If Not You, Climate Activist, Then Who?
Some activists argue that individual climate actions don’t matter. They’re wrong. Here’s the math.
Have you ever searched for the top articles related to climate change on Medium? The results are pretty discouraging, particularly if you’re someone who is looking to do something about climate change.
Here’s three out of the top five headlines:
- Quit Obsessing About Climate Change. What You Do or Don’t Do No Longer Matters.
- Climate Change Activists Are Lying to You
- This Statistic Changed My Entire Perspective of Climate Change (Spoiler: it’s that “If every American did everything they could to reduce their carbon footprint, it would only reduce U.S. gross emissions by about 22%.”)
It can be disheartening to read these articles. Their arguments are built on well-researched facts about the sources of carbon emissions. If you’re looking for someone to blame for climate change, companies, governments, and high-carbon industries are good targets.
The logic of these arguments is attractively simple:
- Large, bad companies caused climate change. Therefore →
- You should stop feeling responsible for doing anything to fix it. It’s their fault so you neither can nor should make meaningful changes in your own life. These companies’ impact is so large and yours is so small that you’d just be wasting your time/energy, etc.
We largely agree with everything up until the “therefore.” It’s at that point that such arguments make a logic leap. They jump from one conclusion: big bad companies made the problem to another: individual actions cannot fix it, without demonstrating the causal relationship between the two.
While this logic is simple and unburdening, it is ultimately lazy and wrong. The opposite, that you can and should do something about climate change, is actually far closer to the truth. Individual actions drive society. They push it to remain in the status quo, or, when enough of them build up, they drive society to change.
When you take a personal climate action, like biking or getting solar panels, you not only can reduce your own carbon footprint, but you drive change in your personal network and across industrial supply chains. And we’re not just saying this. Both phenomena have been researched and quantified. We’ll walk through the math below.
Before that, we want to share a Jewish proverb that we think speaks to our individual responsibility around climate change:
If not me, who?
If not you, activist who follows climate change closely enough to write or read articles like those above, then who? Who could we reasonably expect to take action? Who else is likely to lead the transition to a zero-carbon society? Really, think about the question. If not you, who?
The apathy that such naysaying articles sow amongst climate activists is dangerous. It’s dangerous because in order to stabilize our climate, we need our cars to become electric. We need solar panels on all homes (plus attic insulation, induction stoves, etc.). We need plant-based and lab-grown meat to go from novel to normal. We need our grocery stores to be filled with food that was grown on farms that are sequestering carbon back into their soil.
These societal changes won’t happen automatically. They need forward-looking people to make deliberate choices. Only then can such low-carbon technologies and practices have the chance of going mainstream.
From one climate activist to another, you can and should take meaningful personal climate actions. We need you to lead us onto the trail that ends in a stable climate. We need you to make living a decarbonized life normal.
Your actions matter. Let’s dig into the math.
If you want more where this came from, we adapted much of the following from our deep dive into why divestment from fossil fuels and re-investment in renewable energy matters. The arguments against divestment similarly rely on flawed logic.
#1: Your Actions Influence Your Network and Community
When we’re trying to make a decision or a change in our lives, we often look at what our peers are doing. Why do you read product reviews when shopping online? Why do you ask your friends what show you should watch next? Why are there more hybrid cars here in the Bay Area than in most other places of the country?
When you align your daily life with your climate values, whether it be biking over driving, cooking a vegan meal, or changing who you bank with, you are setting an example for your community to follow. And that example ripples out.
Researchers studied this influence when it comes to what can be one of the most impactful climate actions you can take: getting solar panels. In 2014, the Journal of Economic Geography published an article looking at the question, are solar panels contagious?
They looked at home solar installations in Connecticut in 2014 and found the answer is a clear yes. They found that if you install a solar system on your house, you increase the likelihood of another solar system being installed in your area. This was true after they factored out other potential demographic explanations such as income or political views. This makes sense, solar panels are a highly visible change. Here’s a line from their conclusion:
“Our results indicate that there are important spatial neighbor effects: adding one more adoption in the previous 6 months increases the number of PV system adoptions in a block group per year-quarter within 0.5 miles of the system by 0.44 systems on average.”
So, based upon their findings, you could expect an installed solar system in the green circle (below) to lead to an additional 0.44 systems in that circle. You could almost claim that such systems got 1.44x the CO2 impact for the price of one. Almost, but we don’t want to wander down the rabbit hole of double-counting.
The articles we linked to at the top of this one fail to answer the question, well, how does something go mainstream? If we need all cars to be electric and every home and structure to have solar, how does the adoption of these technologies on a mass scale happen?
This phenomenon has been thoroughly studied. It starts with those who are willing to go against the status quo. These are the people that Everett Rogers, in his theory of Diffusion of Innovation, dubbed the “Innovators.” The 2.5% of the market that is willing to take a chance on something promising. If they have a positive experience, it enables the more risk-averse early adopters to jump on board.
When you take a climate action you give permission and encouragement to your network and community to follow in your footsteps. Thus, your action ripples; when someone in your network takes an action, their influence spans to their network and their community.
If you’re reading this (and have gotten this far) you probably care a lot about climate change. If you aren’t an Innovator or Early Adopter of technologies like solar, electric cars, plant-based diets, then… who is? Who would be more likely than you?
