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How to flight climate change? Let's try honesty.
This is blog action day, and we're all supposed to be blogging about climate change. Which, one way or another, is what I generally blog about.
My suspicion, though, is that the blogosphere is going to give us, today, a great deal of just what - in my view, at least - we don't need. Which is terror, gloom and doom.
Granted, it's hard to avoid. The situation is grim, and the prospects for the kind of dramatic global action that will address the issue look pretty flimsy. But I think one reason they do look flimsy is that we have spent so much time and energy on the grim prospects. If, in fact, there is little hope that we can avert the worst effects of climate change, why bother? And especially why bother when averting those effects would involve economic peril and enormous (and unwelcome) changes in our lifestyle?
It's not that the press, as well as organizations fighting global warming haven't noticed this. And they are making furious efforts to convince the world's citizens that they really can do something to combat global warming. The problem is that the changes we really need to make sound so terrifying that they're scared to be honest about them.
So instead we are encouraged to believe, by well-meaning folk - including the UN itself, with its glitzy, ad-agency designed, Facebook-oriented Hopenhagen website - that washing your clothes in cold water and installing fluorescent lightbulbs will make a significant contribution to the problem. It won't. As Bill McKibben said last spring at a showing of a film about the (small-scale) efforts religious groups were making to address global warming: those are all good things, but it's too late for them. (One indication of the essential frivolity of the project: one of its partners is Coca-Cola. Another: so far, the petition's garnered less than 80,000 signatures. Stop Animal Cruelty has 4.5 million.)
Meanwhile, stunts (or, as Elizabeth Kolbert calls them in a wonderful New Yorker critique, eco-stunts) proliferate. My current favorite is Dirty for Swain. That's Christopher Swain, who, backed by Timberland, is swimming from Massachusetts to DC to publicize ocean pollution and encouraging his followers to support him with their own get-dirty stunts and then publicize the stunts on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
We don't need this kind of nonsense. We need truth. We need a global discussion about the real costs and consequences of addressing climate change. How can we, as a society, figure out what changes we are willing to make if we don't talk honestly about our options?
Because guess what? Once we get past the scare tactics of politicisnas and corporations who insist the steps we need to take will destroy a) their business, b) their consituents and c) the global economy (conveniently not mentioning that they've said exactly the same thing about every new environmental regulation passed in the last 30 years), we may discover that the changes we need to make will actually lead us not to the cold, dark, uncomfortable future we all, on some level, dread, but to a way of life that is more resilient, more sustaining, and just plain more fun.
Labels: Bill McKibben, Christopher Swain, climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert, Hopenhagen
Easy ways to go green - a dangerous oxymoron
If I see many more headlines about easy ways to go green, I'm going to go bananas. I just did a Google search for variants of that pernicious little phrase and came up with 41 million hits. 10 easy ways to go green. 5 cheap and easy ways to green your wardrobe. 8 easy ways to green your reading. 50 easy ways to go green.
Here's the problem: if they are really going to make a difference, they're not easy. And if they're easy, they're probably also pretty inconsequential.
I ought to know: a few years ago I, too, wrote one of these stories, as part of a series I wrote for MSN Money called "Walk the Talk." In the process of researching it (and because they were going to film my house), I decided I really should practice what I preached. So I put up a clothesline (those are my sheets in the video), and searched Home Depot (in vain) for a water heater wrapper, and tried to remember to turn off the power strips.
Here's the brutal fact: saving energy is not convenient. It sounds great to say you're picking the low-hanging fruit, and you are. But harvesting even low-hanging fruit is a lot of work.
Here are just a few of the "easy" suggestions that are a dime a dozen on the internet:
Stop using paper towels (they suggest using any old rags). Right, and wash the rags, dry them, find a place to store them....
Put all your electronic gadgets on power strips. I thought this was easy too, till I tried it. First you have to figure out when you use each gadget and make sure all the gadgets on each power strip really can be turned on and off at the same time. You also have to find a place to put the power strip where you can actually reach that little switch. And you have to remember to flick it.
Line-dry your laundry. Yes, it is rewarding. Sheets dried out of doors smell heavenly, and there's a pleasant contemplativeness to the act of hanging them out in the sun. But easy? Unless you have a clothesline inside as well as out, you can only do the laundry in good weather (which, this summer in the Northeast, where I live, means you could hardly do it at all). And while clothes dried outdoors may smell wonderful, unless the wind is blowing pretty briskly, they come out stiff as a board. (Drying them indoors is even worse; my husband, a patient man, finally put his foot down on my drying his towels indoors. They felt, he said, like sandpaper.)
