CLIMATE CRISIS 101
(A.K.A. ENGLISH 23)
The Climate Crisis: What It Is and What Each of Us Can Do About It
Note that this IS NOT the current website for Eng 23.
This is an archived website from 2019-2020.
Go to the current 2020-21 website.
(Jump down to Table of Contents, Syllabus, or Lectures)
I just stumbled on this page. What’s this all about?
This long webpage contains a university course on the climate crisis. It is a complete course and completely open to the public. Although the only way to receive university credit for the course is by taking English 23 at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), it is nonetheless possible to access all of the material for that course on this page, free of cost.
Why is English 23 also called Climate Crisis 101?
Although the YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram accounts, as well as the URL and podcast, associated with this material are all called “ClimateCrisis101,” the UCSB course that this is all based upon has the designation “English 23.” Sorry for any confusion – as this is hardly an ideal situation – but this is how UCSB designates its courses. Nonetheless, Eng 23 is a 101 (i.e. introductory) course on the climate crisis. Why not stick with the name “English23” throughout? The simple fact is that it’s hardly a descriptive name. Actually, it’s not even a little descriptive… So, in order to make the course immediately recognizable to an online audience as an introduction to the climate crisis, it is also known as “ClimateCrisis101.”
What exactly is Climate Crisis 101?
Climate Crisis 101 is a number of things.
First, it is an actual college course offered at UCSB.
Second, it’s the course content, such as the Climate Crisis 101 YouTube channel, audio podcast series, and this webpage, which are entirely free of charge and open to the public.
In the case of YouTube, this takes the form of short video lectures that not only explain the nuts and bolts of various aspects of the climate crisis, but focus on what we can do about it, both as individuals and through collective action.
Unlike a traditional lecture series, each of the primary lectures is short and to the point. These YouTube videos are usually less than 20 minutes in length (though the “deep dive” videos, which comment on the online class discussions, are longer.) For the most part, you can view them in any order that you like, though, as they are clustered in short playlists around certain themes, some videos reference others in their particular playlist. Still, feel free to poke around and watch anything that catches your eye in any order that you want, as no video here is a prerequisite for any other. This strikes me as a more interesting – and potentially far more effective – way of experiencing material than sitting through a prescribed sequence of hour-long lectures.
The focused discussions of the climate crisis that take place in the YouTube comments are central to the course, as literally hundreds of people constructively discuss particular issues there.
The audio podcast series adds another element to the discussion through interviews with a range of individuals, from climate scientists to journalists to teen activists, who are intervening in the crisis.
Course Overview and Approach
In one sense, the climate crisis is being caused by a rise in atmospheric CO2 and other so-called greenhouse gases. Science can address this cause. However, approached in another way altogether, this crisis is being caused by a range of troubling human activities that require the release of these gases, such as our obsessions in the developed world with endless consumer goods, cars, certain food, lavish houses, fast fashion, air travel, and a broad range of additional lifestyle choices. The natural sciences may be able to tell us how these activities are changing our climate, but not why we are engaging in them. That’s a job for the environmental humanities and social sciences.
In this course, we will see anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) climate change for what it is and address it as such: a human problem brought about by human actions. Thus, we will be taking a long hard look – from the perspective of the environmental humanities – at these actions and how they are culturally constructed. In other words, we will be exploring why we do what we do, even when these actions are disastrous for our planet and our species (along with most other species on the planet).
While this largely academic question is interesting in its own right, the course is also meant to be deeply personal insofar as we will be looking at our own actions and how they impact the planet and climate. Moreover, we will not just be considering our individual actions, but also forms of collective climate activism. Becoming engaged and active, whether simply by voting or by becoming a committed climate activist, is of paramount importance if we are to mitigate this crisis.
Lecturer
The course lecturer is Professor Ken Hiltner, who wrote and recorded all this material. Whenever something is written in the first person (i.e. “I believe that…”), it is Ken’s voice that you are hearing. In addition to the University of California, Santa Barbara, Ken has taught at Harvard, where he received his Ph.D., and at Princeton, where he served for a year as the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Visiting Professor in the Environment and Humanities at Princeton University’s Environmental Institute (PEI). He is currently Director of UCSB’s Environmental Humanities Center.
Why does this course take a humanities approach to the climate crisis?
As noted above, the climate crisis can be seen as a human problem brought about by human actions. In addition to seeing the problem in this way, the solutions to this crisis that have the greatest potential impact also center on human behavior (i.e. cultural norms) rather than just technological innovation.
According to Project Drawdown, which is the most comprehensive plan ever put forth to reverse global warming, the #1 thing that we can do to roll back global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions does not involve wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, or any sort of similar technologies.
Instead, what is required is a cultural change regarding food: we need to waste far less of it and to switch to largely plant-rich diets. Doing so will result in a staggering reduction of 137 gigatons of CO2 or equivalent gases.
In comparison to this reduction, globally shifting from fossil fuels to electricity generated by photovoltaic (solar) panels will roll back less than half this amount of emissions. The adoption of electric vehicles? Far less than ten percent. We should, of course, work on exploring a variety of technologies to help reduce our emissions, but it is important to keep their relative impact in perspective.
Worldwide, agriculture is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, yet between 1/3 and 1/2 of all the food that we produce on this planet is wasted. Regarding the switch to a largely plant-rich diet, the same amount of greenhouse gasses are released in producing one pound of beef as are released in producing thirty pounds of lentils, also a great source of protein.
I know, changing how we eat doesn’t sound nearly as sexy as a self-driving electric car, but it would nonetheless be ten times better for the planet.
On a similar note, the #2 thing (according to Project Drawdown) that we can do to roll back GHG emissions is also a cultural issue that is a far cry from technology.
We need to educate more girls and women (which dramatically curbs population growth, as the more education a woman has, the fewer children she has) and promote family planning (globally, there are roughly 85 million unintended pregnancies every year). These two things together would roll back 103 gigatons of GHG emissions.
This is not to say that we should place responsibility for this particular issue with girls and women. To the contrary, the responsibility lies with the institutions that restrict a woman’s access to education and control of her own body. And too, it is obviously the case that contraception is a male responsibility as well.
Why is population so important? Sixty years ago, the global population was about 3 billion. At the time of this recording, it is 7.75 billion. By 2050 it will be approaching 10 billion. The simple fact is that this many people are profoundly taxing the resources of our planet. Hence, reducing the population of our species is one of the main things that we can do to mitigate the climate crisis.
Taken together, these two cultural changes regarding food and population can take us nearly a quarter of the way to where we need to go to get GHG emissions under control. Note that very little is needed by way of technology here, as the necessary changes can be made right now by both individuals and a range of groups and institutions.
This is not to say that these changes will be easy. Indeed, it is arguably far easier to change cars (such as by making them electric) than to change people’s actions, as issues like birth control are controversial across the planet, including the U.S., where Roe v. Wade may soon be challenged.
Nonetheless, we need to seriously roll up our sleeves and address the climate crisis as a human problem in need of human solutions.
Incidentally, many of these may well be win-win solutions, as giving girls and women equal access to education, as well as control of their own bodies, are worthwhile goals in their own right – at least as far as I am concerned. Similarly, reducing the global herd of 70 billion animals that we keep for food is obviously great from from the perspective of animal rights. Hence, the changes that we need to make to address the climate crisis may not only be better for the planet, but for human (and a range of) beings in a host of ways.
Although I have great respect for the sciences, science- and technology-based solutions to cultural problems like the climate crisis are rarely sufficient in themselves. The simple fact is that they often fail to attend to the root cause of problems of this sort.
This course will focus on these root causes.
One of the things that I find interesting about this environmental humanities approach is that it returns (to echo a 1960s phrase) “power to the people.” In other words, you do not need to be a specialist in climate science or lithium battery technology to make a dent in the climate crisis. Instead, anyone can make a meaningful, indeed crucial impact on the climate crisis, either through personal action or collective activism.
Given that the climate crisis is so overwhelming, where do we even begin? Please see the following section for some ideas.
How do we begin to save the planet?
(Note that this is a continuation of the previous section on the merits of approaching the climate crisis from the perspective of the environmental humanities. Ideally, that section should be read first, otherwise the below mention of things like contraception and education may be a little bewildering. Note also that the below lecture “Pulling it all together: 20 things that each of us can do to save the planet” is an expanded, annotated version of this list.)
Author Jonathan Safran Foer recently published a book entitled We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, where he argued that each of us should adopt a plant-based diet if we want to save the planet from catastrophic climate change. Hence, saving the planet begins when we eat, breakfast and otherwise. Since, as noted above, such a switch could make a significant dent in the climate crisis if adopted by everyone, I definitely applaud this as a step in the right direction.
However, while eating a largely plant-based diet is generally a good idea, the situation is sometimes more complicated. For example, eating asparagus in the Winter in most of North America is often no better for the climate than eating chicken or pork. Why? Because it is generally flown in from South America – and air travel has a huge climate footprint.
Moreover, we need to be clear about something: regardless of what we do, the planet will obviously continue on. Hence, the phrase “saving the planet” almost always implies that we are saving it for ourselves, humanity. As humans are just one of many species of beings that inhabit the earth, a more equitable and less anthropocentric way of stating what the phrase leaves unsaid is “saving the planet [for all life on it].”
Still, I think that Foer is on to something, as what he proposes is certainly what I would call a humanities approach, but we need to act at more than just the breakfast table. Here are ten examples of what we can do that are in this vein:
Saving the planet begins
at markets and restaurants, when we buy enough to eat – and no more.
at meals, when we eat for the good of the planet and its climate.
in the bedroom, when we use contraception and limit family size.
in the classroom, when we fairly and equally educate boys and girls.
on the way to work, when we walk, bike, or use public transportation, rather than owning a car, which can account for a quarter of our carbon footprints.
at home, when we choose to live in an appropriately sized dwelling or co-housing, instead of an average (i.e. oversized) American house, let alone a McMansion.
on vacation, when we choose slow travel over air travel, which is, environmentally, the worst way to get around.
in stores and online, when we choose not to buy yet more unnecessary stuff.
off-line, when we barter, borrow, rent, and otherwise exchange, as well as repair, things, rather than buying still more stuff.
with buying, not only by buying less, sharing, and keeping things longer, but also by only buying from companies with environmentally sound and socially just practices.
This list of ten things is by no means complete, but you get the idea. Note that all of the above involve personal and cultural changes rather than new or more technology.
Similarly, but on a somewhat different note, saving the planet begins
at the polling place, when we cast our vote for candidates, from local to federal, advocating for sweeping climate policies, such as carbon pricing and the Green New Deal.
again at the polling place, when we vote for candidates and initiatives that put people and the planet ahead of corporate interests.
prior to the polling place, as we explain to five or more of our friends and family the importance of voting on behalf of our planet, its climate, and all the life that lives on it.
at gathering places. when we join together and collectively demand climate action, such as with the Sunrise Movement.
by protesting and through acts of peaceful civl disobedience, such as Greta Thunberg’s protest outside the Swedish parliament.
with reading, as we learn more about the crisis and what is being done – as well as why nearly enough isn’t being done.
with rethinking, as we, as individuals and as a diverse range of human cultures, take a long hard look at how we inhabit this planet.
by sharing what we know and do with others, so that they too have a better understanding of the climate crisis and what can be done.
by joining with others in initiatives, from local to global, such as freegan or bicycle collectives, so that we can support each other.
with us, as we become (to echo a phrase often attributed to Gandhi) the change that we want to see in the world.
Again, this second group of ten things is not an exhaustive list, but it should be clear that none of the above (on either) list requires much by way of technological innovation, but rather just people both embodying change and joining together to demand it.
In other words, both lists suggest personal, cultural, economic, and political changes, rather than technological solutions, to a crisis caused by human beings. Again this is not to say that technological innovations are not needed to address the climate crisis, but this is not nearly enough by itself.
Because so much depends on human actions (personal and collective), this course focuses on many of the above 20.
Note that both of the above lists are aimed at the developed world. Since the poorest 3 billion people on the planet have emitted just 5% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, only a few things on these lists apply to them. Moreover, there is one that I would add just for the developing world that would be absolutely huge, if they could somehow succeed in doing it: convince the developed world to stop emitting so many greenhouse gases!
This is a discussion-based course involving over 800 students
Traditionally, much of academia has taken place behind closed doors. Even though we are now in a connected age, this is still the case at many universities. At UCSB, for example, most online class discussions take place behind a password-protected wall in a Moodle-based online area known as “GauchoSpace.”
As far as I am concerned, this is problematic. There is no reason to keep this material from the public – especially given the urgency and severity of the climate crisis. Consequently, anyone who is interested can follow along with our class discussions – even years from now, as I have no intentions of taking down the course archive. Feel free to invite friends or family to check out our online discussions.
Given the size of the class (860 students) and the fact that every student will be making three groups of ten (30 total) comments, literally millions of words of commentary and discussion will be created by this course and archived.
How does this work in practice? Traditional lectures can be seen as a kind of broadcasting. As only the lecturer talks and everyone else listens, knowledge travels in just one direction, not unlike a radio broadcast. In contrast, during a lively discussion ideas are transferred back and forth as many people can take an active part.
Admittedly unusual – and certainly experimental – we will be using the comments in this class in order to facilitate a discussion involving the more than 800 students in the class. In order to do so, we will be taking a decidedly different approach to flipping our classroom. (Incidentally, I have long been intrigued by this general approach: I flipped my first classroom back in 2012-13 at Princeton University.)
Unlike a lecture, in a traditional discussion-based class the instructor generally both transmits information and helps students make sense of it during the class period by way of a class discussion. In other words, part of the time the instructor delivers information by lecturing and part of the time there is a class discussion over what has been said by the instructor and others.
In contrast, in a flipped classroom, students first encounter the information prior to class, usually through an online source. Class time is then given to working through this material, often by way of discussion. This allows for more time to discuss the material and work through it in other ways.
See the next section on the deep dive lectures for more on this discussion-based approach.
“Deep-Dive” lectures
This course employs an admittedly experimental variation on the now traditional approach to flipping a classroom outlined immediately above.
Prior to class, students will have already watched (or read) the day’s material and commented on it, as well as – and this is important – commented on what their classmates had to say. All commenting will be done on YouTube and hence will be completely public. During the class session, Ken will jump into this discussion by reflecting on particularly helpful comments, which he will be projecting onscreen.
Ken’s responses to these comments will be recorded as individual sessions. After the course ends, they will be uploaded to YouTube as “deep dives” into the material with the comments onscreen and Ken’s reflections as a voiceover. For example, if you would like to consider the climate crisis as a generational issue (which a cluster of five of the primary lectures take up) in greater detail, as well as see what informed students think about this important issue, the five accompanying deep-dive videos will provide additional food for thought.
Ken will similarly reflect on student reaction to the assigned readings and course films. These deep dives on the course readings and films will also be uploaded to YouTube after the course ends.
In this way, everyone in the room will take part in the discussion, which is a dramatic increase from a traditional discussion section. In such a section, assuming that it is particularly lively, perhaps just 30-40% of students participate regularly. An excellent discussion leader can push it to perhaps 50%. This, of course, means that half of the students are not participating in section. In our approach, however, everyone will be taking part in the discussion – which, in this case, will be over 800 people.
Moreover, as a student will have time to consider his or her written comments, they may well be more thoughtful. Consider the dialogue that one encounters in really good fiction. One of the joys of reading such a conversation comes from the fact that it is often just too good, with phrases and retorts chosen just too perfectly, to have been spoken in real-time. And it wasn’t, as the author had the benefit of time in writing and revising it into a polished form.
In transitioning from the spoken to written word, students have the same luxury with their comments in this class. When we put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) we have time, even if just a few moments, to reflect – as well as to revise the thought once written down, if desired. Consequently, while they may read like the transcript of a spoken conversation (as does the dialogue in a novel), our online discussions are potentially more thoughtful and precise.
Finally, because online comments are a form of social networking, the format is familiar and quickly embraced by students.
By using this admittedly unusual approach, not only will the primary lecture material be preserved online, but all of the considered and thoughtful class discussion surrounding it will be archived as well.
Attend, read, watch, or listen. The choice is yours.
A note to my UCSB students: even though you are encouraged (and in some cases required) to encounter this material in additional ways, attendance at lecture is absolutely mandatory!
There are four ways to encounter the material for this course.
1) Attend the course lectures. This is the ideal approach, as students not only systematically encounter all the course material, which they are tested on, but I also respond to their thoughts and questions during lecture.
2) Read what is on this page. Below you will find complete text of all the primary lectures for the course. Hence, this page is not only book-length, it is in fact a book.
3) Watch the videos of the lectures on YouTube, which are accurately closed captioned in English for greater accessibility. The goal is to also closed caption them in Spanish and Chinese.
4) Listen to the audio podcasts, which aggregate together all of the talks for a particular lecture. Note that the audio podcast series will not begin until after this course is taught for the first time.
This multi-pronged approach (which is further explored immediately below on the section on “Accessibility”) is designed to blur and challenge the distinctions between a book, a classroom experience, and an online experience.
Why take the above four approaches to disseminating essentially the same material? While everyone potentially benefits, this multi-pronged approach also makes the course material more accessible to a range of individuals with varied abilities.
For example, with this approach you need neither hearing nor sight to fully access all the course materials, as it can alternately be read or heard. During the “deep dive” videos (which will also be available as audio podcasts), Ken will narrate what is onscreen in order to make the material accessible in audio form.
Nearly all of the text on this page is twice standard size (24pt) in a font recommended as an option for print disabilities. For the highest contrast possible, almost all letters are black and appear against a solid white background. All text is clustered together in large blocks separated by, rather than embedded with, images for added clarity.
Since there are just six of these large text blocks, it would be a relatively simple matter to cut and paste them into a text editor in order to convert them into a specialized font, such as Open Dyslexic. Apologies for not building this functionality directly into this site, but, given that this is a living document and is being continually updated (see below), it presents a somewhat daunting challenge. Nonetheless, I am working on it.
In addition, using a varied approach to presentation gives everyone potentially useful options, such as the ability to easily listen on the go to a number of short lectures on the same theme collected together into a single audio podcast.
If you are an educator using this material, the large font on this page is a particularly good size for projecting it onscreen for a class.
Doesn’t posting this material online make the actual class redundant?
It is useful to pause and to reflect on why we give university credit for coursework. Credit is not given for simply showing up for class. Instead, students are graded on how well they have understood and mastered the material. Even if someone were to explore all of this online lecture material, the instructor would be in no position to evaluate what they had learned. Such evaluation is essential for accreditation.
This is not to say that someone studying this online material could not master it well enough to receive an “A” in the actual class. Indeed, the goal of posting everything online is to offer such a person everything necessary to attain that level of proficiency.
It is also the case that the course subject matters here. If this were a course on something like a computer language, having university accreditation would likely be of significant value in seeking a job. However, understanding the climate crisis is different. True, having accrued four credits for this course could play a role in obtaining an undergraduate degree, but the reason that someone would take this particular course is presumably because they want to learn more about what will likely be the most significant issue of this century – and one that will have a profound impact on his or her life.
In this sense, whether you receive credit for taking this course is – as far as I am concerned, given the urgency and severity of the climate crisis – far less important than learning about this issue.
This is also a moral issue for me. Anyone who is interested should have access to this material. Again, it might be different if the subject at hand were something like Renaissance poetry, but it seems to me that there is a moral imperative in making this material open to the public. Given that fossil fuel interests are working hard at spreading disinformation about the climate crisis, everyone needs to have unrestricted access to reliable information on this crisis.
Should you agree with everything that is presented here?
In a word, “No.” Given that our topic is the climate crisis, this may come as something of a surprise. I am certainly not suggesting that you deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change. Nonetheless, when students disagree with me, it is often a sign that I have succeeded at my job.
Why? In part, it has to do with the humanities approach that we are employing here.
If this were a class on the science of climate change, I would expect you to agree with most of the material presented. For example, that a rise in global CO2 levels is having an impact on global temperature. While a particularly advanced student, such as a PhD student working in the area, might (after years of work and research) be able to take exception to certain aspects of the relationship of CO2 levels to global atmospheric temperature rise presented at lecture, this would be a major accomplishment and almost certainly not an intervention that would come from a student taking an introductory lecture on the climate crisis.
But the humanities are different.
Imagine if we were not considering the climate crisis, but (using a more traditional subject from the humanities) a poem. As your instructor, my job would be to introduce you to the poem and its context, get you focused on it, and to give you a range of material to help you think about it in new and perhaps unexpected ways. If your encounter with the poem went well (i.e if you committed yourself and I did my job well), you would be able to offer up a reading of it, or at least a portion of one.
My goal would not be to have you agree with me, but rather to mentor you in developing your own reading of the poem, which might be completely different than mine. If, on an exam or assigned essay, a student just repeated back everything that I had said about a poem, I would sadly conclude that I had failed to mentor them into the art of textual analysis. However, I would be really excited if they came up with their own way of approaching the text.
Returning to this class and the climate crisis, my job is to get you thinking about it in an informed way – which is not to say that you must agree with me. For example, I have a series of lectures focused on the climate crisis as a generational issue. You might disagree with this approach in a variety of ways.
First, you might draw attention to the fact that, when considering different positions on the climate crisis, the gulf between generations is not as great as the gulf between people of different political leanings, especially those individuals that think of themselves as either very conservative or very liberal. Alternately, you might feel that casting blame from one generation to another is not particularly helpful, and in fact might just make things worse.
Neither response is in any way wrong. In fact, I think that both of these reflections are useful and completely valid. If a student had come to me with either observation, I would be more than a little gratified, as it would be clear that they were thinking hard about the climate crisis and how best to approach it.
My goal is to get you to do just that.
Why is this an issue for an English course?
As noted above, not only does the climate crisis need to be seen as a human problem brought about by human actions, but the solutions to this crisis that have the greatest potential impact also center on human actions.
But why, exactly, is this an issue for an English course?
Wouldn’t approaching this crisis from another field of the environmental humanities or the social sciences makes sense? The simple fact is that we really need everyone to address this issue, including the average person on the street and scholars ranging from scientists, to sociologists, to specialists in the humanities.
Nonetheless, the study of English does bring something unique to the table.
The public is inundated daily with a broad range of material relating to the climate crisis. We know that fossil fuel interests annually spend hundreds of millions of dollars producing this material, which is often distributed by way of conservative think tanks like the Heartland Institute.
Moreover, now that the climate crisis has become a politically polarized issue in America, a variety of additional media outlets (including a major news network) now spread the message of climate skepticism or outright denial. Alternately, scientists, scholars, journalists, and others are desperately trying to convince the public of the validity and urgency of the climate crisis.
Confronted with this bewildering array of material, how does one get to the truth of the matter?
This course takes the position that we can read through to the truth.
In other words, since most people do not have a background in climate science or renewable technology, we have to rely on our ability to critically read a variety of materials in order to determine their validity. In this sense, teaching the skills of textual analysis, which is something that we do throughout this course, is central to our approach.
On the other hand, what we read in this course is just as important as how we read it. Hence, instead of randomly selecting texts to teach the art of careful reading, the course texts are designed to provide a comprehensive overview of the climate crisis and what we can do about it, as well as the debate that it has engendered in the U.S.
In this sense, this course studies the culture and thought of the climate crisis – which is really now two cultures in the U.S. fiercely competing for dominance.
In this course, these two projects – studying the culture and thought of the climate crisis by learning how to read through to the truth of the matter – are not limited to written texts. The last few decades of critical analysis have expanded our definition of what constitutes a “text.”
Hence, for our purposes a text can be a written work, a photograph or painting, a film or video, or a range of additional creations – and any of these can be ‘read’ in our sense of being actively analyzed. In practice, this means that we will be analyzing both written works and documentaries that throw light on the climate crisis.
But why focus on English texts in particular? There are a variety of reasons, but two in particular are worth noting.
First, a significant number of texts that deny (in one way or another) the reality of the climate crisis, or its severity, are written in English for American, British, Australian, and worldwide audiences.
Second, as 25% of all greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were put there by the United States, understanding how this particular country has framed the issue is of unusual importance, as it can give us insights into how this crisis was brought about – and, hopefully, what we can do to reinvent U.S. culture, which is now being exported to the world with disastrous results for our planet and its climate.
Is this a MOOC?
Although it might be possible to convert the approach explored here into some sort of graded MOOC (Massive Open Online Course), it is by no means the objective – and certainly not at all necessary in implementing the approach. Moreover, making it into some sort of a paid course, and in the process restricting access to this material, strongly goes against the spirit of this approach. At the risk of repeating myself, as everyone on the planet is experiencing the climate crisis, everyone should have complete access to credible materials relating to it.
This is a living document
Unlike a print book, this page is regularly being updated and expanded. Why? Because the climate crisis is unfolding at a bewildering rate. Consequently, this page and its content will change along with the crisis. Moreover, students often come to me with questions that suggest new material that I should add to this page.
As a living document, this page is somewhat like an academic preprint; however, with the understanding that a print version will not be forthcoming. I welcome input from my students and colleagues, as well as the public, in improving it.
If you would like to cite from this page, you should note the date of the reference. Alternately, you could archive and reference a copy of this page from the day that you are citing it by way of the Internet Archive (a.k.a. “The Wayback Machine”) and reference that URL.
Navigating this page
In the upper right corner this page is a “hamburger menu” – i.e three horizontal lines that bring out the site menu. (When you are at the very top of the page, you will have to scroll down a little to make it appear.) If you click the burger, a menu will appear with an abbreviated Table of Contents to help navigate to the major sections of this page, along with individual weeks of the Syllabus. While it would have been possible to duplicate this functionality with a permanent sidebar, this approach keeps it out of the way until needed, and hence from using up screen space. Sidebars are also, generally speaking, ugly.
In addition, once you scroll down a little, in the lower right a faint box will appear with a small chevron in it. Click it and you will immediately be taken to the top of the page.
A note for teachers
The material on this website may be of particular interest to educators, as the course videos and podcasts may be useful in flipping a classroom. In fact, as noted above regarding this being a discussion-based approach, this course is designed around a flipped classroom.
A note on the syllabus for people not taking English 23 at UCSB
If you are not enrolled in the course, you still might find the below syllabus of interest, as it structures what may otherwise be a confusing array of online material. Although it is possible to randomly watch the course YouTube videos, this syllabus not only provides a systematic way of approaching them, it also offers links to additional course material (such as the primary readings, which are all available free of cost online). In addition, it should be possible to watch all of the course’s YouTube lectures directly from this page – even if YouTube is not available in your country
Seriously, why does this page look the way that it does?
See the above section on accessibility. It’s also time for a confession.
I love getting lost in a good book. Lost in a sea of words, just words on a blank page. As I am a scholar of the written word, this probably comes as little surprise. Of course, there is nothing wrong with feeling the same way about a page rich in images, like a graphic novel, but I personally find the look of words alone against a stark backdrop familiar and inviting.
In her Thinking With Type, Ellen Lupton succinctly – and wonderfully – observed that “Typography is what language looks like.” In addition to considering what written language is doing, which is what I do for a living, I am fascinated (“mesmerized” might be a better word) by how it looks. The fact that I am dyslexic may play a role here.
While this fascination began decades ago when I was a child who read far too many books, and continued into adulthood as I collected far too many of them, I have grown to enjoy the look and nuance of digital text even more. Perhaps not surprisingly then, I find long scrolls of crisp Helvetica text pleasing.
Apologies in advance if you don’t like this look, as I realize that it flies in the face of a good deal of contemporary web design and the fact that pictures can indeed add interest to a page. Hence, you may find it just plain boring. Still, since I have no desire to monetize this site with ads or to promote anything here, I hope that you enjoy the luxury of this minimalist approach.
To answer the above question in another way, with this page I am offering up an interpretation of how a book (which this is) can look and act as we enter the third quarter of the 21st century. Don’t get me wrong, I am in no way claiming to be a web innovator, as there is hardly anything new here. Nonetheless, as I have brought six books into the world as printed objects, the online approach being employed here strikes me as an interesting alternative.
I also like that it is free of charge. Did you know that most scholars make very little money off of the books that they publish? This may come as a surprise, as university libraries often pay more than $100 for each of the books on their shelves. Nonetheless, many professors make only a few hundred dollars in total royalties per book, as academic publishing is an expensive process. Hence, I like the idea of eliminating it all together and directly offering this material to everyone without cost.
The accompanying YouTube videos and audio podcasts, where this material is also presented (and which can be viewed and heard, respectively, directly from this page), are part and parcel of this approach to bookmaking. As I noted above, this approach is designed to question the distinctions between a book and classroom and online experiences.
Greta Thunberg, climate activist
Table of Contents
How do we begin to save the planet?
Week 1: The uninhabitable (or at least unwelcoming) earth
Week 2: The climate crisis as a local, burning issue
Week 3: Denying the undeniable
Week 4: Front only the essential facts of life
Week 5: Making waste (of the planet)
Week 7: Drawing down the climate crisis
Week 8: Communicating climate change, through words and actions
Week 9: Can the climate crisis make us happy?
The climate crisis as a generational issue (Introduction)
1) How the climate crisis was brought about in a single lifetime
2) Why the generation that caused the climate crisis is not acting
3) What a new generation can do to mitigate the climate crisis
4) Can one generation do what previous generations failed to do?
5) What the Boomer generation knew about the climate crisis – and when we knew it
What each of us can do about the climate crisis
2) Flying, the absolute worst thing that you can do environmentally
3) Do we need a climate vanguard? (Food, today and tomorrow)
4) Personal action, climate activism, or becoming politically active. Which matters more?
6) Pulling it all together: 20 things that each of us can do to save the planet
2°C: Beyond the Limit, Fires, floods and free parking
Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming
Project Drawdown, Summary of Solutions
Social justice, environmental justice, climate justice, and the injustice of it all
Communicating the Climate Crisis: vegans and freegans, vegetarians and climatarians
Drawing down greenhouse gas emissions by being the change
Before the Flood and An Inconvenient Sequel
A Climate of Doubt and Merchants Of Doubt
Are we destroying the planet in a misguided pursuit of happiness?
Syllabus for English 23, “The Climate Crisis: What It Is and What Each of Us Can Do About It”
(a.k.a. “ClimateCrisis101”)
About this syllabus
This is the official syllabus for Eng 23 for the Winter of 2020. For general information on the class, see the above Preface.
Course Format
The format of this course is highly unusual and more than a little experimental. Given that we will be taking up what may well be the most important issue of the 21st-century, our discussions of the course material will be public, involving the more than 800 people in the class.
Contact Info
Lecturer: Ken Hiltner. Office Hours: MW 1-2pm at the Coral Tree Cafe. He/His/Him. Always “Ken,” never “Professor Hiltner.”
If your last name begins with A-O, your TA is Celeste McAlpin-Levitt (mcalpin-levitt@ucsb.edu). Office hours: Wednesdays, 3-5pm in South Hall 2432D. She/Her/Hers.
If your last name begins with P-Z, your TA is Sydney Lane (slane@ucsb.edu). Office hours: Fridays, 9-11am in South Hall 2607 in the L&E (Literature and Environment) room. She/Her/Hers.
Course Grades
1) Midterm: 25% of course grade, 50 questions (1/2% of course grade per question), Scantron format. Midterm is on Friday, February 7 at our regular time and place (Campbell Hall, 2-2:50pm)
2) Final exam: 30% of course grade, 60 questions (1/2% of course grade per question), Scantron format (not cumulative). Final exam is during exam week on Monday, March 16, in Campbell Hall from 4-7pm.
3) Attendance at all lectures: 15% of course grade, taken via i>clicker beginning the first day of class. Given that there are 30 classes, each unexcused absence thus reduces the total course grade by 1/2%. You receive attendance credit for UCSB holidays: January 20 (MLK Jr. Day) and February 17 (Presidents’ Day).
If a student is found to be in possession of another student’s i>clicker during polling, the devices will be confiscated and both students will be reported to UCSB’s Office of Judicial Affairs. Please check your attendance online after each class. More on attendance below.
4) Commenting on course material. (See below for details on how the online commenting works.)
A) Comments on readings: 10% of the course grade
B) Comments on films: 10% of the course grade
C) Comments on short lectures: 10% of the course grade
Note: you will therefore be making a total of 30 YouTube comments, 3 per week for the 10-week term starting in week #1 (i.e. 10 comments on the course readings, 10 comments on the films, and 10 comments on the short lectures). Each comment thus counts for 1% of the course grade. See below for more on comments and for the extra credit policy.
You have seven days to make the weekly comments. The links for Ken’s weekly videos will become active at 6am of every Monday morning. You must comment by 6am the following Monday to receive credit for the comment. If you do not wish to use your real name on YouTube, you may use a screen name, but you need to inform your TA if you are doing so.
Getting graded on your comments
Please cut and paste all of your comments into a single text file.
1) Prior to the Midterm, your TA will send you login info for a Google Drive folder. Please upload a PDF of your above mentioned file with the comments for the first five weeks by midnight Sunday of week five (Sunday, February 9th by midnight).
2) Prior to the Final exam, your TA will again send you login info for a Google Drive folder. Please upload a PDF of your above mentioned file with the comments for the last five weeks by midnight Sunday of the last week (Sunday, March 15th by midnight).
Your TA will provide more information on the above as we get closer to these deadlines.
Course Requirements
1) All texts are available online (see each week below for links).
2) All films are available on GauchoSpace (GauchoCast) or YouTube.
3) i>clicker. Note that the actual i>clicker device must be purchased; the i>clicker phone app will not work. Please register your i>clicker on GauchoSpace as soon as possible.
4) Large Scantron forms (the red, letter size forms that are 8.5” x 11”) for midterm and final exams.
Honors Section
Email Ken with your reasons for wanting to join the Honors Section by midnight of the first Wednesday of the first week of class. Note that the Honors Section will meet on Friday at 1pm, starting in the first week.
Cellphones
Silence and put away your cellphone before lecture starts.
Please note: You may well find the weekly readings and films more interesting if you first watch Ken’s YouTube video introductions contextualizing them. Then, after doing the readings or watching the film(s), you can return to Ken’s video to comment. In order to make initial viewing more convenient, clicking on the below links to Ken’s YouTube videos will cause the video to pop up on this page. You will, however, need to go to YouTube to make comments.
Also note that the links to Ken’s videos will not become active until 6am on the Monday of that week.
Week 1, Jan 6: The uninhabitable (or at least unwelcoming) earth
Reading:
This week’s reading is “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells, which is a July 2017 article that appeared in New York Magazine. (If the link does not work, here is an archived copy.) An annotated version, “complete with interviews with scientists and links to further reading,” of this article is available here in case you are interested.
Note also that Wallace-Wells is scheduled to speak in downtown Santa Barbara at the New Vic on March 6th as part of UCSB’s Arts & Lectures series. Ken is also working on getting him to speak directly to our class.
If you are interested in reading more of what Wallace-Wells has to say on the subject, the book that came out of this article, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (Tim Duggan Books, 2019), is very interesting. If you are not sure if you want to read the entire book, in February of 2019 New York Magazine published another article by Wallace-Wells adapted from the above book entitled “The Cautious Case for Climate Optimism.” In it, explains why he is optimistic about the future – something that he failed to do in the original 2017 article. More recently, Wallace-Wells published a followup article entitled “We’re Getting a Clearer Picture of the Climate Future — and It’s Not as Bad as It Once Looked” in December of 2019, which is well worth reading. After the book appeared, Wallace-Wells gave a number of interviews in Rolling Stone, Vox, The Atlantic, Vice, and elsewhere.
Reading assignment: after reading the “The Uninhabitable Earth,” please watch both of the following lectures by Ken:
2) “The uninhabitable (or at least unwelcoming) earth“
After watching the above lecture snippets, please comment on YouTube on Ken’s video “The uninhabitable (or at least unwelcoming) earth” (this link will open up YouTube in a new tab so that you can comment directly there).
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Films:
Please watch either the documentary Before the Flood or An Inconvenient Sequel according to these guidelines:
1) If you have not seen Before the Flood, please watch it. It is available for viewing on GauchoSpace (GauchoCast). If you are not enrolled in the class, it currently streams from Netflix, as well as can be rented for a relatively modest fee from YouTube, Amazon, Google, etc.
2) If you have already seen Before the Flood, please instead watch An Inconvenient Sequel, also available on GauchoCast. If you are not enrolled in the class, it can be rented for a relatively modest fee from YouTube, Amazon, Google, etc.
3) Since we will be considering each in class, feel free to watch both videos.
Film assignment: after watching one of the above films, please watch both of the following lectures by Ken:
1) “Films, Introduction“
2) “Before the Flood and An Inconvenient Sequel“
After watching the above lecture snippets, please comment on YouTube on Ken’s video “Before the Flood and An Inconvenient Sequel” (this link will open up YouTube in a new tab so that you can comment directly there). Note that while Ken’s introduction covers both of the above films, you only need to comment on the film that you watched. However, if you have already watched Before the Flood, please feel free to reference it in your comment on An Inconvenient Sequel.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Lecture videos:
Please watch both of the following lectures by Ken:
1) “The climate crisis as a generational issue” (Climate and Generation, Intro)
2) “How the climate crisis was brought about in a single lifetime” (Climate and Generation, #1)
Lecture assignment: after watching the above lecture snippets, please comment on YouTube on “How the climate crisis was brought about in a single lifetime” (this link will open up YouTube in a new tab so that you can comment directly there).
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Week #2, Jan 13: The climate crisis as a local, burning issue
Reading:
Please read “2°C: Beyond the limit” which is a December 2019 article in The Washington Post by journalist Scott Wilson. Note that this article is based on “The Post’s analysis” of temperature rise in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties since 1895. According to the explanation of “Methodology” at the end of the article, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) forms the basis of this study. However, there are no pier-reviewed corroborating studies that support the conclusions that undergird this article regarding the above-mentioned temperature rise. This is not to say that Wilson is wrong, but simply to make you aware of this potential issue.
Reading assignment: after doing the reading, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing it, 2°C: Beyond the limit, and comment on this introduction.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Films:
Please watch the documentary Fire in Paradise, which is an October 2019 episode of the long-running PBS series Frontline. It currently streams for free directly from PBS.
Trigger warning: This film, which takes viewers inside the 2018 California Camp fire, puts a human face on the climate crisis. Hence, it definitely can be unnerving. As one student noted after watching this film, “‘Fire In Paradise’ is one of the most scary and heartbreaking things I have ever seen.” If you have experienced or reacted to the trauma of a wildfire (or any fire, for that matter), you might not want to watch this film.
Film assignment: after watching the documentary, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing it, “Fire in Paradise,” and comment on this video.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Lecture videos:
Please watch both of the following lectures by Ken:
1) “Why the generation that caused the climate crisis is not acting” (Climate and Generation, #2)
2) “What a new generation can do to mitigate the climate crisis” (Climate and Generation, #3)
Lecture assignment: after watching both of the above lecture snippets, please comment on either one or the other (the choice is yours) on YouTube. Note that questions on both lectures could appear on the midterm.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Week #3, Jan 20: Denying the undeniable
Reading:
Please read all of the front material and Chapters 1-3 (in other words, read everything up to an including page 59) of Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming. This entire book is available as a free PDF. Please also read the webpage introducing the book (here) and the first dozen or so of the Amazon reviews of the book (here). Note that this is a principle text denying the climate crisis published by a fossil fuel affiliate (i.e. it will attempt to convince you that scientists are not sure whether the climate crisis is happening or not – let the Reader beware! And don’t be surprised if you are a little convinced…).
Reading assignment: after reading the selections from Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing it and comment on this introduction.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Films:
Please watch either the documentary A Climate of Doubt or Merchants Of Doubt according to these guidelines:
1) If you have not seen A Climate of Doubt, please watch it. It is available for viewing on GauchoCast. If you are not enrolled in the class, it currently streams for free directly from PBS.
2) If you have already seen A Climate of Doubt, please instead watch Merchants Of Doubt. It is up on GauchoCast. If you are not enrolled in the class, it can be rented for a relatively modest fee from YouTube, Amazon, Google, etc.
3) Since we will be considering each in class, feel free to watch both videos.
Film assignment: after watching one of the above films, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing them and comment on his video. Note that while Ken’s introduction covers both of the above films, you only need to comment on the film that you watched. However, if you have already watched A Climate of Doubt, please feel free to reference it in your comment.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Lecture videos:
Please watch both of the following lectures by Ken:
1) “Can one generation do what previous generations failed to do?” (Climate and Generation, #4)
2) “What the Boomer generation knew about the climate crisis – and when we knew it” (Climate and Generation, #5)
Lecture assignment: after watching both of the above two lecture snippets, please comment on either one or the other (the choice is yours). Note that questions on both lectures could appear on the midterm.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Week 4, Jan 27: Front only the essential facts of life
Reading:
This week’s reading is Chapter 1 of Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 classic Walden. A PDF is available here.
Incidentally, although Thoreau is a major proponent of a simple lifestyle in the West, this tradition exists in a range of cultures. Here the Dalai Lama weighs in on the subject:
If one’s life is simple, contentment has to come. Simplicity is extremely important for happiness. Having few desires, feeling satisfied with what you have, is very vital; satisfaction with just enough food, clothing, shelter to protect yourself from the elements. And finally, there is an intense delight in abandoning faulty states of mind and in cultivating helpful ones in meditation.
Reading assignment: after reading Walden, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing the opening chapter and comment on his introduction.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Films:
Please watch either the documentary Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things or the alternative films listed below according to these guidelines:
1) If you have not seen Minimalism, please watch it. It is available for viewing on GauchoSpace (GauchoCast). If you are not enrolled in the class, it currently streams from Netflix, as well as can be rented for a relatively modest fee from YouTube, Amazon, Google, etc.
2) If you have already seen Minimalism, please instead watch both of these two short films on Youtube: Visualizing a Plenitude Economy and The High Price of Materialism.
3) Since we will be considering each of them in class, feel free to watch all the videos.
Film assignment: after watching the above film(s), please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing them and comment on his video. Note that while Ken’s introduction covers all of the above films, you only need to comment on the film(s) that you watched. However, if you have already watched Minimalism, please feel free to reference it in your comment.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Lecture video:
Please watch the following lecture by Ken:
“Why the climate crisis is a cultural problem (and why electric cars are more trouble than good)“
Lecture assignment: after watching the above lecture snippet, please comment on it.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Week 5, Feb 3: Making waste (of the planet)
Reading:
This week’s reading is Chapters 2-7 of Vance Packard’s classic 1960 study of consumerism: The Waste Makers. A PDF of the entire book is available online. (You are only required to read Chapters 2-7.)
Reading assignment: after reading The Waste Makers chapters, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing it and comment on his introduction.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Films:
Please watch either the documentary The True Cost or “The Ugly Truth Of Fast Fashion” (from Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj) according to these guidelines:
1) If you have not seen The True Cost, please watch it. It is available for viewing on GauchoSpace (GauchoCast). If you are not enrolled in the class, it can be rented for a relatively modest fee from YouTube, Amazon, Google, etc.
2) If you have already seen The True Cost, please instead watch The Ugly Truth Of Fast Fashion on YouTube.
3) Since we will be considering them each in class, feel free to watch both films.
Film assignment: after watching one of the above films, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing them and comment on his video. Note that while Ken’s introduction covers both of the above films, you only need to comment on the film that you watched. However, if you have already watched The True Cost, please feel free to reference it in your comment.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Lecture video:
Please watch the following lecture by Ken:
“Flying, the absolute worst thing that you can do environmentally“
Lecture assignment: after watching the above lecture snippet, please comment on it.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Week 6, Feb 10: Drawing down the climate crisis
Reading:
This week’s readings are the first 25 approaches from the “Summary of Solutions” from Project Drawdown (i.e. “Refrigerant Management” to “Concentrated Solar”). Please go to each of the 25 pages and read the summaries (which are just two or three paragraphs each), as well as the “Impact” statements on the sidebar. Note that if you find this material of particular interest, you might enjoy the book that came out of this project: Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming.
Reading assignment: after reading the above, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing this material and comment on his introduction.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Film:
Please watch either the documentary Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret or Wasted! The Story of Food Waste! according to these guidelines:
1) If you have not seen Cowspiracy, please watch it. It is available for viewing on GauchoSpace (GauchoCast). If you are not enrolled in the class, it currently streams from Netflix. A DVD can also be purchased from cowspiracy.com.
Trigger warning: Cowspiracy is not, generally speaking, a very graphic film, even though it takes up beef and other meat industries. In fact, other documentaries that deal with the subject (such as the 2011 film Vegucated) actually take viewers inside of slaughterhouses. In this sense, Cowspiracy seems to be attempting something of a genre shift. That said, there is one particularly disturbing scene in the film where a duck is slaughtered by a backyard farmer. It occurs from 1:10:16 – 1:12:23. If you think that you might find this scene unsettling, please scrub past it. In general, feel free to skip any scene that seems a little disturbing. None of them will appear on the exam.
2) If you have already seen Cowspiracy, please instead watch Wasted!. It is up on GauchoCast. If you are not enrolled in the class, it currently can be rented for a relatively modest fee from YouTube, Amazon, Google, etc.
3) Since we will be considering each in class, feel free to watch both videos. They are each interesting, though in different ways.
Film assignment: after watching one of the above films, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing them and comment on his video. Note that while Ken’s introduction covers both of the above films, you only need to comment on the film that you watched. However, if you have already watched Cowspiracy, please feel free to reference it in your comment.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Lecture video:
Please watch the following lecture by Ken:
“Do we need a climate vanguard? (Food, today and tomorrow)“
Lecture assignment: after watching the above lecture snippet, please comment on it.
Week 7 Feb 17: The Green New Deal
Reading:
This week’s reading is the Green New Deal (i.e. Resolution #109 of the U.S. House of Representatives, 02/07/2019)
Reading assignment: after reading the Green New Deal, please watch Ken’s video “Social justice, environmental justice, climate justice, and the injustice of it all” and comment on it.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Films:
Please watch “The Green New Deal, explained,” and “Why you still don’t understand the Green New Deal,” which are both short VOX videos, as well as “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.” All are on YouTube.
Film assignment: after watching the above three films, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing them and comment on his video.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Lecture video:
Please watch the following lecture by Ken:
“Personal action, climate activism, or becoming politically active. Which matters more?“
Lecture assignment: after watching the above lecture snippet, please comment on it.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Week 8, Feb 24: Communicating climate change, through words and actions
Reading:
This week’s reading is the chapter on “Communicating Climate Change Science” (Chapter 8) from the book Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions, which is a University of California publication. Note that while the link is to a PDF of the entire book, you are only required to read Chapter 8.
Reading assignment: after reading the above, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing this material and comment on his introduction.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Film:
Please watch either the documentary Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution or Tomorrow (Demain) according to these guidelines:
1) If you have not seen Being the Change, please watch it. It is available for viewing on GauchoSpace (GauchoCast). If you are not enrolled in the class, it currently can be rented for a relatively modest fee from Amazon.
2) If you have already seen Being the Change, please instead watch Tomorrow. It is up on GauchoCast. If you are not enrolled in the class, it currently can be rented for a relatively modest fee from YouTube, Amazon, Google, etc.
3) If you have already seen both films, please watch one again. The choice is yours.
