount of money to provide 10,000 children in Africa with clean water. And I also suspect that the switch will be from we-don’t-need-to-act to it’s-too-late-to-act and it’ll be pretty much instant because I don’t think those who benefit from climate change denial are going to give up when the evidence is at everyone’s feet; they’re just going to change the argument. Like others, I don’t fly, I don’t drive, etc. etc. but I agree that (a) the number of people doing this will remain insignificant until economics forces the collective hand and (b) until this happens there’s not really much point in my behaving in this way. And because of this it’s not immediately clear to me that it’s rational not to drive or not to fly or not to do any of the other things I don’t do. Solving climate change seems to be one of the less likely outcomes of the next few decades and I’m not sure there’s any virtue in not driving other the hope that by acting like this, I’ll help avert climate change. I’d like to think my lifestyle does have some benefit beyond itself – don’t we all – but I’m not really convinced that it does.
Great post, Lou, and so eloquent that I have nothing to add.