Want to save the Earth? Here’s how, but you won’t like it…
There has been a lot of navel gazing and fat chewing and graveyard whistling in response to the latest UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report on global warming which while still downplaying the risks of climate change, manages to be the most alarmist mainstream report to date. The gist is that the IPCC expects significant and irreversible change sooner rather than later, sea levels to rise and continue to rise even if we stop emitting carbon now, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Basically we are well and truly screwed. None of this is new information. And still, nobody is doing much of anything about it. Sure, there are some efforts at rearranging the deck chairs through investments in solar and wind power or promises to switch to electric cars but there are nowhere the dramatic and bold leadership steps being taken that are needed to actually halt this slow motion catastrophe. I’ve written about how we need to price things to include their true costs and while that needs to happen for us to reach sustainability, it is too late for us to get there without an immediate and drastic change in how we live. Particularly here in America. Our leaders are simply fiddling while the world burns, dividing and distracting the people while the 0.001%-ers strip mine the world to feather their bug-out-compounds.
Here’s the secret. All that money the wealthy elites are counting on to fund their escape requires consumption. Consumption on our part, the 99.999% of us who don’t have a self-sufficient private retreat on a remote temperate island. Funny enough, consumption is also what is driving global warming. What to do? The elites and their governmental lackeys will not save us. We are the only ones who will save us. It won’t be easy and if significant numbers follow the prescription below, it will push our “betters” to new paroxysms of hyperbole, witch hunts, military aggression, and various bread-and-circus distractions. The elites need us, they need to feed off of us, and they need us uninformed, docile, and afraid so we’ll sit still and meekly take it. But if we fail to consume, the capitalist economy that they rely on, that their rentier skimming bleeds from, and that drives climate change will crumble. What new shape will society take? Who knows, but better to get there voluntarily rather than via ecological collapse and war. How can I help, you ask?
This is not going to be popular, but if you truly want to do your part to stop climate change, stick it to the man, and otherwise ensure the survival of life on Earth…
Don’t procreate
The single biggest thing you can do to help the earth is to not have kids, with up to a 25 times bigger impact than ditching your car (saving 127,000 lbs of carbon equivalent per year for kid free versus just 5,200 for going car free). Adding another person or three to the planet multiplies your impact geometrically and pushes the sustainable carbon per person threshold (roughly 4,600 lbs at today’s population) lower. I know we all love our genetic vanity projects, but there are millions of orphans, refugees, rescue pets, and companion robots out there to satisfy your instincts for nurture. Failing that, just buck up and realize that if you truly care about the earth you have to sacrifice. Full disclosure, I have failed in this. :( Decreasing population is the biggest impact and the hardest to face. If we’re serious about surviving as a species we need a plan for cutting population. Wait a minute… population will take care of itself if we’re not serious, which means we are serious…
Don’t drive
Driving represents a huge portion of the average American’s carbon footprint. The average American drives 13,500 miles in a given year. With the fleet average around 25 mpg that is roughly 11,000 pounds of carbon per person at 20 pounds of carbon per gallon. Reminder, the sustainable carbon emissions per person is estimated at this time to be around 4,600 pounds, from all activities. Did I say screwed? So dust off that bike and pick up a bus route map. Telecommuting is an option for some jobs, and if it is, do it. If it isn’t, quit.
Don’t fly
The IPCC report highlights the impact of aviation, with grams of carbon emitted per passenger mile for air travel at or above driving a car. You can roughly equate the two, meaning a flight of 10,000 miles is like driving 10,000 miles, with the commensurate release of carbon dioxide. Teleconferencing is a suitable replacement for a huge majority of business travel, and flying for leisure is not really ethical in light of the times. Grandma’s funeral? She’ll get over you not being there, in fact she already has. Thanksgiving? You can get fat and drunk at home and fight with your immediate rather than extended family. Bucket list trip to Bali? Virtual reality has come a long way, psychedelic mushrooms are inexpensive and studies show yield lasting life improvements. A huge plus is that you can avoid the Kabuki theater with reach-around that is airport security. If you miss the groping I’m sure you can find some kind soul to oblige you.
Don’t eat meat
The American diet equates to roughly 6,800 pounds of carbon equivalent emissions per person per year. Of which 80% could be eliminated by going vegan. Do it. For the children. Which you don’t have.
Don’t have a large house
Americans spend 53% of their household energy on heating and cooling, or around 13,000 kWh. With a national mix of energy sources yielding 1.6 pounds of carbon dioxide per kWh, that is 20,800 pounds per household. With 2.6 people per household, that’s 8000 lbs of carbon per person per year. Build a zero house and that goes away.
Don’t throw things away
You get it. Keep your phone, fix your clothes, resole your shoes, repair your bike. This is depressing.
Don’t buy new things
Ugh. Make it stop.
Conclusions
I said this wouldn’t be easy, it wouldn’t be fun, you wouldn’t like it and yeah, that was accurate. I kind of ran out of steam there at the end, the outlook is that grim. To put it all together for you: Ignoring procreation, an American who flies 5,000 miles per year emits more than 40,000 lbs of carbon per year. Roughly 8 times the 4,600 lb sustainable limit. Cutting out flying, driving, meat, and halving your household energy budget would bring that down to around 15,000. Which is in line with estimates for the average American homeless person according to MIT. Can you see how dire this is? Even homeless people are living unsustainable lifestyles! That’s a problem we’ll have to address on the way to cutting our personal emissions and will require society-wide changes to the way in which living spaces are built, our transport infrastructure, our energy generation mix, agricultural practice, etc. We can’t wait though, we have to start changing the way we live now.
Giving up is not in our nature. So, if nothing else, the key is “Don’t”. Pretty simple. Everything we do has an impact on the planet. Every dollar we earn and spend has a cost and the current system is unsustainably set up to hide these costs and to allow those at the top to steal the future of our planet through these unsustainable capitalistic growth models. Growth for the sake of growth, growth is debt, debt is wealth, wealth is happiness. Our capitalist system on a finite planet is basically a race for the elite to accumulate as much as they can before the music stops and the rest of us realize there is nothing left for us to live on. The leaders of the world are not acting, and where they are acting they are not acting quickly or dramatically enough. We have to do it ourselves. If we can’t stick to all the above, we can stick to some. Willingly or not, we’re going to have to stick to most of them sooner rather than later. A principled, voluntary realignment of life as we know it is far better than a collapse into a Hobbesian dystopia where only the strong and selfish survive. Although Mad Max was a cool flick.