Are We Responsible?

What role do individuals play in the larger response to climate change?

Dear friends,

Late last year, a column in The Economist asked the question: What responsibilities do individuals have to stop climate change?

The piece points out that while the magazine’s readers—a well-heeled group—“would recoil at the idea of stealing from a poor Malian goatherd or a struggling Bangladeshi farmer” and “next to none would countenance murdering such a person,” the havoc wreaked by climate change is already destroying livelihoods in less-wealthy nations and killing thousands of people at a time.

Does that mean, they ask, that rich Western consumers are somehow complicit in theft and murder because they are responsible for emitting significantly more carbon, and furthermore, “Is it too much to ask individuals to do their part to mitigate these harms?” 

The piece goes on to share a range of perspectives from environmental ethicists, in addition to that of a retired Shell employee who has turned into a climate activist and taken “extreme” measures of his own—including turning his furnace way down, stopping his travel by plane and car and joining the group Stop Oil in protests that occasionally block traffic.

The Economist briefly nods to the value of policy change as an important—potentially the most important—lever for change, and acknowledges the fact that individuals’ influence on political leaders is an important way to bridge that gap. But they ultimately shrug at the idea of individual change—suggesting it probably is asking too much: “Where public transport is bad, it is difficult not to drive. Most individual customers cannot pick whether they want their electricity generated using wind or coal. And given that few supermarkets systematically distinguish between carbon-intensive and climate-friendly products, it is hard to know what is best to buy.”

The piece struck me as an elaborate attempt to repackage an old message, and to assure readers that the question of how—and how much—to respond to climate change in their personal lives is mainly an academic one. It also continues the ongoing work of decoupling individuals from the extractive industries they work for or work indirectly to support through other related industries such as advertising, finance, legal work and public relations. It’s as if many of the people reading The Economist aren’t the same ones making and upholding decisions to continue burning fossil fuels in the first place. Instead, the article effectively ensures that we see those people’s transportation and dietary decisions as the only ones worth analyzing.

That kind of casual mulling-it-over is thrown into stark relief by a paper that was published in Science Progress last fall by a group of social scientists from Australia, New Zealand and the United States, which warns of the ways we have literally overshot the capacity of our planet. They use the term “ecological overshoot,” which refers to the number of Earths human society would need to sustain itself. “Humanity would currently need 1.7 Earths to maintain consumption of resources at a level the planet’s biocapacity can regenerate,” they contend.

The paper is also in some ways a response to articles like the one in The Economist, because it argues that overshoot is itself a symptom of “a deeper, more subversive modern crisis of human behavior” and that the only way to avoid utter climate catastrophe is to shift social norms relating to reproduction, consumption and waste. (I’m focusing on consumption in this issue, but reproduction is an important—if highly controversial—piece of the conversation. More on that soon.)

They argue that efforts to intervene to slow the rate of climate change and other related ecological disasters tend to focus on the symptoms of ecological overshoot rather than the distal cause—“maladapted” human behaviors. And that “even in the best-case scenarios, symptom-level interventions are unlikely to avoid catastrophe or achieve more than ephemeral progress.” For example, they talk about the switch to renewable energy and how it won’t be enough to reverse the overshoot on its own.

“Even if successful—which is not likely—the energy transition would address only a single symptom of ecological overshoot, likely worsening other symptoms significantly in the process. As noted earlier, it is humanity's access to cheap, convenient energy that has allowed us to overshoot many planetary boundaries. Would anything else change simply because we substitute one form of energy for another?”

The answer, they say, is a wholesale reversal of the work that psychologists, advertisers and PR agencies have been doing for the last century to engineer desire for products that are seen as key to our identities rather than simply key to our survival and comfort. In other words, the socially constructed attitudes, values and behaviors that encourage unnecessary personal consumption—work that has become increasingly effective through the collection of unfathomable quantities of personal data—need to be deconstructed.

“For decades we’ve been telling people to change their behavior without saying: ‘Change your behavior.’ We’ve been saying ‘be more green’ or ‘fly less’, but meanwhile all of the things that drive behavior have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction—and we’ve been wondering why nothing’s changing,” Joseph Merz, the paper’s lead author told the “Guardian” recently.

The wealthiest quarter of humanity is responsible for 74 percent of excess energy and material use, the scientists point out. (I am in that quarter—and the odds are very good that you are, too.) Meanwhile, as the paper points out, the people who represent the other 75 percent “aspire to achieve equivalent high-end lifestyles, encouraged, in part, by the constant barrage of advertising.”

Rather than grow the number of people who are consuming needless items for psychological reasons, a number of scientists have argued that fossil fuel use and material consumption would actually need to come down by between 40 and 90 percent if we are to prevent runaway warming of the climate.

There is some evidence that consuming less is gaining in popularity as an unexpected status symbol in some wealthy populations. But Merz and the other scientists behind the paper argue that we need “ways to positively socialize responsible behavior, [so] we can help people maintain their sense of self-worth and social status while reducing their contribution to ecological overshoot.” They add that we “must consider how marketing, behavioral science, and other direct instruments of social influence, including the media and entertainment industries,” might be used to help create a tipping point that leads to a real, lasting shift.

