In some of the online forums I peruse from time to time, there is often a lot of "either/or" talk — endless arguments about which of two problems (or solutions) is most pressing, important, necessary, possible…
Population versus consumption is a frequent theme; also renewables versus consumption — that is, whether renewables can supply all of our energy "needs" or whether we need to reduce consumption; a third common dichotomy is systemic change versus personal consumption — "the problem is capitalism… industrial civilization… big oil… big coal… the corporations… the military-industrial complex…"
What all of these "either/or" arguments miss, of course, is that this is a multiplication problem — debating whether population or consumption is more destructive, or whether developing renewables or reducing consumption is more effective, really makes just as much sense as debating whether height or width is more important in finding the area of a rectangle!
But beyond that, these dualities betray a misunderstanding of the scale and urgency of the problem. Climate scientist Kevin Anderson has determined that we need to cut our emissions 10% per year — and drop emissions to ZERO within ten years — just to have an outside chance of holding warming to the longstanding target of 2°C (and we know what effects we are already seeing from just 0.8°C, with more in the pipeline from what we've already emitted — the 4-6° we are heading for is nearly unimaginable). So our emissions have to essentially drop off the proverbial cliff — and that is not going to happen by reducing either consumption or population, or by either effecting systemic change or changing our own lifestyles (as if one could happen without the other); and certainly not by developing renewables without radically reducing consumption as well. This is an all-hands-on-deck, do everything we possibly can as fast as we can situation, and it feels as if very few people I run into really, truly get that.
There seems to be an idea out there that if we begin to reduce our emissions somewhat, then things will start to get better... and little awareness of the cumulative nature of the problem — that what matters to the climate system is the total amount of carbon we add to the atmosphere, not how fast we put it up there. David Roberts, writing in Grist, attributes this in part to thinking about global warming the same way we think of other environmental problems like air or water pollution: if we quit putting particulates into the air, the smog dissipates within a few days (witness the dramatic improvement in air quality in LA when city officials instituted traffic controls during the 1984 Olympics); and if a factory stops dumping its wastes into a river, the water will run cleaner pretty quickly as well. But the CO2 we emit stays up there in the atmosphere for up to a century, and carbon emissions accumulate (sort of like lead posioning in your body) — and that is the piece of this that people seem to have trouble getting their heads around. Our habits of thinking are too ingrained, ironically from past successes.
So a lot of concerned, well-meaning folks (including many of my friends and relations) don't really feel the urgency, and continue to go about their lives thinking that something will come along to fix this — after all, we sent a man to the moon, didn't we?...Or debate which of various dual options is the most realistic, with little recognition that the only way to do what really needs to be done — that is, bring emissions down to ZERO, as soon as possible — is to radically reduce both population and consumption, to both develop renewables and reduce consumption; and to (yes) change our capitalist-industrial-corporate system and look to our own wasteful lifestyles that support that system.
More about all three of these in future posts, soon I hope (sorry I am not as prolific as I would like to be, I'm a bit painstaking in my writing)…
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