Can Boomers’ Personal Actions Avert a Climate Catastrophe?
Three tests: Will you do it? Could it matter? Can it spread?
Does it make sense for Baby Boomers to take personal action to address the climate emergency? For many of us, this seems the logical place to start. After all, we have to start somewhere and these actions are the only things we can fully control ourselves.
Not surprisingly, there are scores of books and thousands of articles about small, individual actions you can take to slow climate change. Yet we know that avoiding catastrophe will require rapid, systemic change, a transformation of societies and economies unlike anything the world has ever seen. And this must be achieved in the face of determined opposition from powerful, wealthy people who benefit from the status quo, as well as ordinary people who have been persuaded that climate action would threaten their jobs or lifestyles. In the face of such fierce opposition, how can personal and household actions make a difference?
For Boomers there’s an additional and unpleasant factor to consider: most of our emissions history is behind us. Even if you died tomorrow, thereby ceasing your emissions entirely, the greenhouse gasses you have caused to be emitted during your lifetime will go on heating the planet for centuries to come.
Perhaps most importantly, there’s the risk of a type of cognitive bias in which people who take small actions to address a big problem think that they have done their part and do no more. Unable to find a name for this, I’m calling it Tote Bag Bias. Imagine a person who drives to the store in an SUV, stocks up on groceries including lots of beef, then feels virtuous because they take it all home in reusable totes.
Corporations encourage Tote Bag Bias to divert attention from the need for effective regulations and better policies so they can continue with business as usual. Many Boomers remember the 1971 Keep America Beautiful ad in which an Italian-American actor dressed as an American Indian canoes past smokestacks along a polluted river. A bag of trash thrown from a passing car lands at his feet. A single tear rolls down his cheek. The kicker: “People start pollution. People can stop it.”
Mark Kaufmann, a science reporter at Mashable, tells how the campaign was created by beverage and packaging companies that were already pumping out billions of plastic bottles each year, even as they blocked a bill in Congress that would have required a 5-cent deposit on beverage containers. “The real message, underlying the staged tear and feather headdress, is that pollution is your problem, not the fault of the industry mass-producing cheap bottles,” Kaufmann writes.
Less well-known, even among people who passionately support climate action, is that one of the world’s biggest oil companies created the concept of “personal carbon footprint” for much the same reasons. Kaufmann relates how 20 years ago British Petroleum hired the public relations firm Ogilvy & Mather to persuade people that climate change is our fault, not the fault of the giant oil companies that extract, process, and sell the stuff, propped up by billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies, while they block policies that would speed the transition to lower-carbon alternatives.
BP unveiled its “carbon footprint calculator” in 2004 so that people could assess “how their normal daily life… is largely responsible for heating the globe,” Kauffman writes. “A decade and a half later, ‘carbon footprint’ is everywhere. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has a carbon calculator. The New York Times has a guide on ‘How to Reduce Your Carbon Footprint.’ Mashable published a story in 2019 entitled ‘How to shrink your carbon footprint when you travel.’
The personal carbon footprint is the meme that will not die. Just today a friend forwarded me an email from the consulting firm Deloitte promoting a personal carbon calculator that estimates the climate footprint of your purchases by linking to your credit cards. Tagline: Climate change is not a choice, it’s billions of them. None of the suggested actions includes organizing, voting, divesting or pressing for climate-smart policies.
Gernot Wagner argues in But Will the Planet Notice?, his excellent introduction to the history of environmental economics, that solving environmental problems requires smart policy rather than personal action. The cover powerfully conveys his thesis: a large footprint comprising many smaller footprints points down the page, while a single small footprint in the midst of them points up. The implied answer to the question in his title: no, the planet will not notice our individual actions.
Yet Wagner and his wife have spent a ton of time and money to reduce their climate footprint. In a recent article, he described how they spent $100,000 to retrofit their 750 square foot, 19th Century New York City apartment to save energy and cut emissions. Actions included installing solar-powered, computerized skylights that automatically open and close to control temperature, humidity and indoor carbon dioxide levels. The retrofits cut their electric bill, which had been as high at $400 a month, to about $100. Of course, as he notes, “it will take decades to recoup our initial outlay.” Why bother?
When I asked Wagner this, he pointed me to an article he wrote for The Economist. For individual actions to be effective, he writes, “it is essential that they generate momentum.” Bicycling, he writes, is one example. People who ride bikes urge their local governments to build more bike lanes, which makes other people feel safer riding bikes, which leads to more bike riders, which leads to more and better bike infrastructure, creating a virtuous loop.
Peer influence can be quite powerful. A recent article from the Yale School of Environment concluded that “a growing body of research shows that the behavior of peers has a significant influence” on energy-related decisions such as installing rooftop solar or buying an EV. For example, residential rooftop solar tends to pop up in clusters: if one homeowner installs solar panels, neighbors are more likely to do the same. One study found that panels that could be seen from the street influenced neighbors up to 500 meters away, while those that couldn’t readily be seen only influenced neighbors up to 100 meters away. The researchers suggest that for the hard-to-see panels, word-of-mouth may be the primary means of influence.
Drawing on these ideas for a book I’m writing, I’ve created three tests I applied in selecting personal actions to recommend:
- First, feasibility. Am I willing and able to do this? This test seems obvious, but even the most dedicated among us will not undertake actions that are too hard, too expensive, or make life significantly more difficult. That’s why in the six actions I plan to suggest, I not only explain how they can help the planet but how they can make your life better — or at least not any worse.
- Second, impact. Will the action make a difference if enough people do it? There are many sustainability choices that would have little or no impact on the climate, even if everybody did them. Examples include those tote bags, recycling, composting, and planting native plants. I do all of these things and heartily recommend them for other reasons. But I don’t pretend that these actions are going to make a difference to the climate. That would be falling prey to the Tote Bag Bias.
- Third: spreadability. Can I do this in a way that makes the action spread? Some things, like installing visible rooftop solar, spread naturally. Others, like divesting your retirement savings from fossil fuels, can spread through discussions with the people who help you move your money, such as your financial advisor (if you are lucky enough to have one), and through conversations with friends and family. It’s not necessary to announce such a decision on FaceBook — though it probably wouldn’t hurt!
In subsequent posts (and in the draft of my book chapter on personal action) I’ll describe six actions and show how they meet these three tests. (Spoiler alert!) The six actions are:
- Stop wasting food and eat less meat
- Drive less — walk, bike, and take public transport more
- Move your money
- Install rooftop solar
- Swap your ICE for an EV
- Fly less — or not at all.
The list starts with actions you can do right away. If you haven’t done so already, you can start today eliminating food waste and shifting to a plant-based diet. Same for driving less and walking and biking more. Moving your money — shifting your retirement savings from index funds that include fossil fuels to those that do not — will take a little longer but can typically be done in a month or two. Installing rooftop solar and replacing your internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicle with a plug-in electric are significant investments for most of us, but for many Boomers will still pass the feasibility test. My wife and I have done all of the first five actions within the past year. I’ve left flying less or not at all for last, for reasons you will see when I share that post.
This is a work in progress! I welcome comments, suggestions and advice!
Thanks!
