Much has been made of the question of how we can reduce our individual impact on climate change. We all of us want to make a difference. If we individually consume less, surely we're doing our part to save the planet.
But I really think the premise is wrong, because in an interconnected world, none of us can be meaningfully separated from the whole.
Consider the number of degrees of separation between you and anyone else on the planet. This might seem like a pretty hard thing to assess given how many of us there are and in some pretty far-flung places. I don’t know personally anyone in the Papua New Guinea Highlands (to mention some arbitrarily remote location), but I can be pretty sure that it’s not too much of a stretch to suppose my Australian friend has a friend who has been to the PNG capital Port Moresby where he ran across a guy whose cousin occasionally makes trips to the capital to work for “luxury” items to take back to his remote mountain jungle dwelling where he presents them to his wife.
That would be just five degrees of separation. Certainly, the relationships are pretty far-flung, but it’s like the line from the TV series Breaking Bad, “I know a guy who knows a guy.” None of us is truly independent of anyone else.
The same principle can apply to all of history. Suppose that an estimated 100 billion people have walked the earth in the last 50,000 years. With each successive generation, each of us is related to two others to the power of the number of generations. Exponentials lead to big numbers quickly: 100 billion people equates to just 37 successive generations. So, it shouldn’t take too great a number of generations before the number of your number ancestors is similar to the number of people living at that time. As evidence, all humans look and act pretty much the same. One way or another, there was sufficient intermingling for us all to have ancestors in common.
So, as a first approximation, we are linked through our social and economic connections to everyone currently alive, and moreover we can be linked by blood and tradition to everyone who has ever been alive.
It seems then that the question should be not what is your carbon footprint but what instead is our carbon footprint, that for humanity as a whole. We are a collective “super-organism” that has evolved over time by burning carbon based fuels to sustain ourselves and to grow. Individually, we may profoundly feel that we can behave as isolated entities; our personal economic choices, in however limited a way, can reduce the collective rate of CO2 exhalation.
The evidence is against this argument, however. If we term our collective wealth as the accumulation of all past economic production, summing over all of humanity over all of history, then the data reveal a remarkable fact: independent of the year that is considered, collective wealth has had a fixed relationship to added atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Expressed quantitatively, 2.42 +/- 0.02 ppmv CO2 is added every year for every one thousand trillion inflation-adjusted 1990 US dollars of current global wealth.
A useful analogy here is to a growing child, who consumes food and oxygen and exhales carbon dioxide. The rate of CO2 exhalation by the child is determined by the sum of all cellular activity in the child. All the child’s current living cells require energy, and all produce CO2 as a waste product. But there are two key things: first, no set of cells can be magically dissociated from any set of others, e.g. the heart from the brain, as they are all interdependent; and second, the total number of current cells in the child is not determined by what the child does today, but rather by child’s past. Over time, the child grew from infancy to its current size, accumulating cells such that prior growth determined the child's current capacity to exhale CO2.
For humanity, it is the same. We currently “exhale” CO2 as a total civilization, but our current rate of exhalation is a collective enterprise by its intertwined parts as they have emerged from past civilization growth.
So, if emissions are so tightly linked to the collective whole, and all past growth of civilization’s consumptive needs has already happened, entirely beyond our current control, what individually can we do right now?
To further illustrate the problem, let’s look at CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. To calculate the actual increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, one has to consider that the land and oceans absorb a fraction of what is emitted. Estimating carbon sinks is possible but can get pretty tricky. Nonetheless, we can look at the observed relationship between economic activity and atmospheric chemistry to get a sense of what is going on.
Looking above at the past 2000 years of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, obtained from Mauna Loa in Hawaii and from ice cores in Antarctica, and measured as a perturbation from a baseline “pre-industrial” concentration of 275 ppmv, there is a surprisingly tight power-law relationship with global GDP. For the entire dataset :
log[CO2(ppmv perturbation)] ~ 0.6 x log[GDP(2005 USD)]
Amazingly, for over 2000 years, the relationship between CO2 and economic activity has been pretty much a mathematical constant.
In fact, if we look just at the past 60 years in the above, the relationship is linear and even tighter: since 1950, for every trillion inflation-adjusted year 2005 USD of global economy, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has been 1.7 ppmv higher.