Start a garden. I wonder what could possibly have made anyone think that was going to be easy.
Recycle everything you can. Yes, it's worth doing - and it's a royal pain. It's not difficult with the things the city picks up weekly, though I will never understand why juice cartons go with the metal and not with the paper. But everything you can? Let's see: compact flourescents (package them properly and take them to a not-easy-to-find recycling site), fabrics (recycled at a few of New York's Greenmarkets), books (there's a store in Manhattan that will take them), electronics (hope you get word of one of the city's infrequent collections). Oh, and remember to rent a Zipcar for all the schlepping.
Let's get real here: this is a country in which, according to a statistic widely cited on the internet (though I've never actually been able to track it to a specific source), up to 70% of the people who buy a programmable thermostat never actually program it. And that really is easy.
But here's the real problem: when we tell people it is easy to go green, one of two things will happen. Either they will put in a compact fluorescent bulb and think they are saving the planet, or they will try to make more dramatic changes and - like the people who buy a programmable thermostat with the best of intentions - give up when they find it's harder than they expected.
We have all - every one of us - grown up in a society that prizes convenience above almost every other value. And going green is not convenient. To stick to it, you have got to be willing to take trouble. Sometimes a lot of trouble.
The issue isn't simply personal. It's global. We can change all the light bulbs in the world, and it won't make a significant dent in climate change. The changes we'll need to make to really make a difference will be uncomfortable and expensive. So much so, that I can't think off the top of my head of a single politician who has actually spoken truthfully about what will be required.
Those changes may - I believe they will - bring us richer lives. But they will not be either convenient or easy.
Telling us that going green is easy isn't just dishonest. It also short-changes us, in the same way we were short-changed after 9/11 when Bush told us to go shopping. As Rebecca Solnit points out in her new book, A Paradise Built in Hell, (reviewed in the New York Times today), human beings faced with disaster are capable of extraordinary creativity and resilience.
So don't tell us it's easy. Do us justice. Tell us the truth.
easy. Labels: climate change, easy ways to go green, Rebecca Solnit
Does the media stoke our national what's-in-it-for-me debate?
The other night I saw an ad for ABC News in which the ever-avuncular Charlie Gibson touted the program as focusing on what matters to you in the news. I've seen this kind of pitch often enough, heaven knows - every news program on the air claims to tell you how the news will affect you - but this time it really bugged me.
What, may I ask, makes them think they can know what matters to me? They can't, of course, so they have to make assumptions. And the assumption they almost universally make is that what matters most to me is how some news development will affect my pocketbook.
Well, sorry, Charlie, but there is more to me - there is more to all of us - than our pocketbooks. And I'm beginning to think that the media's relentless focus on the cost of anything from a gallon of milk to a climate bill is one big reason that our national discourse has become so stunted, so pinched, and so angry.
Then comes this marvelous post on Climate Progress. What's missing from media coverage of a climate bill? According to Penn State's Donald A. Brown, it's the ethical consequences of doing nothing. "The climate change debate in the US," Brown says, "shows no sign of acknowledging that US climate change policy should be guided by duties to the rest of the world." In contrast, he points out, when Scotland passed a remarkably ambitious climate bill (a 42% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, rising to 80% by 2050), one of the arguments made for it was that, as climate change affects everyone on the planet, Scotland had a duty to do its part to address the problem.
In the US, meanwhile, the latest argument in favor of passing a climate bill is that unchecked climate change will endanger our national security (all those climate-change refugees out there). I don't mean to belittle that argument - it's quite true. But how is it that the United States, which so profoundly felt its duty to the rest of the world after World War II, seems now to be a country in which the only arguments that have any traction are the ones about how much this will hurt us? Or, even worse, not us, but me?
Obviously, the media doesn't bear the whole blame for our national descent into a what's-in-it-for-me ethos. Politicians, who regularly bring home the pork with one hand while stoking the national paranoia about taxes on the other, bear a lot of the blame. But the job of the media - theoretically, at least - is to ask the hard questions. And surely there are harder questions begging to be asked than "how will it affect me"?
Labels: climate change, Climate Progress, ethics
Transition towns and evangelical churches, or what do Rick Warren and Rob Hopkins have in common?
