On our way to zero net emissions

I struggle with this question a lot. Individual lifestyle changes are a drop in the ocean and may be counterproductive if you think they leave you with clean hands and excuse you from trying to promote collective action. But lifestyle changes are going to be necessary, so taking them now could help to remove some friction and, when pursued along with others, can help build alternatives from the bottom up. I worry about offsetting because when done without care, it can shift the costs of your consumption onto others by increasing demands on land.

More to the point, how should this impact our voting patterns? Climate change is the key issue of this generation (dwarfing Brexit in terms of its importance to the planet), and yet, while some people are apparently prepared to vote tactically (i.e. as single-issue voters) on Brexit, few are prepared to do the same for climate change.

And yet only radical and fundamental change to our socio-economic system can save us now. In other words, climate change is a planetary emergency and can only be solved on a planetary level: i.e. via supranational organisations (the WHO….what is climate change if not a health emergency?….the UN….the EU….and so on). Change by individuals, or even by individual nation-states, is simply not going to be enough.

There are politicians who realise this (at the moment, a tiny minority) and politicians who do not (most of ’em). There are political parties that recognise this (mostly on the so-called ‘radical’ left….although their views will be the mainstream soon enough) and political parties that do not (the majority of political parties in the ‘West’).
These ‘ratios’, so to speak, have to reverse (i.e. what is now the view of the ‘lunatic fringe’ has to become mainstream, and the views of ‘business as usual’ bunch have to become a minority view), and it has to happen in about 20 or 30 years time, if Western Civilisation as we have known it is to continue. This has to be a change in the zeitgeist as radical (or in many ways more radical) as that which happened, say, between 1925 and 1935 in the US, and between 1937 and 1947 in the UK, except it has to happen in most countries on planet Earth, and it has to be permanent.

This is primarily a political (not an economic) problem and it will have a political solution. Or not.

Just a reminder: ‘The (IPCC) report says that for limiting warming to below 1.5 C “global net human-caused emissions of CO2 would need to fall by about 45% from 2010 levels by 2030, reaching net zero around 2050.” Even just for limiting global warming to below 2 °C, CO2 emissions should decline by 25% until 2030 and by 100% until 2075.
Non-CO2 emissions should decline in more or less similar ways. This involves deep reductions in emissions of methane and black carbon: at least 35% of both by 2050, relative to 2010, to limit warming near 1.5 °C. Such measures could be undertaken in the energy sector and by reducing nitrous oxide and methane from agriculture, methane from the waste sector, and some other sources of black carbon and hydrofluorocarbons.
On timescales longer than tens of years, it may still be necessary to sustain net negative CO2 emissions and/or further reduce non-CO2 radiative forcing, in order to prevent further warming (due to Earth system feedbacks), reverse ocean acidification, and minimise sea level rise.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Report_on_Global_Warming_of_1.5_°C#Necessary_emission_reductions

To the best of my knowledge, no one has even suggested a way in which the necessary cuts can be accomplished via the so-called ‘free market’.

Not flying makes a lot of sense for people in north america, uk, europe or even australia. For most professionals and academics in such places, while there are significant losses to professional opportunities, some reasonable professional life is still possible. Throughout the UK, people still travel by train to get to various conferences. A train ride to paris from london is about 2.5 hours. From paris to italy is about 11 hrs. From edinburgh to london is bout 4.5 hrs. All in all, that is a better part of a day spent travelling by train. By comparison, a plane trip inclusive of airport wait times consumes about half a day as well.

You can drive from seattle to florida in 14 hrs (I can’t see how long it would take by train, but I imagine that if such a train route existed, it would be significantly less). I don’t know that the carbon footprint of people who currently travel by plane would be reduced if they started driving instead, but even if it did, the increased difficulty is not so significant as to pose significant threats an academic career.

By contrast, think about an academic career in Singapore. If I wanted to be an academic in Singapore (I’m Singaporean, my family and basically my entire social support structure is there), not taking a plane except in emergencies basically means not having access to any other decent academic departments. For my field, philosophy, the nearest decent departments are in australia, which are at least a week away by ship, but 8hrs by plane.

Not to mention, my current situation where I study and currently live in the UK but visit my family in Singapore a few times a year would not be possible at all. It takes 2 weeks to get from Singapore to UK by ship.