If you’re thinking that this kind of talk sounds optimistic—and a little creepy—you’re not alone. I also have mixed feelings about using the same tactics that industry has long used to manipulate people into consuming more to manipulate them into consuming less. Yet Merx et al give several examples of the way that public health messaging has changed culture in the past (the public acceptance of drunk driving, for instance). And it may ultimately be naïve to assume that any mass-scale change is possible without some intentional effort to move the dial. Given the sheer quantity of climate news I take in, I understand the urgency behind this message.

On that front, the paper’s final analysis is especially chilling: “The clock is ticking not only because the health of the natural systems upon which we are utterly dependent is deteriorating, but also because broadscale interventions are only possible when a society holds together and is capable of coherent action,” it reads. “As the effects of overshoot worsen, the likelihood of societal breakdown increases.”

To me the operative question now, in 2024, is how should those of us who do feel an innate sense of responsibility—as individuals, as employees, as voters, and as citizens of this planet—to align our behavior with its needs interact with those who do not.

Is it enough to model that sense of responsibility, to illustrate through words and actions, that it’s not as optional as we’ve been lead to believe? Or does this moment require something else of us entirely?

Climate news you might have missed

EVs vs. gas-powered cars

The news—and memes—related to electric vehicles and the mining they require can be difficult to parse so I appreciated this analysis from Jonathan P. Thompson at The Land Desk. As he lays out, the lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt used to create EV batteries are indeed impactful to the environment (and they often result in mining that endangers both fragile landscapes and Indigenous communities). In fact, they require six times as much of those mined minerals than conventional cars.

Indeed, fresh out the factory door, a new EV has a larger environmental footprint than its gasoline-powered counterpart, says Thompson. But the gas-powered car emits significantly more emissions, even when you take into account the lifecycle analysis of the mineral mining. But that doesn’t mean we should all go out and buy one tomorrow either. He echoes the authors of the study mentioned above when he adds:

“That meme serves a purpose: It reminds us that we won’t get out of this mess by producing and consuming more stuff, no matter how “green” it may be. Simply clogging up the roads with electric vehicles, blanketing the deserts with solar panels, building new dams, or filling our homes with “sustainable” goods won’t solve the problems created in the first place by overconsumption and waste. Economic and cultural systems must be overhauled or even overthrown. And the incessant hunger for more, more, more must be tempered at last.”

The high (carbon) cost of war

Bearing witness to the ongoing violence in Gaza—and the U.S. support of that violence—has been painful for many of us. A recent study puts some hard numbers behind that support, and in particular, the carbon footprint of transporting weapons halfway around the world.  

According to the researchers behind the study, the emissions from Israel’s aerial bombardment and ground invasion of Gaza in the first two months after October 7 were equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal. “The projected emissions from the first 60 days of the Israel-Gaza war were greater than the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories,” they wrote. (The number places the war above the nation of New Zealand in the global ranking.)

A significant chunk—47 percent—of those emissions come from the 200 flights carrying 10,000 tons of weapons and other goods, mostly from the US. (That number has gone up to 244 flights just from the U.S. in the last month.) Those flights required almost 50m liters of aviation fuel and resulted in an estimated 133,000 tons of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere.

“By no means do we seek to seek to divert attention away from the human suffering the war has caused, especially for millions living in fear of losing their lives in Gaza due to Israeli bombardment or those still being held hostage by Hamas—we echo calls from around the world for a durable ceasefire,” the authors of the report wrote. “But this exercise attempts to offer some glimpses of the wider environmental and climate effects of the conflict-effects that are not separable from the wider humanitarian costs of war.”

On the brighter side

1.  This story about Con Chim, an Island off Vietnam that couldn’t afford to join the green revolution when the rest of the nation did, is fascinating. Rather than build infrastructure to control the flow of water year-round, the farmers on the island had to rely on the seasonal rains to grow rice for half the year and turn to small-scale fishing and shrimp and crab farming during the dry season, when the water gets too salty for rice. As a result, they’ve been able to adapt to climate change in ways the mainland rice industry has not—and now they may influence the way rice is grown throughout Vietnam.

2. In 2023, researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew England recorded 89 “new” species of plant and fungi that were until then unknown to humans. The list includes a tree that grows almost entirely underground (!), a fungus that grows on lichens in Antarctica, and an orchid with translucent petals. Scientists around the world are racing to get plants like these in the official record books as the climate warms. And while there’s no guarantee that our recording of their existence can save them from extinction, for some species it may be a small, important step in that direction.

3.  The video explainer about Persian wind towers—a cooling architectural zero-emissions ventilation system invented 700 years ago—has been making the social media rounds this last week. And while the technology is probably old news to anyone living in the Middle East, for those of us living in what have until recently been temperate climates it’s an important reminder that humans have been using low-tech ways to stay cool for generations.

4.  This rundown of effective climate action in 2023 from the reported over at Heated is heartening and—dare I say—inspiring.

5.  The process of making cement is an emissions-heavy one. For that reason I found this Heatmap story about a Massachusetts-based company making  a “carbon-free” version of the ubiquitous building material pretty compelling.

The visual

Lidar-derived image of meander scars near Swiftown, Mississippi, on the Mississippi Delta (alluvial plain). The photo is just one of many images by Daniel Coe that track the historical patterns of rivers.

Take care,
Twilight

Top banner by Mara Greenaway.