And, we could turn this around. With an extremely high degree of accuracy, we could estimate the global GDP simply with a CO2 probe at Mauna Loa. In units of trillion year 2005 USD and ppmv CO2:
GDP = 0.58 x CO2 - 174
An atmospheric chemist could easily obtain the size of the global economy within a 95% uncertainty bound of just 1.5%! No need for economists!
Of course, we have to be careful with correlation and causation. And even if the above relationship has worked extraordinarily well for the past 65 years, the underlying basis for a relationship between GDP and CO2 concentrations is in fact rather more complicated. Nonetheless, these data clearly support an argument that what matters for determining the concentrations of this key greenhouse gas are collective human activities.
The relationship between CO2 and world economic activity has been extremely tight and invariant over a very long time period during which the configuration of humanity has changed extraordinarily. There have been periodic wars, famines, and global economic crises. We do not consume the same raw materials with the same efficiencies to the same extent now as we did in the past. The mix of wind, solar, nuclear and fossil fuels has been consumed in widely varying mixtures using an extraordinary range of different technologies.
Yet this tie remains. What is going on? Speculating, perhaps one way to look at it is to consider individually the impact of buying that fuel efficient Prius, or turning down the thermostat. A car or house that consumes less fuel allows for an instantaneously incremental reduction in the demand for fuel. Sounds great. Except, the resources for producing the fuel are still available. If demand drops incrementally, then oil producers reduce prices to increase demand. Cheaper gas is more desirable, and so the collective response of all consumers is to consume more. Ultimately, the net effect on the collective rate of fossil fuel consumption of buying a fuel efficient Prius is zero (or even an increase).
“No man is an island entire of itself...” We have no individual carbon footprint. We are only “... a part of the main”. We'd like to think our individual actions matter but it is only collectively will they reduce our impact on climate. And this will be very, very hard. As unpalatable as it may be, the only successful climate action will be to dramatically and collectively deflate the global economy. Unfortunately, this may be a bit like asking that growing child, once it has reached a healthy adulthood, to voluntarily suffocate or shrink back to infancy.
Is there an alternative perspective that allows for change but is still consistent with the observations? It would be nice to think that our individual or collective actions can meaningfully decouple the economy from changes in atmospheric composition. But how?
It would seem that the only hope of shrinking global Wealth would lay in achieving a deep and near universally appreciated understanding of our plight, an unprecedented appreciation and valuing of the future, far different than the 3% discount rate typical among economists. And an incredible individual maturity to accept that and then to empower a set of governments to force us to do the right thing, painful though it is. Draconian population control, cutting back on consumption and putting funds instead into decarbonizing. De-commissioning perfectly working fossil fuel power plants, crippling taxes used to spend on further decarbonizing, etc.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that individual voluntary actions to drop one's carbon footprint will be understaken to only a small degree and by only a small fraction of people - for a very rational and natural reason... it requires individual sacrifice and pain to oneself and one's family, and the rational and truthful value to climate is precisely zero. It only is conceivable in a rational world (which already is a big assumption), if, as you point out, we ALL make that sacrifice. I believe that the ACTUAL value pursued by many who engage in large scale individual voluntary carbon footprint limiting, is to feel morally superior - those brain chemicals again! I've seen it used in order to stand on a pulpit and finger wag others. It can be counter-productive. And that self-satisfaction too, must be given up in the greater service of a livable future.
Will this happen? Almost certainly not. My own educational efforts find very very few who are genuinely committed to clarity of understanding on these issues, instead preferring a tribal mentality, wishful New Age thinking, and a desire to NOT appreciate the actual numerical realities we face, preferring instead to just feel "hopeful", even promoting themselves as superior because they have "Hope".... but what it amounts to is hope that smart people in a lab somewhere will figure out how to let us have it all - eternal growth and a stable safe climate, and all of us living the Good Life like those Europeans and Americans. I see denial of Reality in many different forms on both sides of the political spectrum.
It would, in a real way, feel less stressful for me to believe that people really have no choice in all of this; that defaulting on the responsibility of full consciousness which I see so much of, is instead just following the deterministic pathways of the neural networks inside our head. I can feel how that would relieve me of the moral outrage I instead experience. And yet, it feels like giving up entirely on the future, which I am not ready to do.