If you follow green blogs and tweets, as I do, it's hard to miss the ongoing slanging match between Climate Progress and the Breakthrough Institute. And I'm not, at least in this post, picking a dog in that fight. But I have been reading Breakthrough - the book that birthed the institute - and it seems to me that Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the book's co-authors, have at least one insight that all of us should pay attention to.
It answers a question I've always had about my own history as an environmentalist: if I do believe in this cause - and I do - why have I seldom contributed to, and never volunteered for, any environmental group? I did once work - for pay - for a couple of environmental groups, but that's another story. (Though perhaps not entirely unconnected to the question at hand.)
It also goes a long way to explain the exponential growth of the Transition Town movement.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger make two related points. First, that for most of its history, the environmental movement has been almost entirely dedicated to stopping things. And second, that about all it has asked from its supporters is their money and their votes. The result, they argue, is that while an enormous number of people say they support environmental causes, when push comes to shove - when they have to put their money or their convenience on the line - their environmental concerns fall by the wayside. (They're not alone in noticing this: a sure way to make green business guru Joel Makower testy is to send him a survey reporting that some huge percentage of Americans buy green, when all the evidence indicates that they don't.)
All this made sense to me, but where they really caught my attention was when they compared the success, or lack thereof, of the environmental movement with the growth of evangelical churches. Unlike environmentalists, they argue, members of evangelical churches will turn themselves inside out to support their church. Why? Because their church is more fun.
Well, I spent quite a lot of time at an evangelical megachurch while I was researching The Word, my book about how people read the Bible, and the Breakthrough guys are right: it's much more engaging, exhilarating, and satisfying to be a member of an evangelical church than it is to be a member of, say, the Sierra Club. It's not just that evangelical church schedules are packed full of meetings, clubs, groups and activities, though they are. It's also that their members are convinced that, through all these activities, they are helping to build a better world. Yes, there are things they want to stop. But there is much more that they want to create.
And suddenly a light went on: that's why the Transition movement is growing so fast. (If you're not familiar with the Transition movement, go here, or here, to find out more. Better still, get ahold of a copy of Rob Hopkins' The Transition Handbook.)
Transition isn't a church, or in any way religious, but but the Transition movement is more like an evangelical church than any other group I've ever come across. Rob Hopkins has grasped what most environmental activists seem to have missed: if people are going to be engaged over the long term, they have got to be building something, not stopping something. And they have got to enjoy themselves.
There are a lot of Transition Towns in the US - and around the world, for that matter - but the one I'm most familiar with, because I've spent some time there, is Totnes, the first in the UK. This summer, according to their July bulletin, you could attend a solstice picnic, go on an edible garden crawl, or go to a meeting about direct action on climate change. There were activities for bikers and photographers, a kids' event at a local estate, a bunch of lectures and movie screenings. And no matter what aspect of our climate crisis grabs you - housing, the economy, jobs, energy, food, health, the arts, politics - they've got a group for you.
The other genius of Transition is that the task of a Transition Town group is not to stop climate change. It is to imagine how their town could not just survive, but thrive, in an oil-constrained and warmer world, and then to do everything they can to make that imagining a reality. But the very process of working towards that goal, of course, also deepens their commitment to doing whatever they can, personally and politically, to address climate change. The two feed, and feed on, each other.
So, though it's hard to think of two people more different in almost every way than Rob Hopkins and Rick Warren...
Labels: Breakthrough Institute, climate change, Climate Progress, environmentalists, evangelical churches, Joel Makower, peak oil, Rick Warren, Rob Hopkins, Transition Towns
If growth is the measure of all things, why aren't we 20 feet tall?
The question of the juncture - or is it disjunction? - between sustainability and economic growth is being raised all over the place right now. Over on Rob Hopkins' Transition blog, there's a lively debate on the UK's low-carbon transition plan and its emphasis on economic growth. Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight, responds -- with a mordant logic worthy of Jonathan Swift -- to arguments that global warming won't be so bad because it will only cut GDP by 5% over the next 100 years. Hey, look, he says, we could wipe out almost half the world and drop GDP by only 4.4%, so why worry? And Dennis Pacheco, on Chelsea Green, asks whether California's IOUs are really a cleverly disguised alternative local currency.
It's a huge topic, and while, after decades as a financial reporter, I know something about the subject, there's a lot more that I don't know than that I do. But it does seem clear to me that there's something perverse about the way that economic growth has become the fundamental measure of the health of our society. Or any society.
If you watch financial news, you've noticed that the very first question out of any interviewer's mouth is "When is the economy going to start growing?" The very definition of a recession is negative financial growth. We are taught, over and over again, that the test of our well-being is how fast our economy is growing, and the first argument raised against any attempt to curb greenhouse gases is that it will hurt economic growth.
So when peak oil folk talk - and they do - about a steady-state economy, it's kind of scary, even to me. Can we thrive - all of us - in an economy that does not grow? Where everything stays pretty much the same?
Of course, it's not that there's not enough to go around. Just as there's enough food in the world to feed us all - if it could be gotten to the people who need it - so there's enough money in the world for a decent, if not extravagant, lifestyle for all, if some of it could be taken from those who have a ludicrous excess and given to those who have almost nothing.
The trouble is, I can't think, off the top of my head, of a single even slightly developed society that has succeeded in doing that. The human desire to hang onto what you've got is very, very strong.
On the other hand, to argue that economic growth is the only way to bring even a modicum of wealth to the world's poorest people is - essentially - to claim that it's necessary to make some obscenely wealthy in order that others may have the barest necessities of life. Does that make sense?
I certainly don't know the answer. But if climate change and peak oil are the overwhelming and intertwined emergencies of this century - and I believe they are - then it's a question we're going to have to tackle, and soon. Journalists and economists and politicians -- and all the rest of us -- are going to have to find a new way of defining social well-being. Growth won't cut it.Labels: Chelsea Green, climate change, economic growth, FiveThirtyEight, peak oil, Transition Towns
Is there such a thing as ecological intelligence? And would it help matters if there was?
The Financial Times recently reviewed Daniel Goleman's Ecological Intelligence," a follow-up to his Emotional Intelligence of a few years back.
Now I haven't actually read the book yet, so it's distinctly presumptuous of me to sound off about it. But I'm going to, because from everything I've read about it, I think the book is wrong-headed in two directions at once.
The subtitle of Goleman's book, to me, gives it all away. "How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything." Goleman's argument, according to the FT, is that if they knew the effects of the products they buy, "shoppers in Berlin or Brooklyn or Beijing could make informed choices that would speed the conversion of China’s power grid from coal-belching plants to alternate sources ... or enhance the health of miners in Africa."
There are two problems here. First off, knowing the hidden impacts of what we buy doesn't necessarily change our behavior. I challenge you to find one SUV-owner in the United States who isn't, in at least a part of her brain, perfectly aware of the by now not-so-hidden impacts of her gas-guzzler, and who doesn't feel both guilty and defensive about them. None of which stops her from driving that sucker.
If Goleman is saying that all it takes for that SUV-owner to change her behavior is to tell her about the terrible consequences of the stuff she's spewing into the atmosphere, then he's simply asking for more environmental nagging. And I think we've already had quite enough of that. I was turned off of nagging as an effective way to change behavior some 30 years ago, when in a burst of well-meaningness, I tried shopping using a little guide called "Shopping for a Better World" (now out of print), which ranked companies on a variety of social issues and then told you what products each of them made. That effort didn't last more than a month. I wanted some of the stuff that the nastiest companies made, and I didn't like the purer substitutes, and the only difference it made in my life was to stop me even trying for many years.
But just for argument, let's say that he's right - that, if informed about the result of their buying choices, consumers will do their best to use their buying power to clean up the Chinese power grid or improve the health of African miners. Just how, exactly, should they go about it? Should they buy only Chinese products manufactured using renewable energy? How will they know? So maybe they'll just stop buying anything made in China. If falling consumer demand pushes the Chinese economy into collapse, will that clean up its power grid? Has Goleman never heard of the law of unintended consequences?
What I suspect Goleman means by environmental intelligence is the desire to save the world from environmental collapse. But it's one thing to want that, and quite another to understand - much less agree - how to get there. On a listserve of the Society of Environmental Journalists, there's a passionate debate going on right now over biodiversity and poverty. To one camp, what is often hailed as biodiversity in desperately poor communities is actually the result of poverty so deep that it robs people of the ability to farm efficiently. To another, it is an ancient and freely chosen practice of great wisdom.
And - by the way - all parties in this debate are commited environmentalists.
Labels: climate change, consumerism, ecological intelligence
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