Film assignment: after watching one of the above films, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing them and comment on his video (link). Note that while Ken’s introduction covers both of the above films, you only need to comment on the film that you watched, though you are free to comment on both.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture.
Lecture video:
Please watch the following lecture by Ken:
Lecture assignment: after watching the above lecture snippet, please comment on it.
Week 9, March 2: Can the climate crisis make us happy?
Reading:
Please read two chapters from the book Being the Change, by Peter Kalmus (on which the documentary of the same name was based): “Leaving Fossil fuel” and “Collective Action.”
Reading assignment: after reading the chapters, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing them and comment on his introduction. (link)
Incidentally, if you find these two chapters interesting, Peter Kalmus has made all of the chapters from Being the Change available for free on his personal website. Here are the chapters (perhaps one or more of the topics, such as biking, slow travel, meditation, or love will interest you!):
Part1: Waking Up; Beyond Green; Global Warming; The Science; Global Warming; The Outlook; Growth Always Ends; Our Mindset.
Part 2: Trailheads into the Wilderness; Like to Bike; Leaving Fossil fuel; Slow Travel, Meditation, a Foundation of Change; Reconnecting with Mother Earth; Opting Out of a Broken System; Collective Action; Community; Love
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Film:
Please watch the documentary Happy according to these guidelines:
1) If you have not seen Happy, please watch it. It is available for viewing on GauchoSpace (GauchoCast). If you are not enrolled in the class, it currently can be rented for a relatively modest fee from Amazon.
2) If you have already seen Happy, watch it again. It is even better the second time. Seriously!
Film assignment: after watching Happy, please watch Ken’s video on YouTube introducing it and comment on his video (link).
Lecture video:
Please watch the following lecture by Ken:
“Pulling it all together: 20 things that each of us can do to save the planet“
Lecture assignment: after watching the above lecture snippet, please comment on it.
Visit the comments to this video used for the “deep dive” lecture
Please watch the following lecture by Ken:
“The Climate Crisis: What It Was and What Each of Us Did About It (A Message From the Future)“
Lecture assignment: after watching the above lecture, please comment on it. The lecture has full details on how this particular, somewhat unusual comment should work. You can also read the assignment (i.e the full text of the video) below.
Attendance
Attendance accounts for 15% of the total course grade. Hence, just showing up for class is probably the easiest thing that you can do to help your grade.
Ken is NOT responsible for attendance. Please email your TAs regarding any questions about GauchoSpace grades.
Attendance at all lectures is required and will be taken throughout each class via i>clicker, beginning on the first day of the first week of class. Thus, you need to have an i>clicker device or app by this date. You need to register your i>clicker on GauchoSpace as soon as possible. Note that i>clicker polling will take place near the beginning, during, and near the end of every class. You must answer 75% of the poll questions for the day to receive your attendance points. You will not be eligible for make-up attendance for answering less than that.
If a student is found to be in possession of another student’s i>clicker during polling, the devices will be confiscated and both students will be reported to UCSB’s Office of Judicial Affairs as an incident of academic dishonesty (i.e. attempting to alter the course grade). Please note that both students can be charged for academic dishonesty. Hence, this is not something that you want to ask a friend to do (or agree to do for a friend).
Three things to note:
1) If you forgot your i>clicker, or for some reason it is not working properly, you need to see your TA before you leave the lecture hall.
2) Within 24 hour of the end of lecture, attendance will generally be posted to GauchoSpace. You are required to confirm your own attendance. If you attended class but it is not showing up on GauchoSpace, you need to immediately email your TA (all attendance is handled by the course TAs, not Ken).
3) Regarding #1 & #2, you need to have contacted your TA regarding an unrecorded attendance by midnight of the day after the lecture (assuming that attendance is posted to GauchoSpace). No exceptions will be made to this rule.
One last thing to note regarding attendance:
In the last minute of class, two i>clicker questions will be asked. Given the way that i>clicker attendance is configured, if you do not answer both, you will not receive credit for attending class that day.
Note: see the above Preface for a general introduction to how commenting works in this class.
General notes on comments
Each week you will be making three separate comments to the course YouTube channel (ClimateCrisis101). You need to comment on the 1) reading, 2) film, and 3) Ken’s short online lecture(s) for that week, beginning in week 1.
All commenting should be done on Ken’s YouTube videos, which will be posted at the beginning of each week. Note that if a film that we are screening appears on YouTube, such as Hasan Minhaj’s “The Ugly Truth Of Fast Fashion,” DO NOT comment on this video directly but rather to Ken’s commentary on it. Only comments made to Ken’s YouTube videos will be credited toward your course grade.
Please visit this syllabus weekly, as links for Ken’s new videos will be added at the beginning of each week. In order to simplify things, you could also subscribe to the course channel on YouTube: ClimateCrisis101.
Note that all course readings and videos are available from the first day of class. Hence, feel free to work ahead. However, you will not be able to make a comment on the reading/film until comments open on its assigned week.
Half of your YouTube comments (i.e. 15 of the 30) should be made to a comment made by a fellow student. Since comment are made to YouTube, you are able to see what your classmates have written. Reading through them can be a thought-provoking experience, as it can give you the opportunity to see the sorts of reactions others have had. (This might also help you assess your own work, as you can see how much time and thought that your classmates are giving to the assignment.) As you no doubt know, online discussions are not only possible, but are often particularly thoughtful, as we have the benefit of time in making our replies well considered.
One of the goals of this class, even though it is very large, is to encourage meaningful discussion, both with the instructor and among students. Hence, half of the time you should be respond directly to a classmate on YouTube. Because of a culture of anonymity, the Internet can sometimes be an unpleasant and nasty place. Please be not only thoughtful with your comments, but respectful as well, offering only the kind of constructive comments that you yourself would like to receive.
If you like what someone has said, you do not necessarily have to reply to it, you can just “like” it. This is, after all, YouTube.
Note that, as Ken’s YouTube videos are open to the public, there may be some comments that may not come from your classmates. As there is a very active community of climate change deniers on YouTube, do not be surprised if you encounter vitriolic comments. However, if you feel the comments contain hate speech or otherwise threatening language, please feel free to email Ken or one of your TAs. Please also check out YouTube’s policies on reporting incidents of hate speech, harassment, or cyberbullying.
Feel free to reply to someone’s comment to your comment. In fact, all such replies (indeed, all comments beyond the required 30 for the term) will be considered extra credit and will be taken into account if your final course grade is close to the next grade up. For example, if your final grade is an 89.3%, it would normally be a “B+” However, if you have a number of extra credit comments, your TA, solely at her discretion, could raise the final grade to an “A-.” Regardless of how many extra credit responses you have amassed, jumps greater than the amount of this example will not be made.
Comment FAQs:
Couldn’t I skip watching the videos and get someone to do the comments for me? Perhaps, but this would be a recipe for disaster, as you will be tested on all the videos on the exams. So, since you have to watch the videos anyway, why not share your opinions? It is perfectly fine if you disagree with the reading, film, instructor, or your classmates. As the climate crisis will likely be the single most important issue of your generation, sooner rather than later (i.e. now) is the time to engage with it. Also, instructors can use a web crawler to look for repeated comments and phrases, as well as other inconsistencies, including stylistic, in comments. Having someone else do your work is a form of academic dishonestly and will be immediately reported to UCSB’s Office of Judicial Affairs.
How long should a comment be and what form should they take? A comment should be as long as necessary to make your point(s). A paragraph or two is generally sufficient. Please make specific references to the text/film/short lecture in order to make clear that you have read or watched it in its entirety (and not just a portion or a trailer in the case of films). The purpose of this assignment is to expose you to a range of thought-provoking material that can make a real difference in your life. Consequently, your comment should contain your thoughts and feelings on the material. It is perfectly fine to express an emotional response.
Here are three comments on the film The True Cost from a previous class (Eng 22). They should give you some idea of what sort of comments that people make. Note that each of the below comments was also worth 1% of the course grade.
Sample #1:
I thought I knew a fair amount about clothing factory workers and outsourcing when I began watching this film, but honestly I was blindsided. I had never really thought about where clothes go when people throw them away, and I’m ashamed that I did not realize the drastic impact on the environment the fashion industry has. My initial reaction was more on the emotional side as we were told stories and shown images of the hardships faced in the factories of Bangladesh. I was furious at the clothing companies for not trying harder to make sure the people they employed had a decent wage and safe conditions. I was mad at the factory owners for ignoring complaints and letting their desire for business overpower the welfare of the people. Mostly, I my heart ached for all of the people that had no other option but to work in such a place. As the movie progressed, however, I began to think more intellectually. I tried to think of ways that we could change or create laws to help those workers, ways to fix and maybe even change our economic system, and ways to make people care.
The film’s audience is definitely casual viewers because they are trying to get everyday people to start caring about other people and the environment that they could be unaware of. I think the film did a great job of communicating their message by highlighting personal stories to target people’s emotions, explaining the environmental impacts, and describing how our economy and consumerism plays an important role in the overall system. The film made me somewhat pessimistic because there are too many people in the world that simply do not care about these issues enough for the problems to be improved upon. I agree with Safia Minney, the founder and CEO of People Tree, when she said that change is coming, but we don’t know if it’ll be in time. For most of the people in the world to wake up and realize change needs to happen now, I think the situation will first need to get worse before it can get better. I would rate this movie 5/5 stars and definitely recommend it to friends and family because I think they did a fantastic job illustrating what needs to be fixed and how, and everyone needs to be educated on these things that happen around the world.
Sample #2:
I felt that the documentary proved to be extremely effective in conveying its message regarding the monstrous effects of the clothing industry on not only the environment, but the welfare of impoverished laborers and the material-centered American psyche as well. Through the inclusion of several perspectives, including that of the underpaid factory workers in Bangladesh, India, and Cambodia, individuals working to change the the inhumane and wasteful nature of the industry, and those who refuse to see the countless negative impacts on human life, the film is able to argue its message without excluding conflicting perspectives. The most impactful way the film conveys its message to the audience is the way in which it captured the aw and painful emotions of the countless workers harmed by working in textile factories. As the majority of the film’s audience is likely American viewers with Netflix subscriptions, in allowing victims and laborers who work to produce cheap product share the the suffering and sacrifices they’ve endured, the consumers who perpetuate the system that is “fast fashion” see the direct effect on the environment and human life. In turn, a person who was once a casual viewer may now become inspired to be more aware of their spending habits. While I feel that their may be more viewers who are already concerned about the issue, as many casual viewers may not feel compelled to watch a documentary about the impacts of the clothing industry, I feel hopeful that the casual viewers who do watch it will feel the effects and become more aware of the issue.
I feel that the true power of this film lies in the emotional response it evokes from the viewer. In following the stories of a few individuals in Bangladesh, India, and Cambodia, I felt as though I could connect to some of laborers, not through experience, but rather in the sense that I was able to see their struggles through their own perspective, and realize that there are so many more real people just like them who work in inhumane conditions, without being paid enough to support their family. The film truly challenged me to be far more cautious in how much I spend on clothing, as I will now be thinking about the stories and individuals in the documentary. Along with this, I also found some information in the film to be quite surprising, such as the fact that only 10% of donated clothing is actually bought. I was completely unaware that the clothing that isn’t bought after being donated is sent in bulk to countries like Haiti, causing their textile and clothing production industry to plummet. Though the film didn’t spend a great deal of time on this issue, it really stuck with me as I always felt I was contributing to society in a positive way by donating clothing, yet I now feel conflicted as to whether the positive outweighs the negative
I can say with confidence that this film has impacted my attitude towards buying clothing. While I have a tendency to want to buy new clothing every few months as the seasons change, I will now truly think about whether or not I need to, and if so, I’ll be more cautious in regards to where I buy from. However, at the same time this film has instilled a small amount of fear in my mind as well. During the film, one interviewee made the point that while the economy and the fashion industry is perpetually expanding, the earth and it’s resources are not limitless. As we become more wasteful each year with extremely finite resources, I feel that one small thing I can do is recommend this film to friends and family with the hope that it will impact them as well. I rate this film four out of five stars as the message that it is conveying to viewers is one that is often overlooked, when in reality it is so important that it deserves to gain recognition and momentum.
Sample #3:
I thought that the film was effective at communicating its subject. The movie achieves this, by showing the audience various first-hand perspectives of people who work for and within the fast fashion industry as well as expert opinions on the globalized system. Through the perspectives of workers in developing countries India, we can see the deterioration of those societies’ physical health (birth defects, disease, cancer), local environments, and mental health (farmer suicides). The problems were around the world, from developing countries to US soil. The film begins from the casual view of branding and fast fashion but quickly goes deeper into the problems directly linked to the industry. The alternating imagery of model shoots and luxury to poverty and environmental destruction emphasizes the contrast between what consumers see and the reality of the situation.
I think that the film’s audience is targeted toward casual viewers, since the documentary not only broadly highlights the macro issues of fast fashion and monopolizing and outsourcing of production, but delves into the lives of the people of developing countries who have to directly deal with the effects of capitalism. Having not known much about fast fashion and it’s negative effects before seeing this movie, I feel like it was very informative and brought up surprising things I never knew before.
At first, I thought that the film would be boring, but I actually found myself interested while watching it. My response was primarily intellectual at first, as I wondered how the production of my clothes is significant at all, but the tragic images from the Rana Plaza disaster and protests in Cambodia made me emotional. The film made me empathize with the victims of the collapse and riot brutality. I was also saddened by the Indian farmers spraying pesticide on their crops with no face masks or protection whatsoever. It made me think about all of the labels I usually do not give much thought into on my clothes, such as “Made in Vietnam,” China, India, Honduras, etc. The shirts may have been produced at incalculable externalities, even the blood of workers, human beings, in those countries.
I learned a lot about the fast fashion industry and how privileged consumers like me, take even our clothes for granted. I learned that this industry is second to the oil industry in emissions. I feel a bit more guilty about UNIQLO being my favorite place to shop for clothing now. The film changed my attitudes about which clothes to buy. I should be buying clothes for long-term use and spend more of my money on fashion brands that are more ethical and open about their production methods. After watching it, I feel pessimistic, because if such large industries have so much power and influence on human health and the well-being of our planet, there needs to be drastic institutional change, since capitalism is such a big part of modern society. I disagreed with Richard Wolff, as he was criticizing capitalism, but I do accept the fact that it essentially prioritizes profit over humanity.
If I were to rate the film, I would give it 4 stars out of 5. It is likely that I would recommend it to a friend, especially if they are into fashion like I am, or care about issues of environmental, social, or even political nature. It is very much worth at least knowing about the fashion industry and its influence on today’s world.
The Climate Crisis: What It Was and What Each of Us Did About It
(A Message From the Future)
AOC’s “A Message From the Future” is a great short film and a great concept for a film.
It’s one thing to imagine the future and make plans for it, but, imagining yourself decades into the future and looking back on what happened because of our actions (or inaction) can get you thinking about the issue in new ways.
On the one hand, with respect to the climate crisis, if we do little or nothing, then we might rightly shudder at what the future holds.
On the other hand, we can imagine a future in which we full on acknowledged and faced the climate crisis in 2020 – rather than continue to deny its reality and delay action on it. Moreover, we can imagine a future where we took up the challenge of acting on this knowledge in the opening months of 2020.
In so doing, we can not only begin to imagine how to get there from here, one step at a time, but also underscore that it is, in fact, possible. This can be both heartening, as well as inspire us to action – even in the midst of an extraordinary crisis that threatens the very future of our species. Incidentally, nothing in AOC’s imagined future is at all implausible.
As the film notes early on with respect to the Green New Deal, “We knew that we needed to save the planet and that we had all the technology to do it, but people were scared. They said it was too big, too fast, not practical. I think that’s because they just couldn’t picture it yet. Anyways, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start with how we got here.”
Similarly, the film ends by noting that “the first big step was just closing our eyes and imagining it. We can be whatever we have the courage to see.”
This is, of course, a wonderful closing line, as we, as a culture, can be whatever we have the courage to see. In other words, within reason, whatever we can imagine for our selves and our culture in the future we can bring about, starting today.
Incidentally, note that AOC believes that we “had all the technology to do it” in 2020. In other words, what is needed is to make sweeping cultural changes, as well as to apply the technology we already have, such as by installing far more solar panels and wind turbines. Sure, newer and better technology can certainly help, but there is no need to wait for it, as we can begin without it now.
I started these lectures by reflecting on what my generation knew about the future. What we knew would likely happen if we did not act – and act quickly and decisively. Well, even if you didn’t watch those lectures, you know that we did little or nothing.
Even though scientists were making pretty dire predictions about the year 2000, let alone 2020, as 2020 was forty years in the future when I was 20 years old, it seemed incredibly far off. Conversely, given the predictions that were made when I was a child and a teenager (throughout the 1960s and ’70s), this frightening future seemed, somewhat paradoxically, close and real. In my mid teens, I remember reading books like Diet for a Small Planet and The Whole Earth Catalog and being really frightened for the future.
This course began on the opening days of a new decade. Scientists are not only in agreement that our global climate is changing, but also in agreement that we need to act now, in this decade. True, we should have acted forty or fifty years ago, but there is still time to act if we do so quickly and decisively – now, in the decade that we just entered.
In a way, AOC has thrown down the gauntlet for each of us. Can you imagine, given the current reality of the climate crisis, a future in which you would like to live? Equally important, can you imagine how to get to that future from here?
I would like to offer the YouTube comment space as an opportunity for you to do just that.
The title of this course is “The Climate Crisis: What It Is and What Each of Us Can Do About It.” Imagine yourself forty years in the future. For many of you, this would mean you’ll be about my age now, 60. Imagine, forty years in the future, reflecting back on “The Climate Crisis: what it was and what each of us did about it.”
In imagining what it was, I am not suggesting that this crisis will be passed by 2060. Rather, I am inviting you to reflect on the nature of this crisis, what it is now, in 2020. In other words, what we knew in 2020 could happen if we failed to act. For example, our first reading for the course, The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, mentions quite a few things.
Mainly, though, I am inviting you to imagine “what each of us did about it.” (If you prefer, you can just write on what we did.)
This is very much like what AOC did in “A Message From the Future.” In fact, what I am suggesting is that, like AOC, you write a message from the future (in this case, 2060) to today (2020).
Feel free to go about this in any way that you like.
For example, you could take AOCs lead and write about what we, as a country, did. You could, like AOC, talk about important milestones, such as when “Democrats took back…the Senate and the White House in 2020, and launched the decade of the Green New Deal, a flurry of legislation that kicked off our social and ecological transformation to save the planet.”
You could also talk about what we did as a species, rather than as just one country.
Alternately, you could zoom in on yourself and talk about the actions that you took, from changing your personal habits to climate activism to political actions.
Or zoom out a little and reflect on what you and your friends, perhaps your generation, collectively did.
In some sense, this is sort of like a New Year’s resolution insofar as it encourages us to imagine life as we would like it, rather than how it is. Moreover, it expresses a well-defined, personal commitment to try to make this happen.
As with a New Year’s resolution, things may not turn out the way that we hope. For example, Democrats may not, as AOC hopes, take back the White House in 2020. Still, the important thing is that she has resolved to do everything that she can to try to make this happen.
The question is, what will you resolve to try to make happen?
The operative word here is “try.” It is perfectly fine to be realistic. To acknowledge, for example, that things did not go according to plan, or took longer than expected. Perhaps you tried to immediately begin eating a plant-based diet, but it took three years to finally get the hang of it.
It is also ok to be pessimistic, if that is how you really feel. Perhaps the 2020s was the decade that we tried and failed to pass the Green New Deal and similar legislation. Perhaps the American Dream of bigger houses, more cars, and mountains of stuff not only proved unstoppable, but spread to the rest of the world as we quickly consumed the planet in the next forty years – or at least destroyed its ability to sustain our species.
Regarding format, it is entirely up to you. Here are a few possibilities:
- As with AOC’s example, it could be a general statement sent out to everyone.
- If you are planning to have a child or children, you could write it as a letter to them.
- You could write it as a letter to yourself. Sort of a time-capsule to be opened in forty years.
- You could even imagine yourself as a teacher in front of more than 800 students confessing that your generation fully knew that radical environmental action was imperative when you were 20, but instead your generation chose to do nothing.
If you like writing and sci-fi (and cli-fi in particular), great, feel free to go a little crazy here.
If you do not think of yourself as a writer, that is ok too. As with all the comments in this class, even though it is an English course, I am far more interested in what you have to say than if you make a grammatical mistake or two.
Since this one comment is taking of the place of the three that we ordinarily have every week, it should be approximately three times the length of an average comment (and, accordingly, it will be worth the same as three comments with respect to the course grade). And too, since there is no reading or film assignment, please take the time that you would have devoted to reading and watching to think about the future.
If you need a little inspiration, I suggest re-watching AOC’s “A Message From the Future.” In addition, let me end with the description of that video provided by the filmmakers, as it nicely lays out what AOC set out to do in it:
What if we actually pulled off a Green New Deal? What would the future look like?…
Set a couple of decades from now, the film is a flat-out rejection of the idea that a dystopian future is a forgone conclusion. Instead, it offers a thought experiment: What if we decided not to drive off the climate cliff? What if we chose to radically change course and save both our habitat and ourselves?
We realized that the biggest obstacle to the kind of transformative change the Green New Deal envisions is overcoming the skepticism that humanity could ever pull off something at this scale and speed. That’s the message we’ve been hearing from the “serious” center…that it’s too big, too ambitious, that our Twitter-addled brains are incapable of it…
This film flips the script. It’s about how, in the nick of time, a critical mass of humanity in the largest economy on earth came to believe that we were actually worth saving. Because, as Ocasio-Cortez says in the film, our future has not been written yet and “we can be whatever we have the courage to see.”
Incidentally, just in case YouTube is not around in 40 years, my goal is to also upload these comments to the Internet Archive in the hope that you can, if you are interested, look back on your message from the future in 2060.
Camp Fire, viewed from space
Note, this page contains 1) the text of each talk, 2) a video of each talk, which can be viewed directly from this page, and 3) and an audio podcast that aggregates together all of the talks for that lecture (i.e. the six lectures that comprise the Climate and Generation can all be heard as a single audio podcast).
Climate and Generation (a six-part lecture series)
(Listen to this section as an audio podcast)
The climate crisis as a generational issue (Climate and Generation, Intro). Watch video.
Across the planet, the youth are rebelling!
This probably comes as little surprise, as you may well have heard of Greta Thunberg, the Sunrise Movement, and are likely aware that their generation is more than a little concerned about the state of our planet and its climate.
The fact that they are now rebelling should come as little surprise either. For decades, we kept telling yourselves that we needed to change the reckless way that we were inhabiting our planet – not for ourselves, but, as we kept saying, for our children.
Well, we didn’t. And those children, who weren’t necessarily even been born at the time, are now here – and coming of age. And they’re upset that we didn’t adequately address this issue decades ago. Let’s be honest, they’re pissed, really pissed – and rightfully so. We are handing them a planet that is well on its way to becoming uninhabitable, certainly unwelcoming, for our species.
If you look at the circumstances surrounding the climate crisis (which, as we shall see, are more than a little unusual), the emergence of a youth rebellion at this moment in history, from this particular generation, was almost inevitable.
In the next five segments of Climate Crisis 101 we will be considering the generational aspect of the climate crisis and why people of my generation failed to act – and are still, even now, not adequately acting.
Which means that the responsibility for sweeping action now falls to new generation coming on the scene, that of my students. Consequently, as far as I am concerned, the youth movement is a very good thing indeed. We should all, for the sake of our planet, welcome and do what we can to support it.
How the climate crisis was brought about in a single lifetime (Climate and Generation, 1). Watch video.
It’s true. The climate crisis was principally brought about in a single lifetime. Contrary to what you may have heard or thought, for the most part the climate crisis was not slowly caused over centuries by many generations of human beings, but rather in a single lifetime. Which means, of course, that the people who largely caused this problem are still alive – and still making it worse.