Also think about what it would mean if academics and professionals did not travel by plane except in emergencies. Let us make an exception to Singaporean academics and professionals and confine ourselves just to people in north america and europe. One of the ways in which academic and other professional departments (e.g. hospitals or sub departments in hospitals) in the global south improve is by collaborations, conferences and workshops involving professionals from the global north that are hosted in the global south. The NUS philosophy department would be a lot less vibrant department if it did not have lots of overseas academics flying in to give talks. My father, for instance, flies to india and indonesia a few times a year to conduct training sessions as well as develop emergency medicine training programs. I’m pretty sure my father is not the only one doing this. I would not be surprised if other professionals from the global north were also aiding the professional development in the global south.

Let’s also not forget whether global or even regional social/political organisations like the world health organisation, the world trade organisation, the asian society for transplantation, the UN etc would be possible without non-emergency air travel.

All but one of the things (the WTO) should be acceptable uses of air travel to even the most dyed in the wool socialist. Let’s go a bit further afield and look at things that socialists might have, let us say, mixed feelings about.

We can start with the crash in the tourist industries in the global south. From there we can note that along with the lack of certain kinds of professional development, a lot of business development that is currently taking place in the global south would not happen in the absence of non-emergency air-travel by people from the global north. Even in a post-capitalist world where employer and employee relations are far less exploitative, I cannot imagine how an improvement in production and production decisions in the global south could come about without a lot of frequent air travel from the global north to the global south and vice versa. A socialist future cannot be an autarkic future.

What are our leisure options in this more environmentally conscious world? We can’t go too far from home. We can’t buy that new gaming rig because it will consume lots of energy and thus produce lots of emissions. I suppose there are some activities without much consumption, but those are a niche taste. Perhaps if you are lucky enough to live near broadway or the london west end, there is the theatre. But since they won’t be flying around the world, the rest of us can at most only see recordings of those productions.

Temperatures will rise all we can do is figure out ways to deal with it.

For myself, I find that climate efforts go on the long list of Adult Responsibilities that I could be doing better. Raising the kids, doing my job and managing the household finances, healthier living, running the household, making home improvements, etc etc.

So there are some home-isolation projects that would make sense, but they compete for budget and time with a leaky shed and aging paintwork and some dodgy pipework. I regularly cook vegetarian meals, but I don’t have a full range of tried-and-proven vegetarian recipes that are tasty, quick, accessible for the kid. I am already happy if I put a varied and healthy range of meals on the table anyway. I would love to cycle more to work, but I struggle to find enough time. I could take the kids to their grandparents by train, but it’s an organizational pain compared to taking the car. Etc.

On the other side, I work in an energy-intensive industry, where even small changes would dwarf anything I can do at home. But the budget is always tight, and that’s frustrating. The company-level finances are clear enough – we can afford some photogenic Green projects for PR, we can do a limited amount of R&D to prepare for future CO2 costs. We could do more than we do, surely. But a serious step-change in CO2 emissions, starting now? That would bankrupt the company – unless our competition has to do the same.

That doesn’t help to motivate efforts at home, to be honest. It feels extremely symbolic.

Murali @10

“You can drive from seattle to florida in 14 hrs”

I assume this was just a typo? The real number is more like 45-50 hours of solid driving, so something like 4 – 5 days if you want to sleep enough to drive safely.

If you ask Google how long it will take by train, it denies that such a calculation is possible. That’s a failure of imagination on its part, since it will tell you that it takes 3 days to get from Seattle to Boston by rail, and a little over 1 day to get from Boston to Florida by rail. (Someone must teach Google about trains-itivity.)

But Google’s ignorance reflects a genuine fact about the US rail network: the US govt, at the behest of oligarchs in the oil and automotive industries, has never supported a passenger rail network. The state of the railroads in the US is a disgrace, and the failure is entirely one of collective action: there is nothing that an individual can do to create a rail network where it does not exist.

This does not change much in your larger point, except making it clearer that even in the US it can be hard to stay in physical contact with friends and professional colleagues.

Lifetime carbon budgets for all: if you’ve been flying a lot in the last couple of decades, now you have to stop. The rest of us may continue in moderation. (This might necessitate some changes to the current distribution of occupational roles, and income…)

I want to sign on to Phil’s final point in a way that partly retracts something I said earlier.

He’s right: we don’t know how to do this. And more generally, there is no easy recipe for being politically effective.

For all that I know, the most politically effective thing that Greta can do is not (as I said earlier) to fly around and give speeches, but rather to use social media to advertise her own personal life-style choices. And that will only work, in the long run, if she actually lives in accordance with the choices she advertises. So, maybe she should work on her life-style first. Provided, of course, that she then uses her life-style as a model for evangelizing more widely. Mute inglorious monks of pristine purity who never tell the world what they are doing, are not going to help anyone. But maybe her life-style will set an example that will lead to collective action — I certainly cannot rule it out.

