by: Jonathan Young
I am at the same time heartened and disappointed by the Climate Strike that took place last month: heartened to see so many people, many of them young, who are genuinely concerned with the effects of the damage we have done and continue to wreak on our planetary habitat, but disappointed because the result of this, as has been the result of all climate action going back to the Kyoto Protocol, will be no change at all.
It’s one thing to call for a net-zero society by 2030, or pass legislation requiring net-zero emissions in a particular state by 2050 (as Illinois has done); it is another thing entirely to actually do that, one that would require incredible technological development, a complete reworking of our entire economic system, and a fundamental change in human behavior.
We like to blame the problem of carbon dioxide emissions on heavy industry or government inaction in regulating that industry, but we conveniently forget that the only reason these polluting industries and their government regulators exist is because of us—the consumers who are the reason industry exists at all.
The industrial structures overseen by government policy which bring food to your refrigerator, a car to your garage, and natural gas to your home—indeed, that caused the car and garage and home to be built in the first place, and gas lines to be laid, and the long and complex industrial supply chain to bring goods to you at all to be developed—have all been built in the service of you and me and everyone we know, the consumers, and our billions of fellow consumers. For as long as that remains so, there is nothing to be done beyond a little streamlining of a grossly exploitative, highly unequal, and environmentally destructive system.
“Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for increasing efficiency in our energy and materials consumption. But it isn’t the magic bullet that climate activists suggest it is”
The most common calls to address these issues—set the thermostat at a different temperature, use solar panels or wind generators to provide power to those lights, stick a battery and electric motor in that car instead of a gas engine—fail to address the magnitude of those efficiencies compared to the overall cost of our use of HVAC systems, electric lighting and appliances, and cars at all. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for increasing efficiency in our energy and materials consumption. But it isn’t the magic bullet that climate activists suggest it is; slight improvements in efficiency and slight reductions in CO2 emissions won’t fix this problem when the average American’s carbon footprint is nearly 20 metric tons per year and our global emissions near 40 billion metric tons annually, increasing even after the signing of the Paris accords in 2015. Reducing our CO2 emissions to zero is not possible simply through government regulation and planting more trees, and it is not simply a question of willpower or moral fortitude—as Al Gore suggested in a recent New York Times editorial. It would require that our lifestyles, especially in North America and western Europe, radically and fundamentally change in ways most if not all of us would find unacceptable.
The untruth we have built up around this issue of climate change is that we can have our cake and eat it too: that we can abolish carbon emissions with no net effect on our lifestyles or population; that we as consumers aren’t really to blame for the problem in the first place and so should not have to change those lifestyles anyway; that government and industry have not just the responsibility but the power to fix this. In the end, none of those statements is true. Protest all you want, that fact won’t change.