I want to talk about how this happened. Not the mechanics of how greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere, but how this was allowed to happen, why no one stopped it – and why, even today, we are not doing nearly enough.
Let me be clear at the onset that I am confident that it is not too late to act – there is still time – though, as we shall see, the solution to the climate crisis that I am going to propose may seem…well…radical.
The circumstances that made the climate crisis possible (perhaps even inevitable) are striking – and more than a little unusual. Even though we have been bringing about this crisis for quite a few decades now, to many people along the way it really did seem that there were few consequences to these actions.
This was largely because of an unusual time delay that challenges and confuses our ordinary temporal perception of cause and effect. It is important to understand this issue, as it can help explain our decades of inaction – as well as suggest how we can finally, adequately, and quickly mobilize. Allow me to explain.
If you pour a quart of oil down a storm drain, the consequences will soon be obvious, as it can quickly contaminate as many as a million gallons of water – it’s true. Release a billion times that amount of CO2 into the atmosphere (carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas causing the climate crisis), and there will be little impact, anywhere on earth. Hence, it may seem that there is little need to worry about the wholesale dumping of CO2 into the atmosphere. For decades, we kept telling ourselves that there wasn’t much to worry about.
But, there was. If you keep releasing enough CO2 into the atmosphere (which we did), the impact will be felt everywhere on the planet, but there will – and this is important – there will be a significant time delay before the consequences are felt.
I would argue that this time delay played a major role in bringing about the climate crisis – without it, I doubt the situation would have gotten anywhere near this far. The delayed impact also set the stage for an extraordinary generational split on the climate crisis that is now revealing itself across the planet.
In order to understand how all this works, imagine that you could indulge in some sort of self-destructive behavior, say cigarette smoking, but without any consequences, whatsoever.
You could smoke three, four, even five packs a day without significantly harming your health – every day for your entire adult life – no strings attached.
Ok, imagine one string: while you would suffer none of the consequences of your actions, your children would suffer them all.
Cancer, heart disease, emphysema, stroke – you get the idea. They wouldn’t have to wait for the symptoms to show up later in life, they would experience them from birth onward.
And, not only your children, but your grandchildren – and, moreover, every subsequent generation of your descendants for hundreds of years.
Here’s another twist, if enough people did it, then not only the descendants of the smokers, but every child born on the planet for the next few hundred years would suffer the consequences.
We are by no means talking about a majority of human beings here. Not half, not even a quarter. If just one in eight people on the planet did it, this would be enough to make every child born for hundreds of years suffer for their entire lives.
One last twist: not only would subsequent generations of human beings suffer for hundreds of years, but all life on the planet will be profoundly impacted, from the heights of the atmosphere to the depths of the oceans. Thousands upon thousands of species would suffer, many would go extinct.
Unfortunately, this is not a thought experiment. This is how anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) climate change works. The abused substance in question is not tobacco but fossil fuels.
During one lifetime people enjoy, dozens of subsequent generations suffer.
I know: I keep saying just one lifetime? Isn’t it true that our fossil fuel addiction goes back hundreds of years?
Yes, that’s right. In fact, I have written about the first true fossil fuel economy to emerge on earth, which was 400 years ago in Shakespeare’s London.
But let’s look at CO2 in the atmosphere. Although there are a number of other important greenhouse gases (some that you may have heard of, like methane, others that you likely haven’t, such as HFCs – both of which we will be taking up in future segments), CO2 is the most significant greenhouse gas and hence an important benchmark.
For the whole of human history, indeed even before there were modern humans, before there were Neanderthals, CO2 in the atmosphere has held at about 280 ppm.
Then, something happened, something big. A few hundred years ago people started digging up large quantities of fossil fuels. When burned, they released CO2 into the atmosphere.
By 1959 (I’ll explain in a moment why I picked this particular year), CO2 in the atmosphere had risen to 315 ppm, a rise of about 35 points.
If it had stopped there in 1959, it is likely that the consequences for the human race would have been, relatively speaking, minor. But it didn’t stop there.
In fact, it continued to rise – dramatically. During the year that I am recording this (2019), CO2 in the atmosphere reached 415 ppm. So, in the past 60 years CO2 has risen by 100 points. That’s three times more than it rose in the preceding centuries. (It would in fact be much more, except that our planet’s oceans have absorbed a quarter of the CO2 that we have emitted – with grave consequences, which we will be taking up in future segments.)
1959 has particular significance for me: this was the year that I was born.
Let’s just pause for a moment to reflect on this: three quarters of all the CO2 – the principal greenhouse gas causing the climate crisis – three quarters of the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere by human beings was put there in a single lifetime – mine. Three quarters of it.
Because CO2 can remain in the atmosphere for hundreds, even thousands of years, dozens of subsequent generations are going to be impacted by what we have done. Generations of people, animals, fish, insects, plants – every living thing on earth.
Recall the little twist that I added with my example of smoking. I stipulated that not everyone would need to do it for everyone on the planet to suffer. This is how the climate crisis has unfolded on earth.
A quarter of all the CO2 in the atmosphere was put there by one country, my country, the United States, even though Americans constitute just 4% of the world’s population. If you add in the countries of Europe, as well as Russia, in the past 60 years these countries, which during this time formed the bulk of what we called the “developed world,” have been responsible for nearly two thirds of all the CO2 emitted into the atmosphere, even though collectively these countries are home to just one eighth of the world’s population.
In contrast, the poorest 3 billion people (“Billion” with a “B” – and that’s approaching nearly half of the world’s population), the poorest 3 billion people on the planet contributed just 5% of the CO2 in the atmosphere, a pretty insignificant amount.
Pause on that: the extraordinary role that one out of eight people on the planet played in the climate crisis, in a single lifetime. For the most part, these people are still alive. For the most part, each day they are still doing exactly what they did to bring about this crisis.
That last point is particularly worrisome, as my lifetime is not yet over. Life expectancy being what it is, I will live another twenty years or so. If we continue on like this, CO2 could rise another forty points, to 455ppm, in what would have been my lifetime. In other words, in the next 20 years human beings (principally those in the developed world) could put more CO2 into the atmosphere than the human race did for the whole of our history up until the time that I was born.
In contrast, nearly half the planet’s people had virtually nothing to do with causing the climate crisis, yet generations of their children will also suffer. And let’s be honest, suffer more than children in the developed world, as all the wealth that our fossil-fuel economy has given us will, at least initially, likely help insulate the developed world from the climate crisis.
Pause on the injustice of that: the wealth and power that the developed world has amassed, which has principally come from our fossil-fuel economy, will help protect us from the worst of what we have done, while the rest of the world will suffer all the more for it. In future segments, we will be taking up this subject, climate justice, in detail.
Never in the whole of human history has one group impacted the planet and its life to anywhere near this degree. It’s not just unprecedented, it is altogether mind-boggling.
In the following segments, I want to propose a solution to at least help mitigate this crisis. The course of action that I am going to suggest is radical. But I see no other course, as little else will likely work.
For now, I want to end with an apology, from my generation to the newest generation emerging into maturity, that of my students. There are, no doubt, better people than I to deliver it. The power brokers in the fossil fuel industry come to mind, as do the politicians that still support them, even now. However, we may be waiting quite a while for their apology.
My generation should be – and I am – ashamed of what we have done. We have left you with a planet on its way to becoming largely uninhabitable, certainly unwelcoming, for our species. What’s worse, rather than correcting our mistakes, we have raised you and the generation before you to keep making the same ones. Instead of teaching you how to live sustainably on this planet, we have done just the opposite. Sadly, as you may have inherited our fossil fuel addiction, many of you may now, like us, be in the habit of casually abusing our planet, our home, Indeed, you may even have trouble imagining a sustainable way of life.
I wonder, I wonder how history will remember my generation…
All that I can say is that I am sorry and that some of us in my generation are with you in this fight – and will be as long as we have breath in us.
Why the generation that caused the climate crisis is not acting (Climate and Generation, 2). Watch video.
In the previous segment, I noted that climate crisis was principally brought about in a single lifetime, mine. Today, I would like to address the question of why we’re not acting. As it turns out, this is arguably a generational issue.
First, allow me to quickly recap what I noted during the last segment:
Three quarters of all the CO2 (that’s carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas causing the climate crisis) was put into our planet’s atmosphere in the 60 years of my lifetime. Most of it was put there by the developed world. In contrast, the poorest half of humanity had virtually nothing to do with bringing the climate crisis about – though they will suffer the most.
An unusual time delay is partly responsible here. For decades, massive amounts of greenhouse gases were released into the atmosphere, seemingly without significantly impacting the global climate. Many people, ignoring the warnings of scientists, simply didn’t believe that doing this was a problem, as the consequences of our actions had not yet caught up with us. Now that they are quickly arriving, coming to grips with what we have done is…well…difficult. It really is mind-boggling.
Mind-boggling for everyone, but, in a certain way, especially for my generation in the developed world: those most responsible for this crisis. How can we even begin to come to grips with what we have done?
Is it surprising that many of us are in a state of denial? Deep, deep denial.
We hear a lot about denial of the climate crisis nowadays. Usually this refers to theories that are advanced, often by or for fossil fuel interests, that in some way deny that the climate crisis is happening, or deny its severity, or that it is human-caused, or something of the sort.
To many people, these attempts at denial sound pretty outlandish, as they fly in the face of reason and the facts. However, to some individuals, those who are themselves in a state of denial, often deep denial, they provide a way out: a way to not face up to what we have done, as what we have done borders on the unthinkable.
Is it at all surprising that those in denial would question the truth?
Of course, since before I was born, scientists have been alerting both the public and policy makers to the problem. Perhaps not surprisingly, those in denial often lash out at these messengers. You may have heard some of them. They can sound something like this:
“After all, I have lived all my life without seeing any significant consequences from the burning of fossil fuels. Sure, there have been some pretty bad storms and crazy weather lately, but there have always been bad storms and wild weather. Who’s to say that they were caused by human action? Scientists? Who’s to say they’re right? Maybe their instruments are wrong. Maybe their theories are wrong. Maybe their computer models are wrong. Maybe this hasn’t been caused by human beings at all. Maybe it’s just the natural cycles of climate. Maybe it’s sunspot active. Maybe, maybe the scientists are corrupt. Maybe they’re part of some insidious global plot to undermine democracy.”
I know, this can sound pretty silly. However, all of these theories denying the climate crisis have not only been advanced, they have all gotten significant traction with certain segments of the public: often, those in denial. Incidentally, and perhaps not surprisingly, denial of the climate crisis is most common in the developed world – which, perhaps not surprisingly, largely brought about the crisis.
Even if individuals in my generation move past denial, there is the real danger of delay, climate delay. In other words, if we come to grips with the fact that the climate crisis is upon us and that we have caused it – and hey, that’s a lot to come to grips with – then how should we proceed? Slowly, with caution? Or decisively, as time is of the utmost essence?
Simple answer? My lifetime was the time to have acted. The six decades that I have lived was the time to have acted. The time for successful climate intervention is now receding quickly; we simply cannot delay any longer. As we shall see throughout this series, we need to fundamentally rethink and change the way that our species relates to this planet – and we need to do it now.
Although different in a variety of ways, climate denial and climate delay can result in the same thing: Nothing. Inaction.
There are three groups that should be particularly and profoundly upset about all this.
First, the half of the world’s population that had a minimal impact on CO2 rise, yet will suffer its consequences the most.
Second, let’s not forget all non-human life on earth, who hold no responsibility for CO2 rise. They will never know why this is all happening, yet are suffering and dying en masse already.
The third group is the children of the people who did this. In speaking to my students, I am for the most part speaking to this group (although, as they hail from all over the world, some of my students come from places that did little to bring about this crisis). While many of this group may have benefited from the fossil fuel economy, they largely had no choice in the matter. After all, parents do not generally decide whether or not they are going to buy a McMansion or gas-guzzling SUV based on the input of their children.
This last group is also in many ways currently leading the worldwide revolt against the climate crisis.
Because my generation has not acted, I am speaking to this younger generation. Not only in the classroom, but here, as I imagine you as the principal audience for this prerecorded talk.
The problem is that my generation is still largely in power across the planet.
Consider the U.S. federal government. The average age of Congress is around my age, 60. The Supreme Court is nearly ten years older, pushing 70. And, of course, Donald Trump was the first person ever elected President of the United States in his seventies. We could continue with state and local governments (the average age of a Governor is early sixties), but the story is much the same, as it is in the corporate world. The average age of a CEO of a major corporation is 56.
Of course, it does not necessarily follow from this that my generation cares little about the climate crisis. Unfortunately, polls reveal that this is in fact often the case.
A recent poll by Yale and George Mason Universities asked voters what will be the most important issues for them in the upcoming 2020 presidential election. Among my generation, so-called “baby boomers,” global warming ranked number 18 out of 29 as an area of concern. Instead, the leading issues were the economy, healthcare, and Social Security. Other concerns ranked ahead of global warming included terrorism, immigration reform, and border security. The generation after mine (so-called Gen X – basically people who are now in their forties through mid-fifties) did not rank global warming much higher as an issue of concern: for them it is 15 out of 29. Finally, the generation before mine, people the age of Donald Trump and older, ranked it lowest of all: 23 out of 29 .
It’s not that these folks necessarily deny that anthropogenic climate change is taking place. According to this poll, 70% of registered voters in the U.S. now believe that the climate is changing because of human action, which is up from what it has been in recent years. While this might seem heartening, the problem is that the climate crisis, although now increasingly acknowledged as real, is just not much of a priority for many people. Sadly, as this poll reveals, this is a generational issue: the older you are, the less urgent you will likely find the climate crisis. People forty and above just don’t see this as very important, at all.
In many respects, this is hardly surprising, as these older generations lived their lives largely without seeing the consequences of their actions because of that strange time delay – which lasted for decades – that we took up in the previous segment.
But perhaps polls aren’t all that revealing, perhaps the generation in power has been acting, has been lowering CO2 emissions. After all, isn’t that what the Paris Accord signed at COP21 is all about? Didn’t the nations of the world agree to limit global temperature rise to a reasonable 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit)? In fact, they did agree to this.
The problem is that global temperatures have already risen by two-thirds this amount, by 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit. When did all this happen? You guessed it: principally during the six decades of my lifetime.
Not only are CO2 emissions on the rise, but they are – astonishingly – rising far more quickly now than when the Paris Accord was signed. At that time (2015), CO2 emissions were rising at less than half a percent per year. Last year (2018), global CO2 emissions rose by a staggering 2.7%. That’s five times as much as when the Paris Accord was signed. In case you’re wondering, even though there had been a lowering trend in the U.S., 2018 was well above the world average with a 3.4% increase.
Simply put, during my lifetime we (and by “we” I principally mean the developed world) have been dumping vast amounts of CO2 other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere each and every year – and every year we have on average been dumping significantly more than the year before. As last year proved, we have by no means been slowing down since the Paris Accord was signed.
How far off are we from the target of the Paris Accord? The goal is to reduce emissions to between 80-95% of the levels that we had thirty years ago, back in 1990, back when I was thirty.
So, no, the people in power are not sufficiently addressing this issue – not by a long shot.
What, then, do we need to do to keep this crisis from becoming even worse? In the next segment, I will be taking up this question – and offering a radical answer.
What a new generation can do to mitigate the climate crisis (Climate and Generation, 3). Watch video.
In the previous two segments, I noted that even though the climate crisis was overwhelmingly brought about in a single lifetime, mine, my generation sees the problem as a low priority and, consequently, is doing little to mitigate it.
In this and the next segment, I want to suggest an admittedly radical solution whereby the next generation can avert the worst of this crisis
Just to recap, allow me to repeat what I said in the last segment: “Three quarters of all the CO2 (that’s carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas causing the climate crisis), was put into our planet’s atmosphere in the 60 years of my lifetime.” Ironically, for the most part the people who currently wield power on the planet are from my generation. And for the most part, they are not sufficiently addressing on this problem – not by a long shot.
I think of myself as a scholar-activist. In the previous segments I have been talking to you principally as a scholar (and teacher), laying out the facts, explaining the situation. When I’ve done this in person, students often ask me what they should do, what action they should take. I am going to respond to that question now as an activist, by suggesting an action.
Here it is, my radical suggestion. It, and what follows from this point onward, is spoken for my students (and your generation):
You need to take control of this planet – or at least set your sights on that goal – and you need to start now, today.
You cannot wait for the normal course of events, which would bring you to power when you’re my age, or nearly so. As we shall see throughout this series, this situation is simply too urgent for that. You do not have decades. You do not even have years to act. You need to act now, in the upcoming months to have as much impact as is possible. The future – and by that I mean sustaining a reasonably habitable earth for human beings – depends on it.
Sadly, you cannot wait for my generation to act, as we have had decades to act, but haven’t. In fact, as I noted in the last segment, during our watch we continued to make this situation worse and worse every year. And even now we see this as an alarmingly low priority.
In suggesting that you need to take control of this planet, I do not mean to suggest that human beings should take control of even more of the earth. Our species already controls over 80% of our planet’s landmass. I am simply suggesting that that control needs to be transferred to a generation that grasps the enormity of this crisis – and will thus hopefully be better stewards of this planet.
Also, let me be very clear, when I suggest that you take control of this planet, I am not in any way implying that you resort to violence to do so. Seriously, violence never solves anything. And, fortunately, throughout the developed world that principally caused this problem, democracy is for the most part still working reasonably well – though, as we shall see in future episodes, fossil fuel interests and others are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to subvert it.
The 2018 U.S. midterm elections can be seen as a proof-of-concept of what can be done. A month after the youngest woman was ever voted into Congress, she co-introduced the most sweeping U.S. legislation ever to address the climate crisis: the Green New Deal. The fact that she did this in her twenties is not, I think, coincidental.
Throughout this series, I am going to suggest a number of things that you can do to help take control of this planet. These will range from activism to engineering sweeping cultural change through decisions that you make on where you live, how you get around, what you eat, what you wear, the stuff you buy, etc.
However, political change is of central importance, even on the local level. You may trade your car for an e-bike (a great thing to do), but if your local politicians are committed to car infrastructure rather than bicycle paths, you may have real trouble getting around on that bike and even be unsafe sharing overcrowded roads with cars.
In short, one of the simplest, quickest, and most effective things that you can do to work toward taking control of this planet is to vote – and to urge five of your friends to do the same.
There is a particular urgency in doing so that is worth noting, as my generation is leveraging democracy to its advantage and interests, which is away from the climate crisis and toward things like Social Security and healthcare. How is this happening?
In the aforementioned 2018 midterm election, voter turnout in the U.S. was generally up. In the case of 18 to 29-year-olds, it was way up, having increased more than any other age group, as over a third voted. This is great, undeniably. However, the problem is that two out of three people over the age of 65 voted. As a group, their voting power is thus twice as great as the youngest generation of voters, simply because they are voting twice as much. My generation is not only effectively in control of this planet, we are significantly leveraging that control – two-to-one in the case of political power, which is all important – and which is, of course, exercised through voting.
It is not my intent is to cause generational discord. Moreover, I am not echoing the 1960s adage that you should trust no one over 30. I am, after all, delivering this message at twice that age. And there are plenty of people in my generation and even older, including politicians, that are deeply committed to addressing our climate crisis. Al Gore and Bernie Sanders, both in their seventies, come to mind.
Nonetheless, the bald fact is that we will be dead and buried when you will be dealing with the worst of this. We haven’t and simply won’t significantly suffer in our lifetimes. However, you will. Though we brought about the greatest catastrophe ever caused by human beings on the planet, the climate crisis wasn’t really much of an issue for my generation, as paradoxical as that may sound. This is arguably largely because of the time delay that I elaborated on in the previous talks. Even today, as polls reveal, it is still not much of an issue for my generation. It will, nonetheless, likely be THE defining issue for you, and for many generations after you.
Is it even possible for your generation to take even partial control of this planet? Frankly, I am not sure. However, I am decidedly of the “aim high” camp when it comes to tackling problems. Even you do not succeed at this incredibly ambitious goal, you may still have a profound impact.
Consider the last great youth rebellions in the U.S., which occurred in the 1960s and ’70s. True, political power was not transferred from one generation to another at this time. However, these youth movements, which in many respects had their center in colleges and universities, were able to exert tremendous political pressure that ultimately resulted in significant cultural and political change.
This not only included the ending of the Vietnam Conflict through the withdrawal of American troops, but also a range of additional cultural changes, such as for civil rights. Especially for people of color, for women, for the LGBTQIA community, we live in a better world because of the youth rebellions of the 1960s – though, of course, still hardly a perfect world.
The simple fact is that, as a result of these rebellions, America was in many ways fundamentally, profoundly changed – for the better.
Even if you do not succeed in taking even partial control this planet, you can have a profound influence on the older generations. Interestingly, you are uniquely positioned to do so.
A recent study found that, when its comes to promoting “collective action” on the climate crisis, one of the most effective approaches is “child-to-parent intergenerational learning—that is, the transfer of knowledge, attitudes or behaviours from children to parents.” (source) Simply put, you need to teach your parents by communicating to them the horrific severity of this problem. You need to explain to them how important this is for your future, the future of their (as yet unborn) grandchildren – indeed the future of all your family’s descendants. By taking this direct, personal approach, your generation can have enormous influence on the generations in control of this planet.
Throughout this series, we will be looking at a range of approaches, such as child-to-parent intergenerational learning, that can allow you to have greater control of the destiny of the earth, our species, and the life with which we share this planet.
I know that I have left quite a few questions unanswered here, such as just how much my generation knew about what we were doing. I will take this question up in a future segment, but the short answer is that we knew more than enough to have been prompted to action. After all, the modern environmental movement emerged at the moment, shortly after the time of my birth, when we could have largely averted the worst all this.
The most pressing question, however, is what you as a generation can do to undo what my generation has done. I will be directly addressing this question in the next segment, as well as throughout this series. In fact, this series centers on this question.
Simple answer is that, in order to help moderate the climate crisis, we need to fundamentally reinvent Western culture, especially consumer culture and the belief that happiness is to be found in things (it obviously isn’t), a culture that we have now sold to the entire world, much to the detriment of our planet. This is not a big job, it’s an almost unimaginably huge undertaking. But it must be done. Because my generation didn’t do it, this job now falls to you.
Thinking back to the 1960s in the U.S., I am reminded of a speech by Robert F. Kennedy where he noted that “There is a Chinese curse which says ‘May he live in interesting times.’ Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind.”
This is probably not actually a real Chinese curse, but what Kennedy noted was correct. While he lived in a time of “danger and uncertainty,” it was also an extremely exciting, creative time. Out of his era, with all its strife, came a better world, precisely because it was not just more of the same, but a bold charting of a new future.
And yet, by comparison, it was arguably not nearly as exciting, with as much room for creativity, as the time in which we now live. Echoing Kennedy, I would argue that ours is “the most creative of any time in the history” of humanity. The challenge, at once both frightening and exhilarating, is to create a new world.
I open my most recent book, which is on the challenge of writing a new environmental era and moving forward to nature (in other words, moving forward to a better relationship with the earth), with a quote from Tennyson’s wonderful little poem “Ulysses.” Allow me to repeat it here, to you:
“Come, my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
In the next segment, we will take up the question of how to begin.
Can one generation do what previous generations failed to do? (Climate and Generation, 4). Watch video.
What can I do to help?
This is one of the most common questions that people ask me regarding the climate crisis.
In response, I often launch into a discussion of voting, activism, and things of that sort. However, many people are asking something different with this question. They want to know what they can do right now, today. Since human actions brought about the climate crisis, they want to know what sort of actions, personal actions, can help grind it to a halt.