To the extent that none of us knows what is most effective, it is good to have people trying lots of strategies. And it’s bad to have people like me saying, as I said earlier, “your strategy is wrong; do it my way.”

One of the lessons that the US left is very slow to learn is that a healthy progressive eco-sphere has many niches. We need yellers and screamers. We also need compromising pragmatists. We need people working on the inside. We need people pressuring them from the outside. We need maximalists who won’t settle, and we need incrementalists who will. Above all, we need less intra-left fighting over who is doing it wrong, because there are a lot of ways to do it right, and no one knows the one true way.

If, like me, you believe the world will NEVER be able to reduce emissions generations enough, you could:

1. live as you like
2. donate $1,000-$10,000 (depending on income) annually to researchers devoted to geo-engineering and carbon capture and other techniques for removing from the atmosphere the emissions we stubbornly insist on still creating.

I know my answer does not respond to the spirit of the question, but it is my honest answer as to how to solve the problem. And I do suspect that my answer will enrage or annoy most climate activists. Half because they think these ideas are dangerous or infeasible (and they may be!), and half because they think they are somehow “cheating,” and the planet can only be saved by noble sacrifices, not by smart spending. Sort of like bariatric surgery is “cheating” your way to weight loss. Email me for more ideas about what I’d do if I were king of the world (grin)….

What gets humans to the top of the Maslow hierarchy is healthy interpersonal relations, not Stuff or exotic vacations. If we ever collectively actually get that, many problems would be much more tractable.

Carbon offsets: appears to neglect that obtaining the money you spent has a carbon load attached to it, so seems like an exercise in virtue signaling. Donations for clean stoves for people who have to live near them, developing clean water sources and so on (dealing with the lower parts of the hierarchy) are excellent things to do on their own.

Where are the Kantians here? Live according to those rules that you want to exist, not according to those rules that actually exist. Why wait for society to force you to fly less, eat less meat and buy renewable energy?
But also from a consequentialistic perspective, the whole idea that your individual lifestyle choices do not matter is flawed. The same reasoning can be held for political action. How much impact will your individual political acts have on the introduction of a global carbon tax? Very little. But why would it be necessary to have a discernable effect on the world as a whole as an individual? We know little about the relationship between emissions and climate damage. Perhaps it is linear, meaning that my emissions of 10 tonne per year will do about a 1000 Euro of damage each year irrespective of what others do. I am responsible for this damage irrespective of what others do. For comparison: if I pay for the education of one child, I will not solve the problem of all uneducated children around the globe. Is that a reason not to pay for the education of the one child?
So personally I experience a strong personal duty to refrain from those acts that I would not perform in my preferred world order. Offsetting will not reduce this duty: you cannot compensate what is bad by doing good. What we can do is offset our remaining emissions.

Efficiency improvements – LED bulbs, modern refrigerators – ought to be adopted rapidly as they are developed. Sensible reductions in consumption of obviously offensive products – air travel, beef, Bitcoin mining rigs – gets us another few percentage points closer to the goal. Beyond that, things get weird, because just figuring out which reductions make sense, and coordinating people to make those reductions, is hard.

Serious reductions in consumption are possible, but it’s not obvious who will impose them. It is commonly held that nobody would vote for a government that promised to do it, although the last decade has shown us that people will vote for certain kinds of austerity if it’s presented as a necessity. Eco-austerity might become politically viable if it can be presented as simply unavoidable – and if we can make bailing out the banks unavoidable then this ought to be possible. The OP contains the beginning of the story that would make this seem so – to paraphrase Liam Byrne, “there’s no carbon left”.

A simple eco-austerity model would involve a combination of carbon taxes, high-ish consumption taxes (at 20% VAT, we’re already there in the UK), and subsidy of renewables. This would reliably increase the renewables in the energy mix, and could be ratcheted up over time.

However, economies of scale in solar production appear to be having very considerable effects on the price of solar panels, and if the trend continues then it might well dominate all other effects. Estimates put the fall in solar panel prices at 35% in 2018, the second-biggest ever fall. Given that these falls are produced by economies of scale, and that falls in price trigger greater demand, it is reasonable to expect the trend to continue. Solar is already cheaper than running existing coal plants in many parts of the US – that is, not just cheaper than building new coal plants, but cheaper than running the already-built ones. Wind power is falling in price less dramatically, but improved design and economies of scale help there too.

