‘Individual Action Does Not Work’

I totally agree with this, but I pause at phrases like

Every ton of carbon dioxide pollution causes around $20 of damage to economies, ecosystems and human health. That sum times 20 implies $400 worth of damage per American per year.

Remember those posters in your middle school that said ‘every cigarette you smoke takes 13 minutes off your life’? As important as it is to quantify the impact we as consumers have on the earth, this is a number designed to mobilize, not to inform.

The environmental movement has enough enemies already. The argument they’re making is just as strong without adding statisticians to the list.

‘What do we want?’ ‘Not climate change!’ ‘When do we want it?’ ‘Within a reasonable timeframe!’

The ‘official protest’ of the COP 15 was this afternoon

I mostly went to look

Every time I go to demonstrations, two things strike me:

1. It seems like it’s the same 75 sign-carrying Euro-hobbits, no matter the cause

and 2. The ‘gather in large, chanting masses’ model seems sorta obsolete.

I’m all for showing support for climate change legislation,

But it seems like we would have come up with a more 2.0 way to do it by now.

It always seems sort of … capitalistic.

Everyone expressing their self-interest,

And hoping it will combine to make us all better off.

We massed and un-massed, chanted and swayed.

And as the day went on, we only seemed to get colder.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Copenhagen: ‘It’s rather like electing a Pope’

-

I was talking to my friend Brock, a scientist at Berkeley and the smartest guy I know, on IM last night:

Brock: Dude what's up.

Mike: Brock!

yo

I'm reading nobel speeches! So much nutrition!

what you up to?

Brock: Just shouting you out. How are ya?

Merry Fucking Xmas and all that.

Are we gonna change the world in CPH this week or are we toast?

Mike: I'm going to a big-ass protest on saturday. Though literally no one I've talked to knows what we're actually protesting. It’s the James Deans leading the James Deans.

Brock: Good on ya, man, I admire you.

Yeah, always hard to channel general dissatisfaction.

Mike: seriously. No one knows what the fuck they're doing

I’m just going because I want to be photographed holding a sign that says The Climes They Are A-Changin'

you been following this whole shit?

Brock: Kinda, but it's rather like electing a pope.

All behind closed doors.

Mike: Let's hope this ends with someone from the Hitler Youth as well

Brock: From here, I can only cross fingers.

Write letters, promote discussion, etc, but there hasn't been a whole lot to follow.

Mike: do you particularly care about this issue? Being a scientist and all?

Brock: Fuck it, we need total climate Nazis right now.

I think it's terrifying.

Mike: So you're on board with The Whole Gore Yards

what do you think we should do? Or they should do, or whatever?

Brock: I am pretty convinced that life will change dramatically within our lifetime due to climate change.

And I actually think it's probably way too late.

Mike: Yeah? I defer to your judgement on this, scientifically

what did it for you, originally?

Brock: Hmmmm good question.

I've seen some really compelling data.

If you just measure CO2 levels, that freaks that shit out of me.

Mike: So you're directly convinced by the science . Not through a Bono-shaped conduit, like the rest of us

Brock: It correlates spectacularly well with global temperature.

Mike: I've seen that graph too it's insane

Brock: That it's unlinked is statistically irrelevant.

And if you extrapolate into the future….

That's when it gets really really scary.

Because there is no reason to think that the relationship will change.

Mike: what do you think the politicians should do, particularly?

Brock: Dramatically invest in economic incentives for cleaner living.

That's vague but we need to jump over this hurdle where action for climate impedes economic viability.

Mike: It would be great to point to a country and be like 'lets be like them!' but everyone is kind of dropping the ball it sounds like

you like any particulars?

Brock: Forest credits for tropical countries.

Keep the carbon in trees and out of the air.

oh yeah Brazil's experimenting with that, right?

Brazil is turning their shit around.

If every tropical country did the same it would help.

Mike: any new stuff coming out from the scientific side?

new revelations, new solutions?

Brock: Unfortunately, way too much negative publicity and that's it.

A few dumbasses joking about manipulating data really does a lot of damage.

Mike: Is there a new emerging scientific consensus? Either on the problem side or the solution side?

Brock: Well, I think that's the scary thing, that the scientific consensus is that we really really really fucked up on this.

Solutions seem completely unrealistic at this point.

We need to basically cut in half CO2 emissions immediately.

Mike: no way, it's that bad?

Brock: If you look at the projections, it's really bad.

Mike: Jesus, the Day After Tomorrow is starting to look more and more like a documentary

Brock: I mean, if population change keeps expanding.

It's bad man.

Mike: so as the science emerges, it's actually getting fucking worse? What's the timeline?

Brock: Dunno, I gotta defer on this one.

It's irresponsible for scientists to overpredict.

Mike: true. Especially in these trying times of abundant Palintry

Brock: Yet this causes tremendous understandable frustration on the part of citizens and enemies of science.

Science is not, never has been, never should be, political.

Mike: This conversation helps me know what to protest on Saturday

My sign is staying the same though

 

 

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

“The distraction of the ‘go green’ movement”

There's a great op-ed in the Washington Post today that sums why I find it difficult to get enthusiastic about the green 'movement' as it's currently practiced.

Stop "going green." Just stop it. No more compact fluorescent light bulbs. No more green wedding planning. No more organic toothpicks for holiday hors d'oeuvres.

Green gestures [...] ("Look honey, another Vanity Fair Green Issue!") lure us into believing that broad change is happening when the data shows that it isn't. Despite all our talk about washing clothes in cold water, we aren't making much of a difference.

For eight years, George W. Bush promoted voluntary action as the nation's primary response to global warming — and for eight years, aggregate greenhouse gas emissions remained unchanged. Even today, only 10 percent of our household light bulbs are compact fluorescents. Hybrids account for only 2.5 percent of U.S. auto sales.