In other words, they are asking how best to live their lives in order to avert climate catastrophe.
Although this is certainly a big question, I have a number of suggestions that can help make a start. Usually, I give five or so. Amazingly, these five things can cut your climate footprint in half or even more.
How is this a generational issue? I have noticed that people of my generation tend to respond very differently to these ideas then do my students and their generation.
This generational difference is more than a little important, as it it reveals one of the truly daunting challenges that we face, which is the subject of this segment.
First, let me quickly articulate five things that can Americans can do to dramatically reduce our personal climate footprints. Then we can move to the two very different generational responses to them. (Incidentally, you might find these interesting in their own right. In future segments, I will be taking each of them up individually in detail, along with a range of similar suggestions.)
1) Transportation. For the average American, owning and driving an automobile accounts for around a quarter of our individual climate footprints. Hence, if you trade your car for mass transit, a bike, or walking shoes, or some combination of these, you will have done the earth (and humanity and the rest of the life on the planet) a huge favor.
2) Housing can account for another quarter of your climate footprint, especially if you live in a large suburban or rural home. Move to a micro-apartment or certain co-housing communities, and you can greatly reduce another big chunk of your climate footprint.
Incidentally, the good news for both transportation and housing is that there is a simple way to approach both: move to a city. City living can mean dramatically less car use (in Manhattan, only one in five people commute to work by car) and generally smaller, more efficient housing. Many cities have made major commitments to mass transportation and bicycle use, Portland and Vancouver are excellent examples, as well as micro-apartments, such as New York’s adAPT NYC program.
3) Waste less food and eat a largely plant-based diet. Food production is the second largest producer of greenhouse gases on the planet. Yet, we waste between 1/3 and 1/2 of the food that we produce. For Americans, much of this happens at the consumer level. Meat is another problem. Producing a pound of beef emits the same amount of greenhouse gases as producing 30 pounds of lentils, which are also a significant source of protein.
4) Have no more than one child per person. In other words, a couple should have either two, one, or zero children. When I was born (1959), there were just under 3 billion people on the planet. There are now 7.7 billion. By mid century, it will be near 10 billion. The planet simply cannot sustain this many human beings. We need to reduce our global population.
5) Re-think your relationship to stuff. For example, the average American purchases over 60 items of clothing each year (not including socks, underwear, and other incidentals). Nearly everything we buy has a climate footprint. The solution: for a start, buy less, keep what you have longer, and consider preowned options from places like thrift stores.
(By the way, these last three suggestions – regarding food, population, and our appetite for stuff – are related. While it might seem that a swelling human population is the principal threat to our planet, we need to always keep in mind the relationship of population to consumption. As it is home to just 4% of the world’s population, the United States would seem to be pretty insignificant environmentally. However, as I noted in a previous segment, 25% of all greenhouse gases that human beings have put in the atmosphere were done by this tiny population, in part because we have a voracious appetite for meat and all sorts of stuff. So, we can’t just think in terms of population: we must also consider the emissions of each person. In the future segments, we will be taking up this issue in detail.)
In any event, if you do these five simple things, you may well cut your climate footprint in half, perhaps even to a quarter or less of its present size.
Now, for the generational responses.
Over the years I have heard a range of different responses to these suggestions from my students and people of their generation. There are two in particular that I hear more than all others. They sound something like this:
1) “Is that it? Just doing these five simple things can make that big of a difference?” (It can!)
The second response often goes hand-in-hand with the first:
2) “Not only doesn’t this sound very bad, in many ways it actually sounds pretty exciting, even desirable.”
It’s true, moving to a place like Portland or Vancouver (or a less expensive urban option) and living without a car can sound pretty appealing. Perhaps far more appealing than life in a cookie-cutter suburb, shuttling around in a minivan or SUV. Since many of my students have at least toyed with the idea of becoming largely vegetarian or vegan, switching to a mostly plant-based diet may be enticing for a range of additional factors, such as the ethical treatment of animals. And very few of my students are thinking about having large families. Regarding stuff, many of them are frustrated with our consumer culture and perhaps already visit thrift shops or have been intrigued by movements like minimalism.
So, all this doesn’t sound so bad and, in fact, can seem pretty desirable.
Although we are often told that adapting to the climate crisis will mean that we will need to make do with less and live drab lives of deprivation, this is not generally the perspective of my students – not by a long shot.
However, when I list these five things to people of my own generation, the response is often quite different. As it turns out, I primarily hear two answers from them as well. They often sound something like this:
1) “That sounds positively horrible! I love my car, and the freedom that it gives me. I’ve worked hard all of life for my house, it is incredibly important to me. And I enjoy the fruits of my labor; all the things that I now deserve as a result of all that work. Instead, you want me to live in a tiny, cramped apartment or with a bunch of other people in co-housing, to get around by bus or on a bicycle, to eats lentils for dinner, and wear somebody’s used clothing? Could you possibly be serious?
The second response is also pretty common:
2) “This is a direct assault on the American way of life. We should be able to live where we want to live, drive what we want to drive, eat what we want to eat, wear what we want to wear, buy what we want to buy, and, of course, have as many children as we please. What you are suggesting sounds like communism, totalitarianism, or something of the sort!”
To these folks, the changes that I outline not only suggest a decidedly unpleasant and drab existence, it comes at the cost of what are actually posited as freedoms.
Throughout this series you’ll hear me cite statistics and quote papers, but let me be clear, what I am relating here is my personal experience. And it is admittedly skewed. My students are a select group. The majority of them are from California, a very progressive state, or are progressive thinking international students, they will soon to be college educated, and they are likely more than a little drawn to environmental issues, otherwise they wouldn’t be taking my classes. In contrast, every now and again I run into members of their generation who hold very different views than I am relating here. I once had a student tell me that he “wanted everything that my parents had – and a whole lot more. I want it all!”
Nonetheless, experience has taught me that the generational divide that I am outlining here is real. And, as far as I am concerned, more than a little worrisome, as it suggests that the generation currently controlling our planet has been crafting and settling into a way of life for decades now that is, quite simply, an environmental nightmare. What’s more, my generation likes it – and often recoil from change almost instinctively. As my generation has shaped our modern world more than any other, many in this generation are actually proud of what was accomplished – and seemingly comfortable with it.
While it may seem that my generation simply inherited its behavior and practices from previous generations (and in some sense we did), we significantly innovated and often outrageously supersized them in a way that was disastrous for the planet. Take housing, for example.
In 1950, shortly before I was born, the average size of an American house was just under 1000 square feet. Today, the average size is over 2500 square feet – more than two and a half times larger, even though American families are now considerably smaller. And of course, as with so many things American, bigger is often perceived as better. Hence, if you can afford it, the ideal home is often much larger. One in five new houses in the U.S. is now, in fact, over 3000 square feet in size. One in ten is a McMansion, at over 4000 square feet. In contrast, a traditional Japanese home, which housed families of four or more, was one tenth that size at 400 square feet.
Housing is just one example of how American lifestyle has grown more and more environmentally disastrous during my lifetime.
The light at the end of the tunnel is, as far as I am concerned, the generations that will supplant us.
Had my generation prepared the way, you would be faced with a far less daunting challenge. For example, if we had already written cars, big houses, meat, and the love of all sorts of stupid stuff out of your lives, mitigating this crisis would be far easier. And not just with respect to these particular issues, as this would have made clear that we can indeed change our lives and lifestyles. In a general way, it would have underscored to this new generation coming on the scene that the way of life that we are handed at birth can be changed at any time.
In short, our example would have made clear to you that is possible to effectively make sweeping and profound cultural changes. That would have been a lesson of inestimable value. Sadly, it is one that my generation never learned. Hence, we could not, did not, teach it to you.
What’s to be done now? If you hope to effectively mitigate our climate crisis, you need to embrace sweeping change. Throughout this series, we will consider specific ways of doing just that.
In the next segment, I want to address the question of what my generation knew about the climate crisis and when we knew it. Although interesting in its own right, this is an important issue to take up, as understanding why my generation failed to act on what we clearly knew was an impending environmental catastrophe on a global scale can hopefully help keep your generation from making the same horrific mistake.
What the Boomer generation knew about the climate crisis – and when we knew it (Climate and Generation, 5). Watch video.
In previous segments, I drew attention to the fact that the climate crisis was principally brought about in a single lifetime, mine. I also noted that an unusual time delay is in part responsible here, as the consequences of our actions were not felt at the time but are only now catching up with us now, decades later.
This raises a crucial question: did we see this coming or not? In other words, did we know that our actions would likely bring about a catastrophe on a global scale that would threaten the very future of our species?
Short answer? Yes, for over fifty years, we clearly feared that this was going to happen. And by “we,” I mean not just scientists, scholars, activists, and policymakers, but the average person on the street in the U.S. knew and was very worried.
In order got understand what we knew and how, let’s focus on the two principal greenhouse gases, CO2 (carbon dioxide, which is released during the burning of fossil fuels) and methane (which for the most part is emitted by the beef industry and while fracking for fossil fuels).
With respect to CO2, if, 50 years ago (in the early 1970s), you asked the average American if we needed to end our reliance on fossil fuels by the close of the 20th century, the answer would very likely have been a decided “Yes.” Moreover, most people feared that failure to do so might well result in an existential catastrophe for the human race. In simple terms, in the early 1970s most Americans feared that if we did not quickly ween ourselves off of fossil fuels we would risk the collapse of our civilization, possibly as early as the beginning of the 21st-century.
With respect to methane, many people in the the U.S. and the developed world by the early 1970s, as we shall see, knew that meat consumption was an environmental disaster.
In short, most Americans in the early 1970s knew that if we didn’t ween ourselves off of fossil fuel’s and meat then we were flirting with a global disaster of unprecedented scope, likely beginning early in the 21st-century. The interesting thing is that this concern was not directly related to climate change.
I will explain this unusual state of affairs directly, but first I want to specifically address what we knew about how CO2 would impact the global climate – and when we knew it.
As a colleague of mine at UC Santa Barbara, John Perlin, has recently argued, Eunice Foote, notably a woman scientist, was the first person to suggest that increased levels of atmospheric CO2 would result in global temperature rise. This was, astonishingly, in 1854.
Flash forward a century, in 1956, shortly before I was born, physicist Gilbert Plass published an article entitled “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change,” which noted that we could expect global temperature to rise significantly in the 20th century as a result of the burning of fossil fuels. Using computer models, which were just coming on the scene at the time, Plass predicted a global temperature rise by the year 2000 that has proven to be pretty accurate, all things considered.
In less than a decade, in 1965, the President’s Science Advisory Committee, which is housed in the White House, produced an important report entitled “Restoring The Quality of Our Environment.” After being presented with it, President Lyndon Johnson made reference to it and the problem of rising CO2 levels in a speech to Congress.
Here are just a few lines from that report:
“Through his worldwide industrial civilization, Man is unwittingly conducting a vast geophysical experiment. Within a few generations he is burning the fossil fuels that slowly accumulated in the earth over the past 500 million years.”
“By the year 2000 the increase in CO2 will be close to 25%. This may be sufficient to produce measurable and perhaps marked changes in climate.”
“The climate changes that may be produced by the increased CO2 content could be deleterious from the point of view of human beings.”
So, yes, we knew about this problem from nearly the beginning, in the sense that scientists and policymakers (including the President) were alerted to the issue at the point when it was emerging as a significant global problem – right around the time that I was born.
During the past 60 years, the problem has, on and off, emerged as a significant political issue. Nathaniel Rich has, for example, outlined how, starting in the 1970s, a decade-long effort almost resulted (according to Rich) in binding treaties that would have reeled in global CO2 rise. (source) It is also now clear that fossil fuel companies like Exxon have known about the problem in great detail for decades, starting in the 1970s. (source)
However, it can be argued – to be honest, I have heard it argued quite a bit – that the public (i.e. the average person on the street) really did not know about the impending climate crisis. To people of my generation, this can be a comforting stance, as in many ways it lets us off the hook. In other words, yes we did something that has proven to be environmentally disastrous, but we had no idea that it would be a problem.
This is an important issue to address. My goal is not to cast blame on my generation, but rather to see our story as a cautionary tale.
The simple fact is that we absolutely did know that what we were doing would be disastrous. Although not with respect to climate change, we nonetheless knew that we were setting the stage for a worldwide catastrophe by the early 21st-century. And yes, if you would have stopped and asked any random American on the street at that time, they would have almost certainly have told you that they knew – and were worried, perhaps very worried.
Allow me to explain.
In 1956, the same year that Gilbert Plass published his article on “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climate Change,” M. King Hubbert, a geologist working for the Shell oil company, introduced his theory of “peak oil.” Hubbert noted that every year we were pumping more oil out of the ground than the previous year. Eventually, he theorized, this trend would end as we began running out of oil. He predicted that this year of “peak oil” would be right around 1970. After that, the trend would reverse, as we would then be pumping less and less oil out of the earth each year as worldwide reverse were depleted.
Almost like clockwork, in the U.S. oil production started to decline in 1970. Consequently, we began relying more and more on imported oil, especially from the Middle East. In 1973, Middle Eastern oil producers put an embargo on the export of their oil to the U.S. for political reasons. This sent shock waves through America, as we were suddenly found ourselves running out of oil to heat our homes and gasoline to power our cars. As you might imagine, the cost of heating oil and gasoline soared.
This was the first “energy crisis” of the 1970s. Another would follow in 1979. The average American was profoundly, personally impacted by all this, as there were, for example, long (in some cases very long) lines to buy gasoline because of the shortage. And then there was the price: the average cost of a gallon of gasoline in the United States in 1970 was $.36 per gallon. By 1980, it had tripled in cost to $1.19 per gallon (source).
Consequently, most Americans not only knew about peak oil in the early 1970s, we knew that, as a consequence, we needed to quickly weaned ourselves off of fossil fuels. This resulted in the first mad dash in the U.S. away from fossil fuels and toward the development of renewable energy sources. By the end of the 1970s, the President, Jimmy Carter, was putting solar panels on the White House.
So, even though many Americans had not heard of global warming 50 years ago, nearly everyone knew that we needed to stop burning fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy – and knew that we needed to do so quickly.
With respect to methane released during meat (principally beef) production, thanks in part to an internationally best-selling book in 1971, Diet for a Small Planet, the concept of “environmental vegetarianism” became widely known at the time. This is refusing to eat meat because of the harm that it does to the environment, as opposed to not doing so for other reasons, such as the ethical treatment of animals. Consequently, even though meat production had not been linked to climate change by the early 1970s, most Americans knew that eating meat was deeply problematic environmentally.
In short, fifty years ago, in the early 1970s, the average American on the street may not have known about climate change, but they definitely did know that we needed to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels and meat, and that we needed to do it quickly. If we didn’t to this, all indications were that we would bring about global catastrophe by the early 21st-century.
We knew what we had to do, yet we didn’t act on this knowledge.
We often talk about how important knowledge is, but, as this example proves, it is not as powerful as we might think.
“Knowledge is power” is an often repeated, popular phase. In spite of its simplistic appeal, the problem with this statement is that it is just plain wrong. Knowledge is not power – not by a long shot.
Let’s say that millions of people are in possession of a profound and important piece of knowledge. For example, that our earth could sustainably feed billions of human beings, if we all would only eat a largely plant-based diet – something that the bestselling book Diet for a Small Planet made clear in 1971. Just having read it in a book, and thus being in possession of this knowledge, is not enough. In this sense, “knowledge is knowledge” – and little more. It’s hardly power.
For it to become power, we must act on knowledge.
Hence, a more accurate formulation would be “if acted upon, knowledge is power.” And it wouldn’t hurt to throw in a cautionary addendum: “if not acted upon, knowledge is power squandered.”
The knowledge that I have been addressing in this talk was largely squandered.
Coming when it did, fifty years ago – when global greenhouse gas emissions were just beginning to skyrocket – this knowledge regarding fossil fuels and meat had the power to change the world, to save the world. Instead, it was mostly ignored. This crucial, extraordinary knowledge never became power.
In the case of the few people who acted upon, for example, the knowledge that a largely plant-based diet could be enormously powerful – environmentally, politically, ethically and in a host of additional ways – they were often marginalized, even laughed at.
For the sake of our species, our planet, and all the life that we share it with, we cannot afford to let this happen again.
We need to act, and to act now, in response to what we know. At the risk of repeating myself, knowledge is power only when acted upon. Otherwise, knowledge is power squandered. Let my generation be a cautionary tale.
The activating of the power latent in knowledge has a name that derives from the word “action”: “activism.” Even if the extraordinary action takes place in a particularly mundane way – such as at the dinner table, or by taking the bus rather than a car – it can nonetheless be powerful climate activism.
Why the climate crisis is a cultural rather than just technological problem (and why electric cars are more trouble than good) Watch video
Many people believe that technological innovations are the solution to the climate crisis. While certainly important, we need to face the fact that cultural changes are every bit, if not often more, important.
In order to understand how, let’s take cars as an example.
A typical car in the U.S. emits about 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Given that the average American’s total annual emissions of CO2 is just under 20 metric tons, cars account for around a quarter of our individual carbon footprints. Thus, if we wish to reduce our individual climate footprints, cars are clearly one of the lowest hanging fruits.
For decades now, electric automobiles have been touted as a solution to this enormous problem, as they do not directly emit CO2 while operating. Each one this promises to reduce those 4.6 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year to down to zero. Hence, they are often called zero-emission vehicles.
It is hardly surprising, then, that for decades electric cars have been held out as a sort of holy grail. Now that they are finally becoming practical and affordable, it would seem that in one swell foop our problem is solved.
Sadly, it’s not.
If we are to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°- 2.0 C, which is the goal of the Paris Accord signed at COP 21, each person on the planet can annually emit no more than about two metric tons of CO2 or equivalent gases.
Think of this sort of like a dietary guideline. The FDA tells us that, if you want to healthy body, you should consume no more than 2000 or 2500 calories per day. Similarly, if you want to healthy planet, you should emit no more than two metric tons of CO2 or equivalent gases per year.
With respect to the climate crisis, the problem with cars involves their production.
First, the good news regarding electric cars.
Even though manufacturing an electric car produces 15-68% more greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than a similar gasoline car, over their lifetimes electric cars generate half of the emissions of their gasoline counterparts, more than compensating for increased emissions during production.
So, if you are going to buy a car, an electric one is arguably the better choice with respect to climate change, all things considered.
But, should we buy one at all? Are there other, external, factors to car’s operation that we need to consider?
The manufacture of a typical automobile emits a extraordinary amount of CO2 or equivalent gases. Manufacturing a typical midrange car (a Toyota Prius, which is a hybrid) releases about 17 metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. A top-of-the-line SUV (a Range Rover) about 35 metric tons.
Let’s lean toward the lower end assume that just 22 metric tons of CO2 or equivalent gasses are emitted during the manufacture of the average car on the road, even though SUVs and crossovers sales are currently dominating the American market and the electric cars now coming online release more greenhouse gases during their manufacture.
The average car has a lifespan of 11 years. This is, incidentally, up from couple of decades ago.
If we spread out the 22 metric tons of CO2 emitted during the manufacture of a typical car over its 11 year lifespan, we come up with two metric tons per year.
Recall that if you want a healthy planet, you should emit no more than two tons of CO2 per year – total.
So, if you buy a succession of cars during your adult life, one every 11 years, and leave them in your driveway and never drive them, you will have totally expended your CO2 allotment for your lifetime. And, of course, this does not leave an emission allotment for anything else, such as for food, clothing, housing, and everything else that we need to live – including actually driving that car!
In case you were wondering, recycling cannot help much more here, as automobiles are already the most recycled of all consumer products.
We could also hope that few people on the planet will own cars. During the 20th century, most cars on the planet were owned by Americans and Europeans. The problem is that we have made them so popular that the rest of the world now wants them.
India is currently the fifth largest car market in the world and growing rapidly. China, now the largest market, is quickly developing an even greater, in fact altogether extraordinary love of cars. In 1985, there were 1.78 million total vehicles in China. In 2017, car ownership alone had soared to 172 million. That’s an astonishing increase of more than 10,000 percent in just three decades.
There are currently just over a billion cars on the planet. Because the rest of the world is now also quickly becoming infatuated with them like Americans, that number is expected to double to two billion in the next 15 to 20 years.
The problem is that if we focus just on emissions and see this primarily as a technological challenge we will lose the fight against the climate crisis.
For decades, we have held out hope that technology and industry will produce a car with zero emissions coming out of the tailpipe, when we should instead have been focusing on the car itself.
Instead of trying to produce a truly emissions free automobile – which, if we consider its entire life cycle, is obviously impossible – we instead need to turn our attention to car use.
The automobile is just one example of the hope that technology alone will get us out of this problem. There is no need to stop driving cars – so the hope goes – as someone will soon come along and give us a zero-emissions automobile. Elon Musk, of course, likes to cast himself as this savior. But the fact is that no matter how hard we try, making a 5000-pound vehicle to carry one person will never be environmentally sound.
For decades now, we have pinned our hopes on reengineering the automobile. As far as I am concerned, this was a complete and utter waste of time. Unimaginably precious time during a crucial moment when the climate crisis was unfolding.
Effort was not only wasted on this thoroughly misguided project, but attention was drawn away from the real job at hand: We should instead have been focusing our attention on re-engineering the cultural practice of car use.
This is not to say that technology is not needed to help solve this problem along with cultural change.
As it turns out, it’s technologically possible to transport a person 350, 500, even an astonishing 750 miles on a single gallon of gasoline or its equivalent. In other words, it is theoretically possible to transport someone from LA to New York on just for gallons of gas.Not only is it possible, the good news is that these transportation technologies are no longer still in the experimental stage.
To the contrary, they have all proven themselves and in fact have been in widespread use for over a century.
What are these wonder technologies? Buses, subways, and trains, respectively. When compared to a 25-mpg car (which is currently the average efficiency of a new automobile in the U.S.) with a single occupant (three out of four cars on the road have just one person in them), a bus is 14 times more efficient (i.e. one gallon of gasoline can transport a single person 350 miles), a subway 20 times more so (500 mpg per person), and a passenger train 30 times more efficient (750 mpg).
A few years ago, a perceptive student of mine, reflecting on this situation and these numbers, succinctly observed that “what we need is not a 100-mpg car, but rather for taking the bus to become cool and owning a car to be anything but.” I could not agree more.
Incidentally, even 750 mpg can be improved upon—and it’s embarrassingly easy to do so. In parts of Manhattan, over a third of commuters walk to work. Bicycling is even more efficient. New Yorkers, incidentally, are eleven times more likely to take mass transit like subways and buses to work than the average American. As Edward Glaeser, David Owen, and many others have thus argued, cities are far more efficient than suburbs and rural locales. This is clearly the case with fossil fuel use and corresponding carbon footprints.
The example of New York (and cities more generally) makes clear that it is quite possible for modern human beings to live rich and diverse lives largely free of the automobile.
Why, then, do so many Americans drive cars? And why do we drive so many of them? The U.S. has fewer than 4 percent of the planet’s population, yet a quarter of its cars. Placed end to end, they would circle the earth – 31 times. As my student realized, in the U.S. cars are cool, really cool. In fact, in the US, we have more cars than we have licensed drivers. Nonetheless, automobiles are an environmental disaster.
If everything else were equal, switching from car to bus could reduce our individual climate footprints for transportation by a factor of fourteen. Yet, with fewer than 5 percent of Americans taking the bus to work, as opposed to 85 per- cent using cars to commute, buses are clearly not at all desirable. But why are cars cool and buses not?
This is not a question for the STEM fields, but rather the social sciences and humanities, where we seek to understand just why people do what they do. Science may be able to tell us how human beings are changing our global climate, but not why we are doing it. The sciences may be able to offer us more advanced technology (i.e. more efficient cars), but they offer little insight into why we continue to engage in these practices. Why, for example, we love cars.
If we can understand why cars are desirable and buses not, we can perhaps then take the next step – and it is a big one – of not just studying culture, but actively intervening in it. For example, we might help foster a culture where riding a bus or train is seen as far more appealing than traveling by car. If we could pull this off, the gains could greatly exceed the impact that a 100-mpg car would have on climate change. This is why I suggested that the humanities have as large a role to play as science and technology in limiting anthropogenic climate change.
But, make no mistake, this will be no easy task. Developing and manufacturing the next generation of lithium batteries will certainly be difficult, but no less so than trying to understand why human beings are engaging in perplexing and at times even irrational practices. As the World Health Organization (WHO) notes, over 50 million people are killed or injured in traffic accidents worldwide each year. Globally, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for young people over the age of 10, surpassing malaria, AIDS, and any and everything else. Consequently, the WHO has declared traffic injuries a worldwide epidemic.
In addition to being incredibly dangerous, automobiles demand a huge portion of family income, making them far less economical than mass transportation. The average cost of owning, insuring, maintaining, and fueling a car in the U.S. is around $9000 a year. This is a huge financial burden. Indeed, work about one day a week to afford a car.
It is often suggested, often by car ads, that they represent freedom. Freedom to hop in a car at any time and go for a ride. However, imagine the freedom of every week having a three day weekend as you didn’t have to put in the extra work just to afford a car. Also, people have run the numbers and come up with an interesting figure regarding retirement: if, instead of spending $9000 a year to own a car, you put that money in a retirement account starting when you first enter the workforce in your 20s. If you did this, you would be able to retire not when you were 65 years old, but in your late 40s. Now that strikes me as freedom.
How is it that cars, in spite of being outrageously dangerous, a huge financial burden, and more disastrous for the environment than any other single source, are cool? Like everything else, this has a history. Here’s the short version.
The U.S. came out of the Great Depression economically because it was drawn into a highly industrialized war. Industrial output during World War II was staggering: the U.S. manufactured nearly 7000 major warships, over 300,000 aircraft, and around 2,500,000 land vehicles in just a few years. When the war came to an end, the challenge was to keep this industrial juggernaut (and accordingly the economy) going strong. The automobile played a huge role in this project.
The growth of the postwar U.S. automobile industry depended on convincing the public that cars were desirable. Getting us to spend huge chunks of our income to buy them and risk our lives driving them was no easy task. Nonetheless, car manufacturers, working hand in hand with politicians and others, pulled it off. In order to ensure that mass transportation did not successfully compete with the car, it received dramatically less federal funding than did industries devoted to building automobiles and road infrastructure.
Another big part of the solution was to sell the public on the idea of suburbia. In postwar America, if you wanted to get out of the city and into the appealing new suburbs you needed a car to commute. In fact, just to get around in the sprawling suburbs you needed a car. For many families this meant, to the great delight of the auto industry, that you needed two cars.
At its height in the U.S. a generation ago, one in six Americans were either directly or indirectly employed by this industry. And this did not include the massive, complementary industry of road construction, such as made possible by Eisenhower’s Highway Act of 1956, which authorized the creation of 41,000 miles of interstate highways.
Although it may sound a little outlandish on first hearing, for decades the backbone of the U.S. economy depended on cars being cool. So cool, in fact, that we would knowingly risk our lives and lavish huge portions of our income on their purchase and upkeep. It is difficult to imagine how a broad swath of the American public would go along with this lose–lose proposition. It’s even more difficult to imagine how it continues today in an age when we are aware of climate change. Although it is a little mind-boggling, the carbon footprint of cars in the U.S. exceeds that of our houses (and any other single source, for that matter).
Returning to the big picture, technology alone will not solve the climate crisis. Instead, we need to look hard at rewriting a range of cultural practices, like our love of cars.
Even though the challenges that we face are daunting – and let’s face it, more than a little scary and depressing – approaching this as a human issue can and should be empowering. There is no need to wait for Elon Musk or anyone else to solve this problem (especially as it is clear that these technologists simply cannot come anywhere near doing it on their own), as each of us can simply write cars out of our lives.
As Americans, we can do even more, as a good deal of the world still looks to us to lay down the precepts of what’s cool. In places like Portland, Brooklyn, and a range of other cities, an emerging eco-culture is eschewing cars to instead embrace mass transit and bikes as cool, really cool. Conversely, in these places gas-guzzling cars like SUVs are anything but cool. In terms of climate crisis, this sort of exciting, future-oriented culture may be one of the U.S.’s most important exports in the 21st century
Yes, even more important – far more important, I would argue – than exporting Teslas.
Although it may seem that we will therefore need to do with less and perhaps even do without (I am, after all, suggesting that we do without cars), we stand to actually benefit by this bargain. Instead of spending huge chunks of our income on deathtraps that are wreaking havoc on our climate and planet, we have the opportunity to imagine new and better ways of getting around.
So, I am curious what you think about the future of cars in the age of the climate crisis – and the larger issue of whether technological innovations will allow us to live our lives without change in this new age or whether will will have to change certain aspects of the way that we live in response to the climate crisis.
Flying, the absolute worst thing that you can do environmentally Watch video
It’s true. Environmentally, the absolute worst thing that you can do is flying.
What is interesting is that air travel only accounts for about 2%, maybe 2.5%, of total greenhouse gas emissions globally (source). As such, it contributes far less to the climate crisis than something like automobile use or eating beef. Other things that you may not think about at all contribute as much or more to the crisis. For example, 2% of all greenhouse gases come from the manufacture of aluminum; 5% from making cement. Who knew, right?
So why is air travel so bad if it is currently such a small percentage of the problem globally?
Like many things related to the climate crisis, it is useful to approach this personally. We often ignore or avoid this approach, as it can make us more than a little uncomfortable, as it requires us to look at what we are doing rather than the actions of some corporation or politician, but doing so is important – in fact, it’s essential.
It’s hard to imagine a way for one person to contribute to the climate crisis more quickly than by flying. If you take a round-trip flight from LA to Paris, which would have you in the air for a little under 24 hours, you will have caused three tons of carbon dioxide to be directly emitted into the upper atmosphere. Incidentally, if you fly first class, you will have contributed twice that amount, six tons.
The next time that you wish you were flying first class, remember this: it’s literally twice is bad for the planet! And, of course, for all you aspiring Kardashians, taking a personal jet is off the chart when it comes to inflicting as much harm to the planet as quickly as possible. There really should be some sort of award for this kind of unconscionable behavior. Perhaps we could call it the “Worst Planetary Citizen” award.
Instead, we see it as glamorous.
In any event, in addition to CO2, other gases emitted by your plane, such as mono-nitrogen oxides (that’s a mouthful!), increase your short-term climate impact by as much as two or three times more (source).
So, if air travel is so bad – which it absolutely is – how is it that it accounts for only 2% of global greenhouse gas emissions?
The problem is that traveling by air is a practice exclusive to the wealthiest, most privileged people on the planet. In fact, flying is in some sense THE iconic display of privilege. For over seventy years now, we have referred to the world’s most privileged people as the “jet set.”
Conversely, 19 out of 20 people on the planet have never set foot in an airplane. Even among Americans, half do not fly annually. Frequent, rather than occasional, flyers are obviously the biggest problem. By some estimates, 80% of flights are made by just one percent of all people on the planet.
Although the term “jet set” has obviously lost its cachet over the decades, now that all sorts of people can fly coach, it is nonetheless a global elite that is still doing all this flying and contributing to the climate crisis in this way.
You may not think of yourself as a global elite or as a member of the “jet set,” but if you fly, you are. Put nineteen random people from across the globe in a room with you, and, just by virtue of the fact that you just occasionally fly, you may well be the only jet setter in the room.
If you are a frequent flyer, put a hundred random people in a room and you will be contributing more to the climate crisis in this way than anyone else in the room. You may not think of yourself as a member of “the one percent” (i.e. the world’s wealthiest and most privileged people), but you would be among the the one percent doing the lion’s share of all this flying.
In which case, air travel could be doubling or tripling your personal climate footprint.
Let’s a pause on that for a moment: Even though you may be trying to reduce your carbon footprint in a variety of ways (such as by eating a largely plant-based diet, not owning a car, buying less stuff, etc.), if you fly, this activity could easily singlehandedly nullify all the gains from the rest of your otherwise environmentally conscientious lifestyle.
Let’s get specific here. In order to meet the goals of the Paris accord, which was established at COP 21, everyone on the planet should emit on average no more than two metric tons of CO2 per year. In a single 24-hour period, that flight from LA to Paris thus expends your entire CO2 allocation for a year and a half. Three years if you fly first class. Factor in the other greenhouse gases emitted and it is two or three times worse even than that.
If only 5% of the world’s population is responsible for air travel, what would happen if the rest of the world began to follow our dubious example? In fact, this is what is now happening. For example, air travel in China recently increased by 50% in just five years (source).
So, what’s to be done?
Three things come to mind. One with respect to business travel, another recreational travel, and a third applies to both.
First, the one that applies to both business and recreational travel is simple enough, though not necessarily easy to enact: Fly less. Instead of multiple business trips or vacations, consolidate as much as possible. For example, instead of two short vacations that require flying every year, why not have one grand one every five years – thus reducing your flights by a factor of ten?
Flying less does not just mean consolidating trips, but breaking them into parts as well. For example, as travel by train is one of the most efficient ways of getting around (and hence has a relatively tiny climate footprint), as opposed to air travel which is arguably the most environmentally problematic, traveling overland by train and across oceans could make sense.
Let’s say that I wanted to fly from my home in Santa Barbara, which is near Los Angeles, to London. First, I could take a bus or train to LA. While there are nonstop flights from London to LA, many in fact have connections in New York City. Instead of doing these two legs by plane, the first could be by train and the second by airplane, thereby cutting the airmiles almost in half. Having traveled across the country by train, I can tell you that it was a wonderful experience that years later I still look back on fondly.
Regarding business travel in particular, a big part of the solution may be telepresencing of one sort or another. I know, when may people think of telepresencing we imagine the transporter from Star Trek.
Telepresencing is indeed being transported across great distances by way of some form of technology.
But the fact is that practical telepresencing is already here – and has been for over a century. Radio technology allowed our voices, at least, to be present at far off places. Not long after, television also allowed live images to be transmitted at a distance. Telephones, first wired though now largely radio, allowed us to conduct realtime, interactive conversations around the world. And, of course, the Internet and cellular networks made practical and affordable technologies like Skype and FaceTime that allow two or more people to see, hear, and interact with each other in realtime.
This technology has now advanced to the point that well over a billion people on the planet now literally carry highly advanced versions of it in our back pockets, as smartphones allow us to conduct conversations with high-definition video that rival broadcast standards.
What does all this have to do with the climate crisis?
It is simple enough: we expend an enormous amount of energy transporting our bodies around, often in environmentally disastrous ways like automobiles and airplanes, when just seeing and hearing each other would do. This is not to say that such telepresencing is the same as a face-to-face encounter: however, when we consider is that the climate footprint of such encounters can be 100 times smaller than the face-to-face meeting, the trade-off is, as far as I am concerned, well worth it for the sake of the planet and our future.
Moreover, social media has challenged us to reconsider how meaningful human interaction occurs. Many people find the relationships that they make and maintain online to be nearly as valuable as their face-to-face ones.
Regarding recreational air travel, let’s say that you make a commitment to stop (or dramatically reduce) flying, starting today. How, then, do you travel, in the sense of visiting new places and experiencing new things there without flying?
You could just throw up your hands in frustration and say “Screw it, I guess I just won’t travel then”! Unfortunately, when they hear about the environmental problems of air travel, many people may well assume that this what the future holds. Is it, then, any wonder that they want to hold onto the present (and their boarding passes)?
Alternately, you could accept the challenge of the future and start imagining possibilities, in some cases really appealing possibilities.
With respect to recreational air travel, an interesting alternative is the emerging slow travel movement.
Slow travel? Yep, it’s a thing.
For example, let’s assume I wanted to take a vacation from my home in Santa Barbara to San Francisco, which is about 300 miles away. I could fly there, which would take just over an hour and which would be unpleasant and an environmental disaster.
This is not, however, my only option. I could, for example, take the train up, which would add about 9 hours to my travel time. Even setting aside the environmental advantages of such a trip, I imagine that it would be pretty nice way to spend a day, just sitting back and enjoying a large chunk of the California coast.
Of course, I would also have other options. One of the most radical would be if I traveled up on my pedalec bike (which is an electric assisted bike that I still pedal), riding four or five hours a day and spending the rest of the time exploring the local areas and staying at Airbnb’s. Such a trip would take around 3 days. And then 3 days back.
Now, some people will scuff (maybe even laugh) at the very idea of traveling in such a way.
However, the nascent “slow travel” movement argues for trips of just this kind (as well as mass-transit options like trains). Like slow fashion, and before it slow food, this movement challenges the cultural status quo. Indeed, it seeks to upend it.
Spending hours preparing a meal, starting with buying the ingredients at a local farmers market to slowly preparing all its dishes (let alone if we grow the food ourselves), can seem absolutely absurd when compared to a fast food restaurant, where you can buy a meal and eat it in under 10 minutes.
Similarly, spending hours of your spare time knitting a hat or sewing a shirt may seems ludicrous when you can buy one from a fast fashion outlet for less than $10.
Nonetheless, in the past few decades slow food has become a real cultural force. Slow fashion may not be far behind.
Decades ago, the architects of the slow food movement, frustrated with the present, imagined a bold new future. It took quite a while, but, at least where I live ( California), the future has arrived, and for many people it definitely includes healthy portions of slow food. One of the reasons that the slow food movement succeeded was that it had much to recommend it.
The same can be said of the slow travel movement. At the risk of rolling out a cliché, life really is about the journey, not the destination. This truism is completely lost on the fast travel industry, where the journey is reduced to a few altogether uncomfortable hours packed into, and jostling around in, a loud airplane.
Let’s return to my imagined trip up the coast on an electric bike. Frankly, making this trip with my wife and young daughter sounds like it could be a pretty magical experience that would stay with us for years. I can’t think of no better way than to experience the California coast. Of course, it would not be all about the destination of San Francisco. Indeed, San Francisco would just become part of the journey.
Yes, the transition to slow travel would impact the air travel industry, but whole new possibilities would open up, such as better mass transit and bicycle infrastructure (both of which are sorely needed). Whole towns that are not traditional “destinations,” will nonetheless be able to play a role in a new slow travel industry.
In any event, I am curious to hear what you think. Is it time to write air travel out of our lives, or at least greatly reduce it? If so, how do we begin?
Flying less? Telepresencing? Slow travel? Other ideas?
Do we need a climate vanguard? (Food, today and tomorrow) Watch video
Are you an architect of the future, part of what I like to call the “climate vanguard”?
As I have argued throughout this series, the climate crisis is going to necessitate sweeping cultural changes if we are to mitigate it successfully. To quote Greta Thunberg: “Either we do that or we don’t.” If we don’t, this planet will become unwelcoming, perhaps largely uninhabitable, for our species. Consequently, there are, as far as I am concerned, no two ways about it, we need to make these changes.
The question is do you want to be part of the group rushing out ahead of everyone else in boldly forging a new future? In other words, do you not only want to voluntarily take part in this extraordinary reinvention of our culture, but do you want to take the lead?
Allow me to flesh this out a little, beginning with a sobering thought:
Many – probably most – people will likely not make the necessary personal changes to adequately combat climate crisis until required to do so. Although unfortunate – and more than a little depressing – this is the sad reality of the situation.
What can we do about this?
First, we need to elect politicians that will implement programs pricing carbon, such as a “carbon tax,” which would directly tax fossil fuel suppliers, thereby resulting in higher costs on all products and services that one way or another require the emission of greenhouse gases. Over time, such a tax would increase. (By the way, in a future episode I will be taking up the nuts and bolts of a carbon tax in detail including the important question of how the impact on financially distressed families can be reduced, such as through progressive tax-shifting.)
Pricing carbon would mean, for example, that the cost of air travel would increase and continue to increase over time. (Incidentally, as I note in another episode, air travel produces tons of greenhouse gas emissions – literally a ton or more of GHG emissions for just one passenger for a long flight!) Thus, air travel would become more and more expensive as the carbon tax increased over time. Consequently, people would, on the whole, be traveling less and less as a result of a carbon tax. Eventually, if the cost became prohibitively high, most people would largely stop flying.
Since air travel is an environmental and climate disaster, this would be a very good thing indeed.
We all should, consequently, support legislation pricing carbon to get the ball rolling on this. But can we do more – and do it directly, right now?
The answer is, of course, “yes.” We can, staying with this example, make a personal decision to stop flying now – today, in fact. Sadly, it will likely be years before the rest of America catches up with us. Nonetheless, we would be charting the future for the rest of the country. Indeed, charting it for the entire developed world that shares our love of air travel.
In that sense, although it may sound like an odd way to think about it, we would be living in the future, working out what the future will be like.
Let’s stay with our example of air travel in order to explore this idea before moving to our primary topic today, which is food.
If you decided to stop flying today, you would then be confronted with all of the challenges that come with that decision. Let’s be honest, it would likely impact you both professionally and personally.
For example, when I decided to stop flying a few years ago, I was immediately confronted with the challenge of how to attend academic conferences and present papers, which are an integral part of my profession. As I have noted elsewhere, the academic truism “‘[p]ublish or perish’ has a less famous corollary: present or perish. At many institutions, conference and lecture presentations are tallied up alongside publications at tenure and other merit reviews.”
Unfortunately – and astonishingly – this means that many professors double or even triple (in some cases far more) their individual carbon footprints by flying to academic conferences.
What, then, was I to do? Since I was no longer able to attend national and international conferences, I started thinking about how such conferences could work if we took air travel out of the equation. Since computer programing is a hobby of mine, I started working out an online conference that addressed some of the shortcomings of conventional virtual conferences, which often use some sort of Skype-like technology to coordinate real time events. In the intervening years, we have coordinated half a dozen of these nearly carbon-neutral (NCN) conferences at UC Santa Barbara.
Now, let me be very clear here – and this is in no way false modesty on my part – I doubt very much that the conference model that I proposed will become any sort of standard in the future.
My point is simply that I found myself strangely confronted with the future. In other words, I was confronted with challenge of a travel-free conference, which the rest of academia may not face until years from now.
Let’s put this in a more general way. We all are going to need to significantly alter our day-to-day lives in order to mitigate the climate crisis. Sooner or later, this absolutely needs to happen. Unfortunately, for many Americans it will be later rather than sooner, as they will not likely make these changes until they are, to be blunt, forced to do so.
The good thing about this situation (I always look for silver lining wherever I can!) is that it gives us time to prepare for this transition. Returning to my example of the academic conference, this means that we have a number of years to experiment with options and come up with a viable alternative to the conventional, fly-in conference. Unfortunately, we are not there yet, but if enough people take this job seriously and work hard enough at it, I am confident that online conferences of some sort will supplant our aging and environmentally disastrous conference model. If all goes well, we can transition into new conference models as we transition off flying.
This is just one example, as many, many of our day-to-day practices need to change: where we live, how we get around, what we wear, what we eat, the stuff that we own, and so forth.
What is needed is a bold group of people to take on the formidable job of being architects of the future. I know, that sounds pretty intimidating. However, it can be pretty simple. As author Jonathan Safran Foer recently noted, it can begin at the breakfast table
Which brings (finally!) us to our topic today: food. As I noted in a previous lecture, the #1 thing that we as a species can do to roll back global greenhouse gas is to waste far less good and to switch to largely plant-rich diets.
This is easier said than done, as the way that we eat is at once, somewhat paradoxically, deeply personal and almost always a shared experience.
Of course, we all like to choose for ourselves what we eat, but this choice is deeply influenced by the culture into which we are born. When reflecting on what makes a people a people, we often consider things like the language that everyone speaks and the laws that everyone follows, but scores of little things unite a people, such as the food that we eat.
These shared practices are often little things that we often take for granted, but can become present themselves as big issues if transgressed. For example, if a child were to tell her parents that she was going to adopt a new way of eating, perhaps by switching to a largely plant-based diet, she would risk disturbing and perhaps even offending them, as her actions could be seen as an affront to her cultural heritage.
There is often a great irony here.
I grew up in the Philadelphia area, which has a large Italian-American population. Consequently, from a very young age, I was exposed to this cuisine, which very often contained beef, from spaghetti with meatballs to cheesesteaks to pepperoni and sausage pizza. However, this is not at all what the traditional Italian (aka Mediterranean) diet is like, as it usually involves very little beef – indeed, not much meat of any kind – but rather is based on vegetables, fruit, beans, nuts, grains, and oil.
When a range of cuisines were imported in the U.S., they were reinvented to include large portions of meat, usually beef, which was often considered a sign of affluence. Its true, eating a meat-rich diet was yet another way of announcing that you had, financially, arrived.
In one sense, there is no one American diet. As we are a country of immigrants, every day across America people sit-down to meals that in one way or another often resemble the cuisines of the county from which they hail.
However, in another sense, although varying widely, these are all distinctly American diets if they contain ample servings of meat and animal products – which in all likelihood were far less common in the original cuisine a few generations ago. Hence, when the U.S. beef industry announced its “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner” ad campaign in 1992, it could do so confident of the fact that all sorts of Americans from all sorts of places were sitting down to eat beef at many, if not most, meals.
Returning to the example of the child seen by her parents as offending their cultural heritage by eschewing meat, the irony is that she may well be reclaiming a heritage that had been corrupted by American consumerism in the 20th century. A second irony is that this is strange thing for a loving parent to object to, as traditional, largely plant-based diets are often far healthier than the beef-rich American diet
But turning from past to future, what will the diet of the future be like? Let me rephrase that, what will the diets of the future be like, as a range of cultural traditions will no doubt inform how we eat in the future?
Well, it seems clear that, if we are to successfully avert climate catastrophe, these diets will involve largely replacing vegetable protein for meat.
But exactly how will this be worked out? With vegetable protein processed and fashioned to look like meat, such as hamburgers? Or with, for example, legumes unprocessed, such as in a traditional lentil curry? Or perhaps in some new way altogether?
I don’t have an answer here, as these “diets of the future” are in the process of being worked out now.
And this does not just involve reducing animal products in our diets. As I have noted in elsewhere, in terms of mitigating the climate crisis, reducing food waste would be every bit as important (in fact, a tad more important) then switching to largely plant-based diets.
Aside from simply throwing food away, this also means that we should rethink what we eat. For example, when we think of vegetables like beats, we are often just thinking about the root (and are consequently just eating the root), even though the greens are tasty and very nutritious. Similarly, while most people discard the rind, pickled watermelon rind has long been a delicacy in the Southern U.S.
When people think about what they can do to help mitigate climate crisis, things like the production of electricity from solar energy often comes to mind. However, it is clear that working out how best to eat is also profoundly important. And make no mistake, there is still much to be worked out.
The good news is that, while making solar panels more practical and efficient will require a broad range of technical expertise, anyone can begin working out the future of food in their own kitchen, today.
Which returns us to my opening question: Are you an architect of the future? Do you want to be?
There are all sorts of ways that you can take up this challenge, including by making photovoltaic panels more efficient. However, for most people, there is a simpler way, as we can take a long hard look at our personal practices, beginning with what we have to eat today.
This is not to say, however, that this will not be challenging.
Although it may seem that this is simply a matter of going vegetarian or vegan, the situation is more complicated than that.
For example, studies have shown that “diets that only included animal products for one meal per day were less GHG-intensive than lacto-ovo vegetarian diets.” So, while becoming a vegetarian is certainly a move in the right direction when compared to the average American diet, it is not necessarily the best solution.