Belief in the power of human agency to change the future is probably a helpful force that has enabled our species to thrive, as it has provided the motivation to carry us through an anticipated downturn in group success.
ReplyDeleteSo we plan for winter, and are motivated to do so by gathering and storing crops. But does this still work where there is no precedent that has been seared into our brains through countless generations of evolution and cultural development. Global climate change is so profound, long-term and widespread, that unlike with the passage of winter, many species simply go extinct.
The Stockdale Paradox is named after admiral Jim Stockdale, who was a United States military officer held captive for eight years during the Vietnam War. Stockdale was tortured more than twenty times by his captors, and never had much reason to believe he would survive the prison camp and someday get to see his wife again. And yet, as Stockdale told Collins, he never lost faith during his ordeal:
ReplyDelete“I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Then comes the paradox.
While Stockdale had remarkable faith in the unknowable, he noted that it was always the most optimistic of his prisonmates who failed to make it out of there alive.
“They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
What the optimists failed to do was confront the reality of their situation. They preferred the ostrich approach, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping for the difficulties to go away. That self-delusion might have made it easier on them in the short-term, but when they were eventually forced to face reality, it had become too much and they couldn’t handle it.
Stockdale approached adversity with a very different mindset. He accepted the reality of his situation. He knew he was in hell, but, rather than bury his head in the sand, he stepped up and did everything he could to lift the morale and prolong the lives of his fellow prisoners. He created a tapping code so they could communicate with each other. He developed a milestone system that helped them deal with torture. And he sent intelligence information to his wife, hidden in the seemingly innocent letters he wrote.
Collins and his team observed a similar mindset in the good-to-great companies. They labeled it the Stockdale Paradox and described it like so:
You must retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.
AND at the same time…
You must confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
This is an interesting perspective. Thanks
DeleteTim, what if climate change is a helpful force? What do you think about Nobel laureate climatologist Oleg Anisimov's view? He says in a recent video (below) that "the problem of climate change is a problem of adaptation to climate change. This is not a tragedy. Certainly some places will become unlivable but there are other places that will become more livable... Russia is lucky." Arctic sea ice melt is opening up vast untouched reserves of oil, gas and minerals. Russia's fossil fuel industry is in a mood to celebrate.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbtZaqWVUgA
Whether climate change is helpful or not is a judgement I prefer not to make. Whatever "helps" humanity in the short term may be bad for it in the long term, with burning fossil fuels as one example. But I would caution that the Russia may not be in for a great ride if much of the world becomes unlivable, even if Russia doesn't. The global economy is interconnected, so collapse overall may be collapse over all. Not to mention the displaced masses can migrate to Russia increasing competition for remaining resources there.
DeleteThat is interesting how closely tied GDP is to emissions.. though intuitively not that surprising. Clearly unfettered economic growth is destroying our chance of survival as a species. However our collective Co2 outputs are the simple addition of everyone’s individual emissions. Whatever can be added can also be subtracted. Each person needs to just slow the heck down, buy less, definitely fly less (as it is, by far, the worst culprit after having kids), compost their organic kitchen waste, grow their own food, support local farmers/craftspeople, buy secondhand goods, and a multitude of other mundane but vital steps to climate recovery.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of the worst polluters of all, they need to be charged with ecocide in an international court. Killing the planet should be made an actual criminal offence. Ie, war mongering dictators, multinational corporations that clearcut rainforests, billionaires that fly into space etc should be convicted of atrocities against mother earth and thrown into work camps.. to be exact work camps that involve remediation of habitats and other ecological activities.
The reason humans developed language was to tell stories and to collaborate in order to take down corrupt alpha males. Humans now just need to cooperate more than ever, learn the true story about climate change, and band together to start a revolution against those who are trashing the planet for short sighted profit. Justice for the planet is simple math - reduce over all CO2 by constricting/equalizing the output of each person, especially the output of the worst climate offenders of all. Those with the lowest carbon footprint are often the first to become climate refugees and that is just not cool. Humans are creative, ingenious, social creatures and the sooner they wake up to the current terrifying reality, the faster they can slow down. Shrooms might help.