#2: Your Actions Change Industrial Supply Chains
Ok, ok. So maybe your actions do matter, but how big of an impact can they really have compared to big companies? What about that stat from the article at the beginning that said if every person in America went zero-carbon it would only reduce America’s emissions by 22%?
So, first off, that article needs to check its sources. We looked at the blog it cites. There’s no link or mention to a study backing up this stat.
According to the EPA, our households are responsible for 42% of US energy emissions (our homes and cars). As you can see, energy is the source of a significant majority of America’s carbon footprint.
But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that the 22% stat is correct. The logic is still wrong. The actions you take not only influence those around you, but the entire industrial supply chain. Let’s look at the math.
Let’s walk through a thought exercise that William MacAskill’s laid out in Doing Good Better:
If you don’t buy a chicken breast at the grocery store, does it matter? The chicken is already there. It was already killed and packaged for you. Will your decision really impact the supply chain?
Yes. It does make a difference, but in a way we don’t intuitively grok. When we think about the impact of our personal choices, we tend to mentally estimate the likelihood that our action has a tangible impact on the broader system.
You think to yourself: there are a lot of chicken breasts here at the grocery store. I bet they have more in the back. Hundreds or thousands of people come through here every day. What difference could my one choice make?
And if you stop there, the answer is: not very much. But there’s a second part that we don’t often think about as our brains don’t intuitively think statistically (learn more about that in: Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow). The second part of the equation asks: what would the magnitude of impact be if our decision were the deciding factor?
Let’s walk through an example. Most of the time when you choose not to buy meat at the grocery store, it will not impact the amount of meat the store manager orders. But if the manager orders meat in units of 1,000 and your decision not to buy meat that week meant the store sold 4,999 chicken breasts rather than 5,000, your single action reduced the next week’s order by 1,000. That’s a huge swing for one action and can make up for all of the times it didn’t make an impact.
The book Economics of Farm Animal Welfare actually crunched the numbers:
“On average, if you give up one egg, total production ultimately falls by 0.91 eggs; if you give up one gallon of milk, total production falls by 0.56 gallons. Other products are somewhere in between: economists estimate if you give up one pound of beef, beef production falls by 0.68 pounds; if you give up one pound of pork, production ultimately falls by 0.74 pounds; if you give up one pound of chicken, production ultimately falls by 0.76 pounds.” F. Bailey Norwood and Jayson L. Lusk, Compassion, by the Pound: The Economics of Farm Animal Welfare (New York: Oxford University, 2011, 223).
Zooming out, all of this should make sense. What else but our decisions drive demand in the industrial supply chain? When something doesn’t sell fast enough, a store manager is not going to order another pallet of it. If a store is selling out of something, they will order more of it for next week. Companies are not alien entities, but collections of people all making choices.
The hard part is connecting the dots between our high level understanding of how supply chains work and the impact you have on them as an individual. It’s opaque and it feels like a leap of faith, but it has an impact. Look at the world today vs. just a few years ago. Burger King has Impossible burgers. Ford is gearing up to launch an all electric F-150 in 2022. The supply chain is listening and it is changing. The exact wrong thing to do now is to stop and return to the status quo.
#3: Your Carbon Footprint Has an Impact, Especially if You Live in a Wealthy Country
The final point we’ll make is a simple argument about fairness. If you live in the US, and particularly if you are wealthy or grew up in an affluent community, is it fair that you have a much higher carbon footprint than most other people on the planet?
By causing the most harm ourselves, shouldn’t we be the first to step up? It’s too easy to just blame corporations when we are the ones who buy their products.
Frankly, in wealthy nations like the US, we get the benefit of getting to use the systems and infrastructure that all those burned fossil fuels produced. Look at the graph above. Residents of which of those countries should do the most? If not us, those with the highest global carbon footprints, then who?
If you’re wealthy by global standards, you are responsible for emitting far more greenhouse gases than the majority of humans on our planet. Here’s how writers at Vox put it in a recent article, How affluent people can end their mindless overconsumption:
“According to a September report from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the richest 10 percent of the world’s population — those who earned $38,000 per year or more as of 2015 — were responsible for 52 percent of cumulative carbon emissions and ate up 31 percent of the world’s carbon budget from 1990 to 2015.
Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent of people — who made $109,000 or more per year in 2015 — alone were responsible for 15 percent of cumulative emissions, and used 9 percent of the carbon budget.”
It feels good to blame corporations and governments and the systems that are larger than ourselves. And they deserve a big part of the blame for climate change. Fossil fuel companies have suppressed the facts, killed low-carbon technologies, and pursued shareholder profit above all else.
But it’s logically lazy and morally wrong to claim that such blame absolves us of our individual responsibility to take action. Blame ≠ capacity to fix. We are all part of a world that still runs on fossil fuels. We have benefited from them, especially those of us who are wealthy. And our actions matter. Collectively, they are what change the world. Without individual actions, how will the status quo change?
So, take heart.
Your actions do matter. They have the power to change the world. And if anyone says otherwise, ask them for their math.
We’d love to hear your thoughts and feedback. We’re particularly interested in hearing about your theory of change and/or your vision for how we go from our current trajectory to a stable climate.
About us: We’re James and Zach, two climate-nerds living along the West coast, USA. We’ve known each other since we were four years old. We started Carbon Collective because when we stop working, we want to retire into a world with a stable climate. We couldn’t find any retirement funds truly aligned with that goal, so we built our own.
If you are passionate about building better tools for taking meaningful climate actions, we’d love to connect!