Similarly, it is not as simple as just becoming a vegan. For example, eating asparagus in the Winter in most of North America is often no better for the climate than eating chicken or pork. Why? Because it is generally flown in from South America – and air travel has a huge climate footprint.
This is why Denmark is planing, as part of his effort to become a carbon neutral country, to put “climate” labels on food in the same way that we have nutritional labels. In this case, such a label would tell you just how good or bad the food is – not for your body – but for the planet.
Food is such an interesting example because an individual really can take the bull by the horns and address the climate crisis at, as Jonathan Safran Foer noted, the breakfast table.
Again, this is not to say that this is easy or that our decisions are clear, but rather that we can begin working out this important climate issue right now – and quite a bit really does need to be worked out, as simply shifting to a largely plant-based diet does not, for example, address the equally large problem of food waste.
Unfortunately, not every issue can be worked out primarily by individuals.
For example, if we want to write cars out of our lives, we can make a commitment to use mass transportation, biking, and walking. However, we can’t easily and effectively do this alone, as we need politicians (from local to national) that will similarly make a commitment to mass transportation and bike infrastructure. Otherwise, taking the bus could be an unnecessarily long and unpleasant experience, and riding a bike downright dangerous if we are forced to share busy roads with automobiles.
Consequently, in future segments we will taking up the importance of becoming politically active.
This is to to say that we cannot personally and immediate eschew car use, but simply to make clear that we need elected officials that support this choice rather than car use, which is unfortunately, but generally, what they support today.
In many respects, this course is aimed at the climate vanguard. Early adopters; early rejecters. People who do not need to be dragged, kicking and denying, into a sustainable future, but rather want to leave the present behind, as it is clearly in so many ways unjust to all the beings on this planet, from animals, to other people, to generations yet unborn.
In this sense, this course is aimed at people who are so profoundly distressed with the present that they just can’t wait for the future. Consequently they are pushing forward into it now, not only by imagining what the future can be, but, as paradoxical as it sounds, living it now.
So, here is my question: do we in fact need a climate vanguard to begin working out what life in the future will be like? Or should we simply wait for the rest of the world to come around to the fact that we need to make sweeping cultural changes in response to the climate crisis?
Personal action, climate activism, or becoming politically active. Which matters more? Watch video
As you have no doubt gathered by now, this course focuses on cultural changes as a way of mitigating the climate crisis, rather than just technological solutions.
Up to this point, we have mostly held our focus on personal actions as a way of bringing about cultural change, such as largely forgoing cars, planes, and animal products.
During all this, you may have wondered if personal actions, such as switching to a large plant-based diet, are enough. If so, you are not alone, as a number of people have argued that such actions will prove inadequate to mitigating the climate crisis.
For example, climate activist Naomi Klein has suggested that “focusing on individual consumer behaviour, whether it’s changing lightbulbs or going vegan, is just not going to get us there.”
Similarly, climate scientist Michael Mann has argued that focusing on “beef consumption heightens the risk of losing sight of the gorilla in the room: civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels for energy and transport overall, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of global carbon emissions.”
In fact, both Klein and Mann are right.
Even if everyone on the planet went vegan, it would not, as Klein notes, be enough – and, I would add, not by a long shot. Moreover, the reason that I started this particular lecture series with the personal actions of automobile and air travel was to underscore that for most Americans transportation is, as Mann notes, the 800-pound gorilla in the room.
Energy and transport, which Mann rightly focuses on, does not only cause CO2 emissions, but methane as well. Around 28% of methane emissions comes from meat (generally beef) production. However, an even greater amount comes from fossil fuel extraction, principally from hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking). Consequently, just switching to largely plant-based diets does not address the largest methane problem that we are facing.
It is worth pausing to consider just how much can be done thorough personal action.
Yes, if everyone on the planet gave up eating animal products, it would significantly reduce global methane emissions. However, we need to accept the sobering fact that a broad swath of human beings are not going to do this. As I made clear with my lecture series on “Climate and Generation,” many in the older generations (like mine) will not likely do this voluntarily. And they’re just the tip of the iceberg, as many people across the planet will not likely voluntarily do so for a host of reasons.
Moreover, even though we can indeed reduce global methane emissions at the breakfast table, fracking is the bigger methane problem. We cannot, practically speaking, end fracking through personal action. True, we could all could forego the products of fracking, gas and oil, but without practical and affordable alternatives (i.e. alternative, renewable energy), how exactly would we live, as quite a bit of our modern lives are fueled by gas and oil?
Hence, unlike the situation with food, we cannot easily make a personal switch here. While we could all install solar panels on our roofs with storage batteries inner closets, this would not address the fact that fracked gas and oil would still be used to make a good deal of the rest of our lives possible, such as the energy used to make our clothes and other stuff. Moreover, just as with the switch to largely plant-based diets, many (probably most) people will not likely voluntarily become their own electricity providers.
So, with respect to methane, this is the sobering situation: Right now, only a small percentage of Americans eat with the climate in mind. And fracking, the bigger methane problem, is definitely on the rise, as half of the oil and two thirds of the gas produced by the U.S. is now fracked.
You can see why Klein and Mann want to shift focus away from personal actions like eating a largely plant-based diet.
But, staying with this example, how, then, do we stop fracking?
It is simple enough: we need to vote and become politically active, calling for legislation to end fracking.
However, even voting is not enough, as someone needs to bring this issue to the attention of politicians and the public. Indeed, someone needs to make it a thorn in the side of politicians. Enter activists, climate activists.
For example, in 2016 actor and climate activist Mark Ruffalo produced a short documentary called Dear Governor Brown that urged the former Governor of California to ban fracking (which, incidentally, he refused to do, in spite of Brown’s commitment to mitigating the climate crisis).
You do not, of course, need to be a famous actor to be a climate activist. After all, Greta Thunberg was, just a short time ago, in many ways a pretty average high school student (though in other ways, an altogether extraordinarily one with the ability to see the climate crisis as a black-and-white issue and sustain a laser-like focus on the problem).
So, should we forgo personal actions like ditching our cars and instead work at being climate activists and getting the vote out?
First, I absolutely endorse climate activism. In fact, I think of myself not just as a professor, but first and foremost as a scholar/activist, a climate activist.
Second, as I never tire of telling people, if you can do only one thing to help mitigate the climate crisis and you do not have a lot of time to devote to the issue, you’re in luck, as the single most important thing that you can do takes just an hour or two per year. Who doesn’t have an hour or two a year to help save the planet?
What sort of magical action has this sort of power?
It’s actually a pretty pedestrian act that many people take for granted – though they certainly should not – voting.
How do we vote on behalf of our planet, it’s climate, and all the life that lives on it?
Cast you vote for candidates, from local to federal, advocating for sweeping climate policies, such as carbon pricing and the Green New Deal. In general, vote for candidates and initiatives that put people and the planet ahead of corporate interests.
And, if you have a little more time to spare, explain to five or more of your friends and family the importance of voting.
But what about personal actions, like foregoing beef, air travel, and having a car? Isn’t doing so important?
I would argue that it absolutely is. Moreover, I am of the conviction that activism, voting, and personal action can be – and very often are – intimately related.
Let’s take one of my favorite examples that I never tire of talking about: car use.
As climate scientist Michael Mann noted with respect to climate change, the 800 pound gorilla in the room is our “civilization’s reliance on fossil fuels for energy and transport overall, which accounts for roughly two-thirds of global carbon emissions.” As I have noted before, the average American’s car accounts for about one fourth of our personal carbon footprints.
OK, let’s assume that we decide to forgo owning car. Then what? In other words, how do we get around? Let’s say you use a bike.
Well, if your city is anything like mine, the bike infrastructure there probably leaves a lot to be desired. In fact, it may well be dangerous, even deadly.
Allow me to explain for a minute or two as a way of introducing activism.
I live in downtown Santa Barbara, 10 miles from the university where I work. A 20 mile roundtrip commute on a bike may not sound very practical; however, I have a pedalec bike, which is a hybrid bike with a propulsion system not unlike a hybrid car, except instead of being powered by an electric motor and gasoline engine, it is powered by an electric motor and my peddling.
(Incidentally, a pedalec may sound like really new technology: however, when I was 16 years old, way back in 1976, I converted my first adult bicycle to a pedalec using a commercially available kit. Because of the first energy crisis in the U.S. in 1973, quite a few people were experimenting with alternative transportation, including electric assisted bikes. As it had a range of about 25 miles and a top speed of about 25 MPH, it was surprisingly practical and could certainly have been used for my daily commute today. However, at the time, as I recall, I got laughed at quite a bit while riding it, especially to and from high school.)
In any event, since my current electric bike can travel 28 miles per hour (which is the speed limit for a bike such as mine) without my breaking a sweat, is actually a very viable transportation alternative that can often compete with car use for a number of reasons. For example:
1) Parking on my campus is a bit of a nightmare, meaning that you sometimes have to drive around for five or more minutes looking for a parking spot and then walk quite a ways to your destination. In contrast, I ride my bike right to my classes, which is very quick.
2) If you leave at the end of the day, there is often a significant traffic jam on the freeway heading back to Santa Barbara. I have never once encountered a traffic jam on the bike path!
Hence, my e-bike commute often takes just a tad more time than if I were commuting by car. As a bonus, assuming that I am peddling actively, my commute is a nice daily workout.
But there is a problem: there are only two main roads that lead from my house to my office. The first is a bike lane along the busiest street in town (State Street). When I say “bike lane,” I really just mean that you are riding along the shoulder, separated from traffic by just a white line on the pavement. The second route, Modoc Street, which is the one I usually take, is more direct with less traffic. However, it too means that I am riding on the unprotected shoulder. What’s worse, in places traffic is moving at 50 miles an hour alongside me.
Given the situation, it is perhaps not surprising (though still altogether mortifying) that four bicyclists have been killed along Modoc Street in the past few decades, including one last year.
So, even though I can make a commitment to a personal action (ditching a car for an e-bike, which people have been doing for over forty years now), the world is clearly not set up for e-bike riders like me. It wasn’t 40 years ago: it still isn’t today. Not to put too fine an edge on it, but not only is it difficult, it can be downright deadly.
Sadly, in the U.S., not much has changed in this regard in my lifetime.
What’s to be done? The obvious action is to become an activist. In this case, a bicycle/climate activist.
I would not at all be surprised if you scoff at this idea. After all, am I really suggesting that advocating for bicycle lanes can play a serious role in mitigating the climate crisis?
In fact, I am.
Let’s look at an example where such bicycle activism made a huge difference: Copenhagen. An astonishing 62% of people now commute to work or school by bike in Copenhagen.
You might be under the impression that this bicycle culture goes back many decades to the beginning of the 20th century when cars first came on the scene in Denmark. In fact, it is relatively recent (and profound) cultural change. I offer it as an example, as it proves that extraordinary cultural change – of just the kind that we need to combat the climate crisis – can indeed happen.
Allow me to quote from Wikipedia, which concisely lays out the history of bicycling in Copenhagen. Note 1) that it begins back in the early 1970s (1973 to be exact) with the first “energy crisis” that alerted much of the world that we needed to quickly wean ourselves off of fossil fuels – something, as I have noted elsewhere in this series, that the U.S. failed to do – and 2) that Copenhagen’s remarkable transformation into a bicycle culture was a largely bottom-up phenomenon brought about by bicycle/environmental activists:
With the energy crisis, which hit Denmark harder than most countries, and the growing environmental movement in the 1970s, cycling experienced a renaissance. The Government was forced to introduce car-free Sundays to conserve oil reserves. Many city dwellers thought it was the best day of the week, and the Danish Cyclists Federation…organized massive demonstrations in Copenhagen and other major cities, demanding better infrastructure and safety for the city’s cyclists. Another grassroots action cited for helping cycling infrastructure on the political agenda was operation “White Crosses” where white crosses were painted on the streets where a cyclist had been killed in traffic…
Although the first separate cycle tracks were constructed much earlier, they did not become the norm until the early 1980s…Politicians, although not very eager, gradually took up building cycle tracks on main roads and also began to develop its first coordinated strategies for increasing cycling in the municipality.
The LA Times nicely continues this history into the 21st century by noting that “[i]n recent years, cycling has enjoyed yet another surge in popularity – the result of constantly improving bike lanes coupled with fears of climate change. Global warming presents an existential threat to this Baltic Sea port, which lies just a few feet above sea level.”
What would the climate impact be if the same number of Americans swapped their cars for bikes? Let’s do a quick, back-of-the-napkin calculation: 62% of the population of Copenhagen times 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year per car (the U.S. average) equals a reduction of 3.8 billion pounds of CO2 emissions per year. Again, that’s 3.8 billion pounds, with a “B.” And that’s just for one relatively small city. Imagine the impact if this happened in cities across the US – and world.
It could be objected that bicycle commuting is not practical in many American locales, as it gets pretty cold in many U.S cities. However, it also gets cold in Copenhagen, as it is further north than any of the lower 48 states. In fact, it is far closer in latitude to Jeuno Alaska than to the rest of the U.S.
Note that what happened in Copenhagen happened on a local level, with activists forcing the city’s local politicians to act.
When election time comes around, we might assume that the climate crisis is a national issue, which it is certainly is; however, it is also true that what happens in your local town (as with our example of Copenhagen) can have global consequences. Similarly, the reason that climate activists like Mark Ruffalo pressured the Governor of California was because he had ability to stop fracking in the state.
Hence, local, state, and national elections all play major roles in mitigating the climate crisis. Again, the local, city elections in Copenhagen have been responsible for keeping 3.8 billion pounds of CO2 or equivalent gasses from being released into the atmosphere every year.
And, of course, this all started with environmental activists. Note too that, starting in the 1970s, these activists were not focusing on climate change, but rather on a range of environmental concerns, especially the fear that our fossil fuel reserves were running out.
To put this in the terms that I introduced in a previous lecture, these bicycle/environmental activists from the 1970s acted on the knowledge that our fossil fuel economy was clearly problematic. In this sense, knowledge became power because it was acted upon – by activists.
When it comes to making a difference in the climate crisis, it is not a question of choosing either personal action or climate activism or becoming politically active. In many, many cases (as in the example of Copenhagen), all three are integrally connected.
I would argue the personal action has a special position, as it can help keep our focus on the prize on a daily basis. Everyday that we hop on a bike or forgo a burger, we remind ourselves that much needs to be done – and that we are, even if in a small way, doing something.
Doing such little things also sends a message to the rest of the world, as we lead by example. To echo a phrase often attributed to Gandhi, we become, indeed embody, the change that we want to see in the world.
I am curious to hear what you think about the roles that personal action, activism, and being politically active should play in the climate crisis.
Housing and Cities Watch video
Back during our discussion of the generational aspect of the climate crisis, I drew attention to the fact that houses have been slowly supersizing during my lifetime. As I noted,
“In 1950, shortly before I was born, the average size of an American house was just under 1000 square feet. Today, the average size is over 2500 square feet – more than two and a half times larger, even though American families are now considerably smaller. And of course, as with so many things American, bigger is often perceived as better.”
“Hence, if you can afford it, the ideal home is often much larger. One in five new houses in the U.S. is now, in fact, over 3000 square feet in size. One in ten is a McMansion, at over 4000 square feet. In contrast, a traditional Japanese home, which housed families of four or more, was one tenth that size at 400 square feet.”
The ever-reliable Union of Concerned Scientists notes that 17% of the average American’s carbon footprint comes from heating and cooling their homes. In addition, 15% comes from other home energy use, such as lighting and appliances. Suffice it to say that, at approximately a third when combined (32% to be exact), a large chunk of the average American’s climate footprint comes from our homes.
Indeed, in terms of our personal climate footprints, only transportation (i.e. chiefly our cars and flying, at 28%) and our relentless acquisition of stuff (26%) rival our houses and their energy use as climate offenders. Though, let’s be clear, they both fall short of houses.
Incidentally, as transportation, housing, and stuff (in that order) are responsible for 86% of our personal carbon footprints, it clearly points to where we need to personally direct our attention if we hope to mitigate the climate crisis. The remaining 14% comes from our food. Hence, while what we eat is certainly important (I would argue very much so), transportation, housing, and stuff are on average each more than twice as important.
Part of the problem with our houses, which is not reflected in that 32% figure from the Union of Concerned Scientists, is the embedded carbon in our homes. In other words, a ton of CO2 or equivalent gases is released when a house is built. Actually, about 80 metric tones are released to build a typical house.
This is the same problem that we encountered with the manufacture of a car.
However, with a house the situation is better, as they generally last far longer than the 11 years of an average car. Even if a house lasted “just” 80 years, which would be a relatively short lifespan for a home, and had just two occupants, that would work out to one half metric tones of CO2 per year. Of course, that would still be one quarter of each occupant’s total annual carbon footprint, but it’s still far better than the embed carbon in a car, which is four times as much when spread over its usable lifespan.
But keep in mind that we still have to contend with the fact that providing energy for that house (for heating, cooling, appliances like refrigerators, washers, dryers) takes 32% of the average American’s carbon allotment. The problem here is that, as Americans expend over 16 metric tones of CO2 or equivalents on average, 32% of this works out to 5.2 metric tones per person. This jumps even more if we add in the embedded carbon.
Hence, the average American is expending over two and a half times their total annual carbon allotment on their homes – and, of course, this leaves nothing for food, clothing, transportation, and all the stuff that Americans love to acquire to fill our homes!
So, what’s to be done? How exactly do we go about reducing this?
As with many issues related to the climate crisis, it is useful approach this as largely a cultural problem. Hence, while I definitely support actions like increasing home insulation and putting photovoltaic solar panels on your roof – and, in fact, my wife and I did both with our little old Santa Barbra house – this is not enough.
So, what, then, is to be done?
It is simple enough: Move to a micro-apartment or certain co-housing communities, as this can greatly reduce your climate footprint.
As I noted on in a previous lecture, “the good news for both transportation and housing is that there is a simple way to approach both: move to a city. City living can mean dramatically less car use (in Manhattan, only one in five people commute to work by car) and generally smaller, more efficient housing. Many cities have made major commitments to mass transportation and bicycle use…as well as micro-apartments.”
Consequently, I want to focus on cities.
A majority, 55%, of human beings on the planet now live in cities. By 2050, that number is expected jump to over two thirds or more.
In order to take up cities and city life, I want to again consider Henry David Thoreau and his life on the shores of Walden Pond. This may seem to be an odd move, as Thoreau is probably best remembered for the two years of his life that he spent living on the rustic shores of Walden Pond – which was, as far as he was considered, as far from city life as possible while still staying close to his hometown.
However, as I suggested in the lecture on Walden, his important legacy for the 21st century is (at least as far as I am concerned) that he took a long hard look at his life with an eye to reducing everything unnecessary. In this sense, it is less important where he did this than the fact that he took up this personal, reductionist project.
Here is something to ponder: what would Thoreau’s Walden experiment have been like had it not been conducted in its semi-wilderness setting, but an urban one instead? His profound aesthetic appreciation of the scene would, of course, be different, but, in wholly practical terms, what would such a lifestyle be like?
In other words, what would a life of urban (rather than wilderness) simplicity be like? Given our topic today, I am primarily thinking of housing here.
In a variety of different places, in a range of different ways, people are not only asking this question, but taking up new lifestyles in reply. What’s more, these are not isolated and quirky, but in many instances are mainstream efforts that are offered as models for us all with respect to housing.
In 2012, spearheaded by then Mayor Michael Bloomberg, New York City launched its adAPT NYC pilot housing program to encourage micro-apartments by fostering a competition for real-estate developers. In 2013, the winning design was announced, which consisted of a modular building with 55 units with floor plans between 250 and 370 square feet each.
Although this might seem a little large when compared to Thoreau’s cabin, keep in mind that these units have bathrooms and full kitchens, which Thoreau lacked. Even so, as the larger apartments can be home to a couple, at 185 square feet per person these units are surprisingly close to Thoreau’s ideal size for domestic simplicity, which was 150 square feet.
New York is not alone as a test bed for this movement, as Boston, San Francisco, and an exciting range of other cities are adapting zoning for apartments as small as 220 square feet each.
In many respects, the adAPT NYC and similar projects are squarely in Thoreau’s rugged individualist tradition, which is a thoroughly American phenomenon. What I mean by this is that Thoreau lived alone – which is exactly how most Americans live: either alone or with their immediate family (i.e. with their parents or children). Consequently, each of our houses has a kitchen, a bathroom, a living room, etc. But must it be this way?
Co-housing, which is less common in the U.S. than in Europe (where, at least in a modern sense, it began around 50 years ago), challenges this individualist tradition. In a co-housing community, individuals and families can live in smaller housing units because they share services and amenities with others in the community. For example, members of the communities often share meals four or more times per week, which are cooked in a community kitchen.
(Incidentally, the documentary Happy has a very interesting segment on co-housing in Denmark. Someone was kind enough to upload this segment to YouTube.)
It is worth pausing to consider this global move toward cities as a form of environmental activism, as it can be seen as representative of a new kind of environmental thinking, which is profoundly different from what Thoreau advocated.
However, this new approach does resemble Thoreau’s in one important respect, as an emerging group of environmentalists is increasingly prompted to direct and personal action, rather than being content with merely speculating on our planet’s future from the sidelines. Like Thoreau, they are engaged in a gritty experiment with real-life environmental consequences.
They are not, however, as with the back-to-nature movement of their parents and grandparents, following Thoreau’s lead and retreating to the last scraps of American wilderness or expending a disproportionate amount of energy on its defense. To the contrary, many are going in the opposite direction by moving to different sorts of land, which many abandoned decades ago, such as cities.
For well over a decade now, a new wave of environmental activists has literally been greening cities. New York City’s High Line and Paris’s Promenade Plantée, both greenways fashioned from abandoned railways, have become icons of this movement, as have rooftop gardens, backyard chicken coops, and vertical farms.
These activists are not leaving the city for nature; they are bringing nature to the city, as the blended rural-urban lifestyle growing there is impacting a broad range of everyday practices. This movement is not limited to cities, but increasingly includes suburbs as well, where lawns are being replaced by vegetable gardens and municipal ordinances are being rewritten to allow livestock, like goats and sheep, to graze among swimming pools and tennis courts.
Although the growth of urban and suburban farming may seem trivial, even quirky and amusing, in some sense this movement overturns over 5000 years of thinking. Beginning with the very first works of Western literature, country and city (and, by extension, nature and culture) have been repeatedly imagined as not only mutually exclusive, but in opposition. In recent centuries, the country has nearly always been preferred, the city eschewed.
This attitude is alive and well in Thoreau, who, distressed by the growth of urban and industrial modernity, fled to what he imagined to be its opposite: the closest thing to nature he could find.
Now, however, a new wave of environmental activists is increasingly shifting its attention from nature untouched by culture, such as the wilderness of national parks and tropical rainforests (which preoccupied many environmental activists throughout the 20th century, sometimes to the exclusion of nearly everything else), to a vision of culture infused with nature – the merging of those ancient opposites: country and city.
Cities, among the most developed of all the places that human beings inhabit, are becoming test beds for the idea that culture can be far more natural than we ever imagined.
Thanks to works by Edward Glaeser, David Owen, and others, the idea of a “green metropolis” (Owen’s phrase) no longer sounds like a contradiction. The formidable challenge is to green cities even further, which, as Glaeser and Owen argue, are already in many respects far more environmentally benign than suburbs and even most rural areas. Although at first glance counterintuitive, they compellingly argue that life in Manhattan is far greener than in Wyoming in a variety of ways.
The notion that cities can be green and natural may seem counterintuitive, debatable, or just plain wrong. It certainly may have seemed so to earlier activists, like Earth First! founder Dave Foreman, who two decades ago baldly declared that civilization inescapably creates a rift between human beings and nature.