Here we have two slightly contrary trends: an austere approach to energy usage and consumption which treats energy as expensive and scarce, and what looks like the cheapest source of energy in human history coming on-line in the next decade. My guess is that the time it would take to build the eco-austerity movement is too great for it to have an impact – by the time it appears, solar + wind + batteries will provide cheaper energy than any fossil fuel equivalent for most of the world. Instead of trading off consumption for carbon reduction, we just focus on replacing the fossil fuels as fast as possible with relatively little disruption to average consumption levels.

The political battle that I’m expecting is the final rearguard action of the fossil fuel companies. They’ve been hugely effective in the US, capturing entire government departments and – through fracking – driving a series of technical and economic innovations that have kept US oil competitive. Among Trump’s tariffs is a 30% levy on imported solar panels from China (though, of course, this merely leaves them costing about what they did in 2017, due to the aforementioned price fall). My guess is that they have a few more tricks up their sleeves, and can hold back progress for years, if they’re allowed to. The question is how best to counteract this.

I’m a bit wary of my own logic here, but it would seem to me that the green movement has a new argument: that cheap solar is here if we want it, that it’s inexpensive, clean, and sustainable; that it will continue to improve; and that we won’t need to worry quite so much about cutting consumption any more, outside of industries that are inextricably linked to GHG emissions (beef, combustion engines). A decade or so of the current trend for solar panel prices and solar energy becomes properly abundant – so cheap that if we, as a society, want more consumption then we simply need to deploy more panels and more batteries. Weirdly, for all of the horrors that we’re expecting in the next few decades, the economic logic of solar seems to be promising us the greatest and most abundant energy economy we’ve ever had. It’s sufficiently far from how we normally think about things that I’m having a hard time believing it, but it would seem to be true.

@
”what do you think we should do, as persons and households”?

– make such a great point as Greta? –
(”influencing” a lot of other people to live as she does??) –

Or be part of the ”Fair Limits project” that you are involved in? –

Or finding any other way to reduce emissions?

The area (State) I’m currently mainly residing in -(run by a ”Green Government”)
is doing it by all kind of ”measures” and ”policies” – and nearly everybody here – happily follows (most of) the helpful examples – like mainly moving around by bicycle.

BUT coming back to Greta’s… could it be called ”eye-opening” point – we tried something completely else. Driving – NOT from Seattle to Florida – BUT from Montecito CA to New York – with a beautiful English Queen Anne piece of furniture from the 17th century – and we took 12 days doing that. AND already in Montecito – on Butterfly Beach – a group of Surfers and Firemen suggested to have Queen Anne as the next US President -(in order to get rid of ”the Moron” who currently is very, very ”bad” for the idea of ”zero emission”) – And when – at the Grand Canyon a group of older Ladies -(from Iowa) – told US – that they ”right away would vote for Queen Anne” – and two days later at Monument Valley a member of the Navajo Tribe chanted :
”Bring Rain Queen Anne!” –
we knew – that there are all kind of ways in order to get to ”zero emission”.

We all seem to be imagining, and sacrificing for, a future that is, best case, broadly similar to the present but with pieces missing. No air travel, no meat, no high-end graphics cards.
I submit that for a cultural shift to gather real momentum, there needs to be some gusto to it. It is the new things we will invent together that will be seen in retrospect as being worth doing anyhow, even though in the present we can only see bleak issues of mere survival.
As Wes Jackson says, “we don’t really know how to live here yet.” This is our best chance to learn how.

I don’t think flying will become “emergencies only”, but it will become different and probably more expensive. They’ll have to run them entirely on biofuels, maybe with some of the shorter flights and smaller planes running on electric power if battery technology improves.

Halasz: The manufacture of an average auto uses 270 bn joules;

No offense, I am always cautious of such figures, and require better breakdowns: does this assume steel and plastic etc as unexamined inputs and just measures the footprint of the assembly?

rjk@28
Thanks,
It really does seem to me too, that there is a substantial chance that once we reach mature renewables, that in fact energy will be cheap and its use guiltless. So the need for widespread personal sacrifice may not be necessary. Even for meat eaters, we may be on the verge of lab-grown artificial meat, so its at least within the realm of possibility that we will be able to mostly have our cake and eat it to. But of course that is decades away, in the meantime it will take some sacrifices to get there sooner rather than later, and sooner will mean less climate difficulties for our descendants, as well as for the other lifeforms on the planet.