Every time I see some magazine article about Greening Your Whatever, I think shut the fuck up. The consumer-powered green movement isn't very useful, and may be doing more harm than good. For five reasons:

1. Consumers are fickle. You might be able to guilt consumers into buying reusable coffee filters next time they go to the store. But the next time? And the next time? Climate change is too important to be driven by the same mechanism that got you to buy Crocs.

2. Not everybody cares. O Magazine and Bono are going to deliver, at best, a tiny portion of consumers.
3. It doesn't target the fundamentals. Buying florescent light bulbs is great. But if you live in a house with four bedrooms, two living rooms, a three-car garage and a treehouse, all of which are lighted and heated, you're not exactly carbon-neutral. Driving a hybrid is great too. But if you live 40 miles away from work and commute by car every day, you're bad for the environment, no matter what you drive. Consumer-based green messages might be fine for getting people to switch from one form of consumption to another, but not reducing it overall.
4. We don't always know what we're buying. I'm not saying the 'green movement' is a fad. But it does have fad elements. 
   We all love organic produce, yay. But do we really know that a salad dressing with 'Organic!' next to the cartoon barn on the label is actually good for the climate? Does that definition incorporate methods of farming? Transport? The labor rights of workers? The fact is, you can charge a lot more for something if it's organic or 'Earth-friendly'. Right now, there aren't any incentives for businesses to offer products that are Earth-friendly. There are only incentives to make products that seem Earth-friendly. There isn't watching these labels or the practices behind them.
5. Consumer products aren't everything. Goods and services sold to magazine-flipping consumers don't actually make up all that much of the economy. Businesses buy shit too. So do governments. Tons of services go on in the background of our economies, totally unnoticed. I haven't heard anyone teaching community-center seminars in how to pick a greener sewage-removal provider. 'Voting with your dollar' only impacts the economy you can see.  

Copenhagen is all climate-tarded this week because of the summit, and it's mostly of the consumer-driven, 'change one tiny habit and we're all going to be ok' variety. I saw a huge sign in one of the city center squares last night that said 'Brad Pitt is Saving The World.'

Because nothing says 'this problem is of the utmost seriousness' like inviting comparisons to a cologne ad.  

Hopefully somewhere in Copenhagen this week, around an oak-paneled conference table, someone's talking about how we can change our options, not just our choices.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Green is the color of my true love’s faddish obsession

-

This is exactly what I was trying to say:

If you look at how people live in the United States, the real green individual is the poor person who lives in a small apartment, rides the bus to work, and consumes beef relatively sparingly. That guy’s environmental footprint is probably smaller in most ways than that of a prosperous person who goes out of his way to consume green products. [...] “To go green” on a social level would probably look very different from what an individual upper middle-class environmentally minded consumer’s personal efforts to do so look like.

Yep. 'Going green' isn't necessarily a bad thing, but a two-car suburban mom putting a WatR-SavR on the showerhead and calling herself small-footprint is like an obese woman putting a slice of orange on top of a pound cake and calling it a salad.

In a time when we need to be asking real questions about the way we all live our lives, messages that essentially boil down to 'Buy something different than the thing that you normally buy!' are not going to cut it.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

Think globally, act selfishly

I've been an increasily amused spectator of the dozens of flash-fads surrounding food we've witnessed in the past few years. Starting with the Atkins diet, it seems like every three months there is a new paradigm for the 'right' way to eat. 'Fat doesn't make you fat!' 'Eat fewer calories and live forever!' 'Only buy local stuff; every Chiquita you buy is flown to your supermarket on a private 747 that runs on dictator-juice!'

There's a new one every year, and the whole 'locavore' thing is the latest movement (i.e. fad) to capture the guilty minds of concerned Americans (i.e. white liberals) from San Fransisco to Manhattan. Actually, just San Franscisco and Manhattan.

The 'Eat Local' thing makes a certain amount of sense. A mango grown nearby is going to be better for the environment, on the whole, than one grown in Libya and flown to you before it's ripe, right? Ummm:

We find that although food is transported long distances in general (1640 km delivery and 6760 km life-cycle supply chain on average) the GHG emissions associated with food are dominated by the production phase, contributing 83% of the average U.S. household’s 8.1 t CO2e/yr footprint for food consumption. Transportation as a whole represents only 11% of life-cycle GHG emissions, and final delivery from producer to retail contributes only 4%. [...] we suggest that dietary shift can be a more effective means of lowering an average household’s food-related climate footprint than “buying local.”

So pretty much what that's saying is that most of the emissions from food come in the production phase, and only 4 percent from transpo. So that mango, grown in non-tractored, less-pesticided Libya, is actually better than your Cali-mango. (If all you care about is the environment, that is. You might wanna ask about who picked the Libya-mango, how old he was and what he gets paid).

I'm getting really sick of this whole discourse that says you can solve climate change by eating less beef, or buying local, or biking to work. Yes, all those things are good, and you should do them. But climate change is fundamentally a matter of infrastructure, not whether you buy reusable coffee filters. If you took all the effort you spend on fair trade tampons and Norwegian sugarcane and started giving your government shit, something might actually happen that makes a difference. Otherwise you're just coloring in the margins. 

Things like wind-farms, bike lanes, emissions standards, carbon caps, sustainable agriculture and efficiency of scale can be achieved by governments with a flick of their mandate. Large-scale, paradigmatic shifts require regulation. The defining struggle of last century, the conditions of Industrial Revolution labourers, wasn't solved by people buying Fair Trade Fords. Workers protested and organized, and governments made laws about working hours and rest periods, and things changed society-wide.

So if you really want to do something useful, put down the seaweed toilet paper, pop off your hemp-Crocs, and write your Congressman. The local one.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend