According to this survey there is little hope, that individual actions can do anything apart from maybe raising awareness. The Guardian asked “every contactable lead author and review editor of reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change since 2018, with 380 of 843 responding”. Here is what you can do according to the opinions of the world’s climate scientists:
- “Most experts (76%) backed voting for politicians who pledge strong climate measures”
- “The second choice for most effective individual action, according to the experts, was reducing flying and fossil-fuel powered transport in favour of electric and public transport. This was backed by 56%[…].”
- “Almost 30% of the experts said eating less meat was the most effective climate action”
- “a similar proportion [30%] backed cutting emissions from heating or cooling homes, by installing heat pumps, for example”
- “Having fewer children was backed by 12% of the experts”
Ugh. And there are these statements:
It can only go so far. Deep, rapid cuts in carbon emissions from oil and gas, as well as other sectors such as transport, are needed, which are outside the control of the average individual […] Individual action can only amount to a drop in the bucket – only systemic changes will be sufficient
Many foresee catastrophic levels of global heating and are shifting their focus away from the physics of the climate system towards action that slows global heating and work that protects people against the climate impacts they now see as unstoppable.
Another post I read recently was A Tour of the Jevons Paradox How Energy Efficiency Backfires:
In short, boosting efficiency seems like a straightforward way to reduce your use of natural resources. And for you personally, efficiency gains may do exactly that. But collectively, efficiency seems to have the opposite effect As technology gets more efficient, we tend to consume more resources. This backfire effect is known as the ‘Jevons paradox’, and it occurs for a simple reason. At a social level, efficiency is not a tool for conservation; it’s a catalyst for technological sprawl.1
Here’s how it works. As technology gets more efficient, it cheapens the service that it provides. And when services get cheaper, we tend to use more of them. Hence, efficiency ends up catalyzing greater consumption.
Take the evolution of computers as an example. The first computers were room-sized machines that gulped power while doing snail-paced calculations. In contrast, modern computers deliver about a trillion times more computation for the same energy input. Now, in principle, we could have taken this trillion-fold efficiency improvement and reduced our computational energy budget by the same amount. But we didn’t.
It gets harder and harder to not talk about the planetary trajectory as set in stone. I guess it’s good to have posts like this in your timeline?
The bald eagle could have easily gone extinct. But we did all sorts of “woke” things protecting it legally, ran conservation and study programs, banned DDT (that was good for other reasons too) and in 2007 they were removed from the endangered species list.
Likewise pine forests could be dead from acid rain.
The ozone could have a huge hole.
We CAN take care of nature when we want to. And the successes have been worth it.
I feel like we forget this, you know?
Is it? What will it do? Hope is cheap. Change is impossible to envision. Especially if imagined as collective change on a planetary scale. Things will have to become much worse before we can meaningfully engage with what happens. Maybe this is not you, but it is us. You can warn and write all the manifestos you want, have a negative footprint or whatever: Just as with AI we’ll have to come to terms with the fact that climate change is just us. We’re the planet. And as the planet is the result and the cause of what’s going on, the individual will have to recognize and come to terms with not being able to do a lot.
There is hope in disruption. But strategically “weaponized” disruption (like calculated, non-violent protest) can only do so much and it seems that big economic players like Big Tech™ to name an example are not even playing within the margins of democracy any more. Take this quote from a recent Cory Doctrow article on the EU’s attempt to regulate tech giants via the DMA:
Apple appears to be playing a high-stakes game of chicken with EU regulators, effectively saying, “Yes, you have 500 million citizens, but we have three trillion dollars, so why should we listen to you?” […] Just like Apple, Meta is behaving as though the DMA permits it to carry on its worst behavior, with minor cosmetic tweaks around the margins. Just like Apple, Meta is daring the EU to enforce its democratically enacted laws, implicitly promising to pit its billions against Europe’s institutions to preserve its right to spy on us. […] Tech has found new ways to compromise our privacy rights, our labor rights, and our consumer rights - at scale. […] After decades of regulatory indifference to tech monopolization, competition authorities all over the world are taking on Big Tech. The DMA is by far the most muscular and ambitious salvo we’ve seen. […] Seen in that light, it’s no surprise that Big Tech is refusing to comply with the rules. If the EU successfully forces tech to play fair, it will serve as a starting gun for a global race to the top, in which tech’s ill-gotten gains - of data, power and money - will be returned to the users and workers from whom that treasure came.
Even if the DMA will be enforced completely and the EU won’t let big companies weasel out of actually complying, I have very little hope that this game of resisting compliance and enacting policies is not continuing for the foreseeable future. Non compliance is surely not a phenomenon exclusive to Big Tech. Far from it. Which means that even if we get the right people to put policies into place to reign in companies this cat and mouse game is just going to make sure that climate change is even more of a sure thing.
And what about all of the non-democratic societies? And what about all those non-environmental governments who do nothing? Can you solve a planetary problem while parts of the world are at war with each other? Or at least are ideologically opposed? What about China?
I read an article by Noah Smith about the wider implications of the tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles the US have enacted. A couple of things form this:
Joe Biden is about to slap 100% tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles. A 100% tariff is an absolutely huge tariff. It means that Chinese EV makers would have to sell their EVs in the U.S. at half the price of EVs manufactured elsewhere in order to be competitive. That just isn’t going to happen. A 100% tariff will probably be enough to keep essentially all made-in-China EVs out of the U.S.
And further, himself quoting David Fickling:
A lot of people are worried that tariffs like these will slow down the transition to a low-carbon future powered by solar power and batteries. For example, David Fickling writes:
China’s widening lead in clean technology, coupled with its vast trade surplus…are combining with faltering efforts on decarbonization in developed countries to produce a toxic mix…If green technology such as electric vehicles…gets badged as foreign and threatening and finds itself excluded via…tariff policies, then drastically falling costs aren’t going to be enough to get it into the hands of consumers…An acceleration in trade wars will only slow our path to zero [carbon].
He’s right to worry. Transportation is responsible for almost 30% of U.S. carbon emissions, or about 4% of the global total. If the U.S. failed to switch to EVs, it could hamper decarbonization efforts by a small but noticeable amount.
And a last one from this:
The most important thing about these tariffs is probably the message they send. Protectionism is now the consensus economic policy of both major political parties in the United States. Biden has extended the Trump tariffs on China and levied the new EV tariffs; Trump is trying to one-up Biden by promising to raise the 100% tariffs to 200%, extend them to Mexico, and slap an additional 60% tariff on all Chinese-made goods. There is currently no major party or presidential candidate that you can vote for in America that is even remotely interested in free trade.
What I take from this is that the biggest economies are at a trade war with each other and it’s about to get very ideological on planet earth again(?) - but not in an environmentally friendly ideological way we might hope for. Meaning that systematic improvements of the climate situation are completely unlikely. Because a climate neutral Europe won’t be enough and itself utterly unlikely. I do not have hope for the rest of the planet.
All this is to say that: We will have to live with it. We will have to accept climate change. We won’t be able to stop the catastrophe. All the displaced people. All the pain and suffering. All the biodiversity loss.
What is interesting though, is that fossil fuels won’t last forever and the world’s overindulgence in a surplus of energy that is not bound to the solar energy system (as opposed to the fossil energy system that spurred much of industrialization) is inevitable. We will not live to see this, but we also won’t stop the shit show until then. The planet will go through this. I don’t see how it wouldn’t.