Even air travel. There already are plans by a few companies more commercial electric air transport. These are mainly on hold pending hoped for improvements in batteries. It seems likely to me that within a couple of decades regional electric air transport will become a reality. With a few hops and recharge stops you might be able to go cross continent too. Although crossing oceans still doesn’t look very likely.

A big part of the necessary change is not greening the electricity supply, by transitioning our other energy consumption uses to rapidly greening electric. So space heating and water needs to move from burning stuff, to heat pumps – possibly augmented by solar heating. Similar changes to transport as well. Then we have to change industrial farming. Tractors and such machinery will have to be powered by electricity, as well as fertilizer production. I don’t think there is a substitute for high intensity farming, the amount of food produced per acre is an important measure of efficiency that we can’t lose sight of.

In any case, as I see it, its all doable. But, we have our work cut out for us if we are going to transition quickly enough.

bob mcmanus 01.03.19 at 12:58 pm @ 7 —
I have read that even with all the energy waste that goes on in big cities, the average inhabitant of one uses less than half the energy the average inhabitant of the suburbs or exurbs does. So I am curious about your initial statement, not that it matters a whole lot. I suppose one could have a very clever house, but then there would be the driving and the deliveries and so forth.

In regard to the general question, I live in an apartment in a big city; by preference I use a bicycle to get around and am a vegetarian (leading to a certain amount of genial derision), I use LED lighting; but I don’t imagine such practices do the slightest thing to reduce the predicted climate and other catastrophes. They’re not virtue, they’re just what I prefer. Thus I like bob mcmanus @ 33, second paragraph. To save the planet, or rather what we might call the anthroposphere, we would have to somehow put a definitive stop to capitalism, patriarchy, war, and imperialism, and for all the talk I don’t see much progress on those fronts at all.

Offsetting is more complex than so far discussed when we’re using the zero emissions context. The only legitimate offsets are from negative-emissions scenarios, like tree planting at the sequestration stage (ie, when they’re burying the trees before planting new ones). Anything else is “we shouldn’t do this at all, but I’m paying someone else to do it less”. That’s true regardless of the merits of the “do it less”.

Charles Stross’ blog has just seen an argument about whether “safer cars” count that works the same way: if I buy a car that is safer for the occupant(s) than other cars, but much more dangerous to those outside, is it really safer? Or is is just pushing the risk/problem onto others who have no choice and no ability to solve the problem?

In an emissions context we have the tiny problem that even renewably-powered electric cars are “lower emissions” not zero emissions, because their manufacture and maintenance still require fossil fuels. And they run on plastic tyres so they’re still dumping microplastics into the oceans which is another problem entirely. Sure, EV’s are dramatically less polluting and we can probably fit them into our budget, but currently we’re not even thinking in terms of a balanced budget.

One would have to convince me that buying offsets works at all. If one had convinced me that it is very likely they do work, id suggest primarily donating lots of money for offset projects, since individual reductions can also be quite expensive, or hypocritical (if they are very profitable because of huge subsidies like solar panels often were in the past with limited positive co2 impact). I guess that even if i would think this is an indivual matter, id still conclude the best way to be responsible is makeing a large political campaign donation and just avoid extreme things.

I would agree with Chris Bertram @21.

Here’s the thing, as someone who’s very confident global warming is real but not altogether convinced on currently-proposed responses. There are multiple cases, over the past 50 years, in many countries, of the following dynamic:
1) Elites propose solving a problem by some action that makes people in the top half of the income/wealth on average slightly poorer
2) Implement the proposed solution
3) The 90th percentile is slightly worse off, but positionally further ahead of the 50th percentile.

This dynamic is frequently noted in sociology: elites often prefer more eliteness to more wealth.

This dynamic is how you reconcile the two opposing critiques noted by Matt@41. If the elites are not willing to sacrifice in service of their stated ideals, and the sacrifices they recommend of non-elites make them look “like Joe Poverty,” it’s a reasonable suspicion that reinforcing elite privilege is part of the goal of this, the 75th austerity/anti-poverty program.

Someone like Greta (mentioned in the OP) goes a long way toward defusing that suspicion. “I’m willing to live like Joe Poverty to solve this problem” makes it look like the sacrifice will really be shared.

Omega: the little electric scooters are apparently a bit of a revolution. People who wouldn’t walk places are using them rather than taxis because they’re faster and cheaper. There’s the problem of sharing the footpath with pedestrians (much of the point is that they’re faster than pedestrians), and some vandalism, but on the whole they seem to be a big step forward.

This article, for example: https://thespinoff.co.nz/auckland/26-11-2018/where-should-lime-scooters-go-on-the-little-road-of-course/

Murali @11 – According to Mapquest, it takes not 14, but 44 hours 36 minutes to drive the 3,135 miles from 5 Broad Street, Seattle to Orlando, Florida, which is in the center of Florida. Were you thinking of some other place called “Florida?” (From here in Boston, MA, I think you might make it to Orlando in 14 hours if you drove 80 miles an hour and never stopped. But Seattle? There’s a continent between the two….)

Most of our required changes are not possible through individual action. Once the electricity supply system is renewable, then I don’t need to ration electricity; until it is no amount of personal sacrifice will make a dent in our emissions. Similarly, unless I decide not to engage in any aspect of the modern economy, I can’t “choose” products that were shipped with green shipping. Once the entire cargo fleet is nuclear, not such a problem.

The one big area where personal choices matter is meat. We can’t reduce the amount of meat the world eats without individually eating less meat.

Eating less meat is a good thing but I would like to point out (as someone who was vegetarian for about 15 years and vegan for about 7) that veganism is not healthy, and almost everyone who does it for a long period ends up stopping due to poor health. It leads to vitamin B12 deficiency, protein deficiency, and can also make you overweight. Eventually some of these problems may be solved by factory meat, but for now it’s not a great health option. Since vegetarianism is not an ethical improvement on eating meat, and has much more limited environmental problems, the best short-term (and also most socially acceptable option) is to simply massively reduce the amount of meat we eat. This can be achieved through collective rather than individual action. The entire food industry as it is presently constructed is a curse on humanity in millions of ways, and reforming it comprehensively would improve health, the environment, workers’ rights and political instability. You won’t fix that by eating organic – we need politicians willing to take on agribusiness.

So yes, eat less meat! But to properly solve these problems, we need to take on agribusiness, and we need to do it soon before the entire planet is fat, afflicted with antibiotic-resistant diseases, and boiling.

If anyone cares, here’s a paper that looks at the last time the world faced an equivalent crisis World War 2

https://www.nber.org/papers/w22590

This is true, and really rams home the point that when the chips were down both the British and the Americans ditched all the nonsense about the so-called ‘free’ market, and planned their economy, because a planed economy is the only kind of economy that can function efficiently in this kind of situation (i.e. where there are specific quantitative goals that must be reached within a specific time period).

Remember we have to make serious progress on this problem within the next 12 years. So, the ‘seven sisters’ have to be nationalised, and shut down. The world’s coal plants have to be nationalised and shut down. Gasoline/petrol driven cars have to be banned. Flights have to be severely rationed. The machine, in other words has to stop. Consumptionism has to be stopped via a ration card system, as per WW2. The wars have to stop (the US military is a major carbon emitter, and this cannot be mitigated).

https://sandiegofreepress.org/2014/11/the-us-military-is-a-major-contributor-to-global-warming/#.XC8Yalz7TIU

To repeat, this is wholly and completely incompatible with the workings of the ‘free’ market as we have known it since 1981, and, for most of us, since 1950 (in the UK).

Ten minutes on statistica.com tells me that (2017 figures) something like 4 billion people fly a year (some people fly often in a year and others never fly, that’s not 4 billion separate individuals of course). That’s about 250 million tonnes, dead weight. That’s a lot; but then again air freight moves 14 billion tonnes annually, give or take; and since a tonne of freight takes the same energy to move through the air as a tonne of people, the pollution-ratio of those numbers is rather striking. Indeed, bc freight is less picky than people, freight carriers tend to fly considerably older and much less fuel efficient planes: A300s, MD11s even DC10s.

I take the force of the ‘let’s be vegan’ argument. I really do. It’s just that, as a Brit, to have full environmental benefit it means eating lots of turnips, spuds and curly kale, and cutting out all the rice and fancier veg that make the diet bearable.

Most of the environmental benefits of veganism can be obtained just by switching from ruminants to chicken.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150401084157.htm

I can’t find it now, but I read an article by an “ethical” vegan (seeking to minimise animal death/suffering) starting from this observation and criticising vegans who use the CO2 argument. Key point is that replacing beef with chicken implies many chickens per cow, each suffering more than cattle do.

I would agree that the wealthy among us have greater responsibility than the less welloff. The idea of common but differentiated responsibility seems right.

In 2014, the United States had a carbon footprint of 11.5 acres per capita, compared to the global average of 3.6 acres per capita.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/492001/world-population-co2-emissions-share-by-income/

=> estimated lifetime emissions based on life expectancy: USA: 920 (le 80); world: 259 (le 72)

If you’re an average middle-aged, middle-class American you could go zero-carbon today and you’ve still contributed far more to the problem than the average person who makes no changes will in their lifetime.

…which I guess is similar to Greta Thunberg’s point, except instead of ‘older generations’ I’d say ‘the rich + the managerial-educational complex, especially in America’.

To me, the signal event of 2018 was when the most admired woman in America flaunted her $6000 boots on national tv. The ascending classes, the rising factions, those who control the Democratic Party let forth a huge collective squee.

Ain’t gonna be no reduction in consumption for those who have been living on bread and water for generations. It’s their turn to party. So some version of Macronism will continue, austerity and punishment for the white working class in flyover country and a shopping spree for deserving coastals and UMC minorities.

So Sanders and Warren can just forget it. It will likely be a ticket of Harris and “I married a billionaire” Beto and over by April.

And Trump will get a second term. Just as this comment will be condemned as whatever bigotry, so will the causes of the further swan dive into fascism be blamed on the rednecks. And the coastals will continue to prosper.

I agree with Z @ 65 and Omega Centuri @ 28 on the importance of individual action within your local community to get some additional scale on our actions.

Omega put it especially well – we as individuals can help support innovations that make it easier to live a more carbon-neutral life whether in building stock, transport, or diet. My partner and I have shifted toward a lower meat diet, and it’s been made much easier by living in NYC with a great variety of veggie-heavy cuisines and groceries. By frequenting those restaurants and foods, hopefully we’re swelling the trend toward eating great new food without meat (or using new meat substitutes like the Impossible burger, etc.) and keeping those restaurants around to show others that vegetarian diets are possible without feeling any sense of sacrifice.

This is how changes in individual lifestyles spread, with the slow person-to-person spread of new insights. And I believe the changes are likely to hold better if they are more gradual and freely chosen.

They’ve appeared now (and apologies for the multiple comments). I’ve just realised my calculation above is nonsensical but I believe the point could be made properly by someone who wasn’t hungover…

The climate model is correct but irrelevant. Our globalized system is so fragile that it will come crashing down, commerce will come to a grinding halt and fossil fuel burning will be greatly reduced or cease. Among the black swans circling overhead are:
Nuclear War
A solar flare that brings down the electric grid
A pandemic
A financial crash, that cannot be bailed out.

The results will not be pleasant. The whole world will become a mashup of Venezuela, South Sudan, and Syria.

Maybe I’m showing my age but I was sure the Cohen argument was ethical, not strategic. If you believe we are collectively, immorally wrecking the planet by eg flying multiple times per year, and need to be coercively prevented from doing so, how can you justify voluntarily choosing to fly multiple times per year?

(Claiming ‘it makes no difference’ is fatuous: 1.5 increase is better than 2 and will save real people from concrete harms. The same is true 1.499999999 vs 1.5 or whatever.

making drastic changes, they rarely last, just like dieting doesn’t work well. small changes can make a difference. You do what you can. Now it might be better if India got with the agenda, but they won’t. We who live in the first world, have the ability to make changes. . To fly or not to fly on vacation. that’s a first world problem, but regardless its still a problem. We can ask ourselves can I have an experience closer to home which will bring me just as much joy? if the answer is yes, stay closer to home. However, if its always been your dream to go, where ever, then go. We are not in this to be martyors.
There are simple ways to help the environment, buy a new car only when you need one, every 15 yrs or so. (some of us live in rural areas where you can’t get along without them–think Canada) T.V.s, kept mine for 18 years. cell phones, replaced when they die and can’t be repaired. Our G-7 countries purchase, electronics as if our lives depended upon it.
There are a lot of ethical questions to ask ourselves. when we travel to these “resorts” do we think about what impact they have on the enviorment in these areas? Some will argue they provide jobs. However, at what cost to the environment.

I don’t count carbon whatevers, its just as simple as deciding to purchase local and less. Repairing things–gives a handyperson a job.

Yes, countries need to do things very quickly or there won’t a decent place left to live in the world. Our grandchildren won’t see old age. We used to think we’d nuke the world into oblivion, but at the rate things are going, I’d suggest we’re going to pollute ourselves out of existence.

My favorite case among the various bits of learned ignorance on display in this thread is Murali’s apparent contention @ 11 that philosophizing requires jet-travel. That’s the sort of claim that Diogenes of Sinope would have richly appreciated.

Sinning less is not generally appealing. SUV’s have largely replaced sedans. People are practical. The only useful option is to change their incentives.

You are Milton Friedman and I claim my $5

I’d like to offer some praise for bad Jim @82. Firstly for standing up to the purity scolds. He has obviously been trying, and from his description is far below the carbon emissions trajectory that we want/need the average citizen of an advanced economy to be on. We want to encourage more to take a similar path, rather than promote an ideal that few will be able to meet.

He is way above the transportation transition curve curve too, having an electric car in these early days. Maybe one or two percent in California have taken that step so far, and as I mentioned before the overall effect of early movers can extend far beyond their direct emissions savings. He also shows some wisdom in evaluating whether solar makes sense for him, -he’s not going to do it just to satisfy an emotion desire to be seen as green. There are many cases like his, where a greater carbon impact could be had at lower cost elsewhere, possibly even by helping someone else to pursue a more cost effective change. We don’t have unlimited resources to spend on this transition, and we need to use them wisely.

Seems simple enough to me.

1) Our collective impact on the world is already far advanced on a catastrophic path.
2) Within that impact, on any dimension, each of us as individuals or households taken in a purely fictional isolation has a trivial impact, whether positive or negative.
3) That characteristic modern conceptual illusion of isolation contrasts with an increasingly clear-cut reality, which is pervasively interdependent causality.
4) In this context, we each need to do our best to reduce the collective impact by all means available. This means:
– our own material consumption choices (eating less/no meat and dairy, flying less/not at all, choosing low-/zero-carbon transportation options, smaller/collective/energy-efficient housing, refraining from conspicuous consumption, etc.)
– influencing the consumption choices of others (by example/persuasion/network effects/formal movements)
– overt political action (voting for green parties and candidates, civil disobedience, acting locally to make changes in school cafeterias, pushing for more egalitarian arrangements that leave people room to build and maintain those social bonds and prevent market-based “solutions” from pushing those worse off into the arms of the extreme right, etc.), and
– rebuilding the day-to-day networks of face-to-face social bonds that so much material consumption is aimed at acting as a poor substitute for.

You may not be able to do all of these things, but you do your best to shift around your habits in a way that takes the unprecedentedly vast challenge of worldwide ecological crisis seriously. Where’s the puzzle?

(Re: point 3: Human sociality has its own characteristic rapid forms of social interdependence. For whatever reason, in the context of ecological crisis this interdependence is often viewed only in terms of its negative/limiting/problem-creating potential. As if people would/could only ever influence each other to do more damaging things, never the opposite… Homo malus malus?)

Barber said most of the bookings were for a month or two, but he had arranged a year-long break for a 45-year-old billionaire who had sold his startup and wanted “some time to reconnect with this family”. The trip cost well in excess of £1m. The family visited 65 countries – from Mauritius to Bhutan, Antarctica and Greenland. “The guy was burnt out,” Barber said. “He wanted to see the world, get back to basics a bit and most importantly see more of his kids, who he hadn’t seen so much of when he was working to sell his company.” A team of agents helped arrange the trip for the billionaire, including applying for visas and fixing up local guides in each country. Flights were the one thing Barber’s team did not need to worry about, as the family’s pilot flew them on their private jet. Specialist travel agents catering to the wealthy arrange trips such as snow leopard spotting in India. Included on the family’s itinerary was tracking snow leopards in Ladakh, north-west India. “They really wanted to see them, but didn’t want to wait there for 10 days and not actually see a snow leopard,” Barber said. So his firm hired a team of local spotters and a helicopter to whisk the family from their luxury encampment the minute the elusive big cats were spotted.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jan/06/super-rich-sabbatical-the-boom-in-luxury-long-breaks-for-the-wealthy

One of the upsides to markets in electric power is where bids from high-income areas are lumped in with bids from low-income areas, so the price will be appropriately punitive (aka rationing) for low-income areas. And, as a bonus, low-income energy producers will have their power funneled to high-income areas!

I’ve heard the argument that nothing in the world will change until people change their hearts. It usually comes from Christians convinced original sin in the hearts of sinners causes all the bad things. The assumption that choosing an electric car is touchstone of virtue requires the assumption that the transportation needs and options are also individual choice.

Act glocal, think lobal.