His solution, which was among the most radical offered by his generation of activists, was to call for the protection of wilderness by nearly any means necessary – even if it required acts of eco-sabotage – from human development.
By contrast, this new group of activists is focused on areas already developed and inhabited by human beings, which cover far more of the earth’s surface than the remaining remnants of wilderness.
If we hope to save the planet, which is now largely covered by cities, suburbs, farms, factories, and all sorts of other human works and projects, we need to turn our attention and energies to these places.
This shift in focus reveals just how much environmental activism is changing. Eco-sabotage (and more benign tactics deployed by moderate back-to-nature environmentalists) aimed at thwarting and checking human encroachment into wilderness is being supplanted by the eco-nurturing of areas that are already developed.
Does this mean that we all need to live in cities? No, of course not.
However, we really need to rethink the image of cites. My generation, following Thoreau’s lead, often saw cities as environmental nightmares and instead fled them for the suburbs.
This created a problem, a big one.
As I noted in my most recent book on Writing a New Environmental Era, if a large swath of the population took Thoreau’s lead and moved away from cities and out to rural locales it would, with absolutely no doubt, be an environmental disaster of unprecedented proportions.
Why am I so sure? Because…it actually happened and was. It began in the U.S. in Thoreau’s era, motivated by likeminded individuals acting on the same back-to-nature impulse that gave birth to his Walden experiment. In a sense, it became the largest (and to my mind most regrettable) cultural movement of the 20th century.
Hundreds of millions of people across the globe fled cities for the dream of simpler, rural lives. They ended up far short of the goal in suburbia. At first, in Thoreau’s era, they left in trains. A century later, the process sped up dramatically, as automobiles became the preferred way to get out of the city and then around in the suburbs. It soon became an environmental disaster on a global scale.
In contrast, today human beings by the billions are moving back to urban areas…It may well be the greatest cultural movement of the 21st century.
I am curious to hear what you think about all this: about living in micro-apartments, co-housing communities, and cities (and their regreening). Although it may sound a little strange soon first hearing, each of these decisions can be a form climate activism.
Pulling it all together: 20 things that each of us can do to save the planet
In this course, we have looked at not only at what the climate crisis is, but what each of us can do about it. These include personal actions, collective activism, political action, communication, and so forth. We have also noted that these are often deeply interconnected.
Today I would like to bring all these together into a list of twenty things that each us can do about the climate crisis. Actually, it is two lists of ten, with the first focusing on individual actions, the second political and collective actions.
This lecture is intended as something of a capstone for the course. Hence it is in part a recap, especially as I quote myself in places. Still, I think that it will be useful to bring all this together. Hence, if you recommend just one video from the course to a friend, this is may well be the best one.
Incidentally, if you find this recap a little redundant, great, as it means that you have been paying attention! However, do watch it through, as there is quite a bit of new material here. Moreover, if you are taking the UCSB course, it is also intended as something of a review for the final exam.
As I noted in the segment on Cowspiracy, author Jonathan Safran Foer recently published a book entitled We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, where he argued that each of us should adopt a plant-based diet if we want to save the planet from catastrophic climate change. Hence, saving the planet begins when we eat, breakfast and otherwise.
It would be great if saving the planet were that easy. However, as we have seen, unfortunately it is not. In fact, as I have noted, the fracking industry is responsible for more methane emissions than the beef industry. And CO2 is a far greater emission problem than methane.
Don’t get me wrong, we can certainly help save the planet at the breakfast table – in fact, I list two ways that we can do so in the first list below – but we cannot stop there, as it simply will not be enough, not nearly enough.
Moreover, we need to be clear about something: regardless of what we do, the planet will obviously continue on. Hence, the phrase “saving the planet” almost always implies that we are saving it for ourselves, humanity. As humans are just one of many species of beings that inhabit the earth, a more equitable and less anthropocentric way of stating what the phrase leaves unsaid is “saving the planet [for all life on it].”
Still, I think that Foer is on to something, as what he proposes is certainly what I would call a humanities approach, as he focuses on anthropogenic (i.e. human-caused) climate change as a result of human action.
Nonetheless, we need to act at more than just the breakfast table.
Here are ten examples of what we can do that are in this vein:
Saving the planet begins
1) at markets and restaurants, when we buy enough to eat – and no more.
Food waste is a huge problem in the U.S. and globally. As Peter Kalmus succinctly observed, “[a]bout 1/3 of global greenhouse gas emissions are due to food production, and about 1/2 of this (15% of global emissions) is due to livestock, mainly cows.” And as Project Drawdown noted, we can drawdown more greenhouse gas emissions by addressing food waste than by switching to largely plant based diets. However, while being freegan may have more impact than being vegan, the ideal personal solution is to largely eat a plant-based diet and waste as little food as possible. This includes eating food that we would otherwise discard, such as the leafy green tops of beets.
2) at meals, when we eat for the good of the planet and its climate.
Although the word has not yet entered the popular imagination, perhaps the best way to eat is to eat as a “climatarian”: someone who eats for good of the planet and its climate. Certainly being vegan or freegan is good, but being as combination of the two is great. And being a climatarian means that we look carefully at even the vegetables that we eat. As we have seen, eating asparagus in the Winter in most of North America is often no better for the climate than eating chicken or pork, as it is generally flown in from South America – and air travel has a huge climate footprint.
Incidentally, as Project Drawdown noted, the #1 thing that we can do to roll back global greenhouse gas emissions does not involve wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, or any sort of similar technologies. Instead, greater gains would come from change the way that we eat. When combines, wasting less food and switching to largely plant-rich diets would result in a staggering reduction of 137 gigatons of CO2 or equivalent gases every year.
In comparison to this reduction, globally shifting from fossil fuels to electricity generated by photovoltaic (solar) panels will roll back less than half this amount of emissions. The adoption of electric vehicles? Far less than ten percent. We should, of course, work on exploring a variety of technologies to help reduce our emissions, but it is important to keep their relative impact in perspective.
3) in the bedroom, when we use contraception and limit family size.
Globally, there are 85 million unintended pregnancies every year. 32 million of these (i.e. 38%) result in births. In the U.S., nearly half (45%) of all pregnancies are unintended. Hence, having both having access to effective birth control and actually using it is of central importance. This is both a deeply personal issue as well as a public one, as access to birth control is restricted across the planet for religious and other reasons. In Latin America and the Caribbean, for example,97% of women do not have unrestricted access to an abortion as an option of last resort.
4) in the classroom, when we fairly and equally educate boys and girls.
We need to educate more girls and women, which dramatically curbs population growth, as the more education a woman has, the fewer children she has. Together with family planning, this would roll back 103 gigatons of GHG emissions – more than anything other than changing the way that we eat (i.e. the above-mentioned synergy of wasting less food and switching to largely plant-rich diets).
This is not to say that we should place responsibility for this particular issue with girls and women. To the contrary, the responsibility lies with the institutions that restrict a woman’s access to education and control of her own body. And too, it is obviously the case that contraception is a male responsibility as well.
What I find so interesting about this approach to curbing greenhouse gas emissions is that it is a win-win-win. First, rolling back 103 gigatons of GHG emissions could have real and significant impact on the climate crisis. Second, educating women and girls across the planet is also terrific in it own right. Even without the environmental gains, we should obviously make every effort to do this. And third, as far as I am concerned (speaking in part as a father of a daughter), every woman on the planet should have control, including reproductive control, of her own body.
5) on the way to work, when we walk, bike, or use public transportation, rather than owning a car.
For the average American, 25% of our climate footprint comes from owning a car, as typical car in the U.S. emits about 4.6 metric tons of CO2 or equivalent gases per year. However, the carbon released in making a car is also a huge problem. As I noted in the lecture on electric cars, “if you buy a succession of cars during your adult life, one every 11 years, and leave them in your driveway and never drive them, you will have totally expended your CO2 allotment for your lifetime. And, of course, this does not leave an emission allotment for anything else, such as for food, clothing, housing, and everything else that we need to live – including actually driving that car!”
6) at home, when we choose to live in an appropriately sized dwelling or co-housing, instead of an average (i.e. oversized) American house, let alone a McMansion.
The largest chunk of the average American’s climate footprint – about a third of it, in fact – comes from our homes, from heating and cooling them, as well as home energy use, such as lighting and appliances.
So, what, then, is to be done? It is simple enough: Move to a micro-apartment or certain co-housing communities, as this can greatly reduce your climate footprint.
For the average American, over half of our climate footprints come from the above two sources; cars, which account for roughy 25% of our greenhouse emissions, and our houses, which account for 32%. However, as we have seen, the good news for transportation and housing is that there is a simple way to approach both: move to a city. City living can mean dramatically less car use (in Manhattan, only one in five people commute to work by car) and generally smaller, more efficient housing.
7) on vacation and when traveling, when we choose slow travel over air travel, which is, environmentally, the worst way to get around.
Air travel only accounts for about 2% or 2.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions globally. However, somewhat paradoxically, air travel can literally double the size of their climate footprint of one Americans. The problem is that traveling by air is a practice exclusive to the wealthiest, most privileged people, as 19 out of 20 people on the planet have never set foot in an airplane. Even among Americans, half do not fly annually. By some estimates, 80% of flights are made by just one percent of all people on the planet.
You may not think of yourself as a global elite or as a member of the “jet set,” but if you fly, you are. If you are a frequent flyer, put a hundred random people in a room and you will be contributing more to the climate crisis in this way than anyone else in the room. You may not think of yourself as a member of “the one percent” (i.e. the world’s wealthiest and most privileged people), but you would be among the the one percent doing the lion’s share of all this flying.
8) in stores and online, when we choose not to buy yet more unnecessary stuff.
In one sense, minimalism is hardly new, as most human beings throughout history have probably gotten by with the bare minimum, or nearly so, needed for life. Even today, for a broad swath of people across the planet, this is likely still true. But what we are talking about here is voluntary minimalism. Relatively wealthy people who could buy lots of stuff, but choose not to for environmental or other reasons. In that sense, minimalism is a “First World solution” to a “First World problem.” However, since the developed world is far and away the largest contributor to the climate crisis, this is an important intervention.
Many people believe that responding to the climate crisis on a personal level will mean we have to do without quite a bit, which means that we will have to live drab lives of deprivation. What is interesting about minimalism is that this group of individuals voluntarily has decided to do without quite a bit because they believe that this is a better way to live. This was also Thoreau’s message.
9) off-line, when we barter, borrow, rent, and otherwise exchange, as well as repair, things, rather than buying still more stuff.
In the documentaries Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution and Tomorrow (Demain), we met a number of people, including climate scientist Peter Kalmus and his family, as they attempt to live sustainable lives. I also put two short videos on the syllabus with similar theme: “Visualizing a Plenitude Economy” and “The High Price of Materialism.”
In different ways, each of these films drew attention to people working together, who, by bartering, borrowing, renting, and repair things, significantly reduced the relentless acquisition of stuff.
10) with buying, not only by buying less, sharing, and keeping things longer, but also by only buying from companies with environmentally sound and socially just practices.
The documentary The True Cost, as well as the episode of Patriot Act on “The Ugly Truth Of Fast Fashion,” exposed the horrible consequences of free (rather then) fair trade. This not only impacts the planet and its climate, but people all over the globe directly. Social justice, environmental justice, and climate justice are often not only related, but deeply and inexorably intertwined.
Hence, when buying, you have the opportunity to “vote with your dollar” to to support fair-trade products that were made under decent working conditions and the manufacture of which did as little harm as possible to the environment and climate.
Incidentally, when taken together, these last three things that we can do relating to stuff can have profound consequences for each of us in the developed world, as a quarter of the average American’s climate footprint comes from all the stuff that we buy.
This list of ten things is by no means complete, but you get the idea. Note that all of the above involve personal and cultural changes rather than new or more technology.
Similarly, but on a somewhat different note, saving the planet can also begin in the following ten ways:
11) at the polling place, when we cast our vote for candidates, from local to federal, advocating for sweeping climate policies, such as carbon pricing and the Green New Deal.
Personal climate action, while important and indeed essential, is simply not enough. For example, around 28% of methane emissions comes from meat (generally beef) production. However, an even greater amount comes from fossil fuel extraction, principally from hydraulic fracturing (aka fracking). Consequently, just switching to largely plant-based diets does not address the largest methane problem that we are facing.
The problem is that we cannot, practically speaking, end hydraulic fracturing through personal action. How, then, do we stop fracking? It is simple enough: we need to vote and become politically active, calling for legislation to end fracking.
As I never tire of telling people, if you can do only one thing to help mitigate the climate crisis and you do not have a lot of time to devote to the issue, you’re in luck, as the single most important thing that you can do takes just an hour or two per year: voting. Who doesn’t have an hour or two a year to help save the planet?
12) again at the polling place, when we vote for candidates and initiatives that put people and the planet ahead of corporate interests.
Not only should we cast our votes for candidates advocating for sweeping climate policies, such as carbon pricing and the Green New Deal, but we to think more broadly, as there are a range of other problems and injustices in the world, both environmental and social, that need our attention.
For example, the beef industry not only contributes the climate crisis through the release of methane, but causes a range of other environmental problems, such as habitat loss ( 40% of the land in the U.S. is used to feed livestock animals), the use of many trillion gallons of water, waste removal, pathogen runoff, a range of issues relating to herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers, etc. We need to need to vote for the environmental initiatives that address issues like this.
Similarly, as the film The True Cost revealed, there are important and heartbreaking social justice issues across the planet, including the U.S., that need to be addressed – and this can only happen through political action.
13) prior to the polling place, as we explain to five or more of our friends and family the importance of voting on behalf of our planet, it’s climate, and all the life that lives on it.
As we have seen, communication is of central importance, not only in communicating to people who are are not yet convinced of the importance, let alone the urgency, of the climate crisis, but friends who may be aware of the problem but are not significantly acting in response to it.
Because voting can have more impact than any action that you can take regarding the climate crisis, such as switching to largely plant-based diet or reducing food waste, explaining the importance of voting on behalf of our planet and all its life and climate to five or more friends, may ultimately have many times more impact than any diet change that you can make. Of course, do everything that you can, including changing your diet, but keeping the relative importance of everything in focus is important.
14) at gathering places. when we join together and collectively demand climate action, such as with the Sunrise Movement.
As we have seen, nearly two out of three people in Copenhagen bike to work or school. This did not happen just through personal or political actions. Instead, what brought this about was the tireless work of activists for many years. After more than a decade of this pressure, city politicians ultimately relented and began putting in the necessary infrastructure to make biking not only safe, but pleasant in the city. Without these activists, this change simply would not have happened.
What we need is a generation of activists to pressure politicians in the US and across the globe for sweeping climate action.
15) by protesting and through acts of peaceful civl disobedience, such as Greta Thunberg’s protest outside the Swedish parliament.
Greta Thunberg was, just a short time ago, in many ways a pretty average high school student (though in other ways, an altogether extraordinarily one with the ability to see the climate crisis as a black-and-white issue and sustain a laser-like focus on the problem). Still, her modest act of civil disobedience, her “school strike for the climate,” has ultimately changed the world.
Incidentally, as Wikipedia notes, prior to her school strike, Thunberg’s first action was to challenge “her parents to lower the family’s carbon footprint and overall impact on the environment by becoming vegan, upcycling, and giving up flying.”
16) with reading, as we learn more about the crisis and what is being done – as well as why nearly enough isn’t being done.
Unfortunately, one of the things that is slowing action on the climate crisis is that it is exceptionally difficult to read through to the truth of the matter. Why? As we have seen, fossil fuel interests are spending many millions of dollars every year to confuse the public about the climate crisis.
Any college-educated American deserving of the degree should be able to carefully read through the facts concerning an issue like the climate crisis to conclude that it represents a real and present danger to our country and planet. Indeed, a high school education should be enough to sharpen the necessary reading skills. Educators like myself need to make sure that we are graduating students with these skills.
And everyone needs to take the time to sit down and carefully read about the climate crisis and what we can do about it.
17) with rethinking, as we, as individuals and as a diverse range of human cultures, take a long hard look at how we inhabit this planet.
The title of Naomi Klein’s first book on the climate crisis, This Changes Everything, could easily be turned into an imperative: if we are going to successfully survive this, “we need to change everything.”
Yes, we can hope that technology will save us. And let’s be clear, technological solutions are definitely welcome. However, it is both naïve and dangerous to think that technology alone can do this. Instead, we need to accept the fact that we have to make sweepingly change tohow we inhabit this planet. Our mass consumerism, which seeming has no bounds, is a case in point.
18) by sharing what we know and do with others, so that they too have a better understanding of the climate crisis and what can be done.
In one of the lectures on climate and generation, I noted that knowledge is not itself power. By that I meant that knowledge is only power when I acted upon, otherwise, knowledge is power squandered. This is not to say that knowledge is not important, as it clearly is the first step to power. Rash and haphazard action without knowledge can be more disastrous than not acting or knowledge.
While we can each individually learn about the climate crisis, sharing this knowledge (i.e. communication) is crucial if we are to all get through this. As we have seen, this not only includes communicating to people who are in denial of the crisis, but to friends and family sympathetic to the cause who sincerely want more knowledge and to know what can be done. And as we have also seen, we could effectively communicate through not just her words, but also our actions.
19) by joining with others in initiatives, from local to global, such as freegan or bicycle collectives, so that we can support each other.
Yes, it would be possible, for example, to be a freegan on your own, but as Peter Kalmus compellingly argued through his example, the support of others should be enthusiastically welcomed. By this I mean not only the help of others in collecting discarded food, but the emotional help and strength that others can offer.
After all, as being a freegan may well result in your friends thinking that you are little odd, wouldn’t it be nice to have a whole group of freegan friends who admired and were grateful for your work at this form of climate activism?
20) with us, as we become (to echo a phrase often attributed to Gandhi) the change that we want to see in the world.
This may sound like an odd observation coming from someone who just recorded over 30 lectures, but talk is cheap. This fact is frequently brought to light by our detractors. For example, Al Gore arguably sets himself up for easy criticism by flying in private jets.
This issue is related to the idea that knowledge alone is not power. After all, if we have the knowledge that flying is an environmental disaster yet continue to do it, then we have not only squandered that knowledge, but have arguably announced to the world – through our actions – that, as far as we are concerned, it is not knowledge worth acting upon.
This is why people like Greta Thunberg try to live by the principles they endorse, by, for example, refusing to fly.
Again, this second group of ten things is not an exhaustive list, but it should be clear that none of the above (on either) list requires much by way of technological innovation, but rather just people both embodying change and joining together to demand it.
In other words, both lists suggest personal, cultural, economic, and political changes, rather than technological solutions, to a crisis caused by human beings. Again this is not to say that technological innovations are not needed to address the climate crisis, but this is not nearly enough by itself.
Note that both the above lists are aimed at the developed world. Since the poorest 3 billion people on the planet have emitted just 5% of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, only a few things on these lists apply to them. Moreover, there is one thing that the developing world could do that would be absolutely huge, if they could somehow succeed in doing it: convince the developed world to stop emitting so many greenhouse gases!
There is one more approach that needs to be mentioned. Why what I am about to say is primarily intended for my students, as they will soon be thinking about careers that they can embark upon, it really applies to anyone. After all, I began a second career as a professor in my early 40s. Proving that it is never too late to take up the challenge of acting on something that you feel is important.
Students often come to me asking what sort of professions that they could take up that would have an impact on the climate crisis. They are often thinking about a major in environmental studies. Alternately, knowing that I approach things from the perspective of the humanities, they are thinking about careers of this sort.
But the simple fact is that almost anything that you think of can have a profound environmental and climate impact. For example, we have seen first-hand that communication is profoundly important through communicators like Kip Anderson, who made the film Cowspiracy. This not only applies to filmmakers, but journalists like David Walace-Wells. The episode of Patriot Act that we watched underscores that even (perhaps especially) comedians can have extraordinary impact.
Possibilities certainly abound in the STEM fields, as well as, of course, law, politics, and policymaking. Urban planners come to mind as especially important.
And, as was made clear in the documentary Wasted!, even chefs can play a very important role here.
When I was in graduate school, one of my advisers gave me some really good advice: you should focus on whatever you feel really passionate about. Not everyone follows this advice, as many people who devote their lives to doing good in the world go into fields that they feel will have the most impact.
But the simple fact is that pretty much any field can have an impact on the climate crisis. If this is not readily apparent in your case, I urge you to do a little research. My guess is that within a few minutes of online research you will find people who share your interests that address the climate crisis. If you can’t find any, shoot me an email and I’ll think about it as well.
In any event, I am curious to hear what you think about the above 20 things that each and all of us can do to intervene in the climate crisis.
President Trump visiting Paradise after the Camp Fire
Readings, Introduction. Watch video.
As far as I am concerned, nearly every university course in the humanities needs to have at its core a group of readings. This course is no different. The good news is that you do not need to purchase any of them, as they are all available online, free of charge.
Why read these texts?
Each in its own way provides an interesting insight into the climate crisis. Not only what it is, but what we can do about it.
Some like Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, published in 1854, and Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers – which is…well…as old as I am – have nothing to say about the climate crisis. Yet, both writers seriously questioned the lifestyle choices that have profoundly exacerbated this crisis. Unfortunately, we largely ignored both writers – though there is still time to act on what they had to say.
Others, like “The Uninhabitable Earth” by David Wallace-Wells, look squarely at the climate crisis and its future – and what the future may hold if we do not respond to the crisis, immediately.
Still others, like Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming have been generated by fossil fuel interests in order to cause us to doubt that there even is a crisis. The goal is not necessarily to convince us that the climate crisis does not exist, but rather to raise doubts in our minds about its nature and severity so that we will be slow to act, thereby allowing the fossil fuel industry to continue business as usual for as long as possible. While this might be good for their bottom line in the short term, it would be disastrous for the future of our planet.
Having read all or most of these texts, you should have a better idea of what the climate crisis is – and what each of us can do about it.
The uninhabitable (or at least unwelcoming) earth (Readings, 1) Watch video.
In December of 2015, 196 nations of the planet Earth agreed to to do their best to keep global temperature rise “to well below 2 degrees Celsius” from a preindustrial baseline. This was at the 21st annual session of the Conference of the Parties, also known as COP21. The agreement reached has become known as the “Paris Agreement.” What’s more, these nations agreed to also “pursue efforts to” limit the temperature increase to just 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Sounds good, right?
The problem is that the global temperature has already risen by two thirds that amount (1 degree Celsius from preindustrial levels). What’s more – and worse – the United States, which is second only to China in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, has since withdrawn from the Paris Agreement and the rest of the nations involved have only promised to reduce emissions, as the Paris Agreement has no enforcement mechanism.
In less than two years after the COP21, the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change appointed by the United Nations to study the climate crisis) released a Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C that suggested that a 1.5 degree Celsius rise could happen in as little as 11 years (just ten years from the time that I am recording this) and almost certainly within 20 years if major cuts on global greenhouse emissions were not made immediately. Since we are not yet taking the necessary steps to make these cuts, a 1.5 degree rise seems inevitable and 2 degrees likely.
Unfortunately, as the IPCC Report made clear, even a 1.5 degree rise would have profound global consequences – and a 2 degree rise would obviously be still worse.
But what sort of consequences would we be facing if we fail to stop global temperature at 2 degrees, which now seems entirely possible, if not in fact likely?
This is the question taken up by David Wallace-Wells in July 2017 New York Magazine article entitle “The Uninhabitable Earth”. Wallace-Wells has, incidentally, subsequently written a book with the same title and published as followup article entitled “We’re Getting a Clearer Picture of the Climate Future — and It’s Not as Bad as It Once Looked.”
The 2017 article lays out the consequences of climate change if we do not act quickly and decisively. Wallace-Wells explains:
This article is the result of dozens of interviews and exchanges with climatologists and researchers in related fields and reflects hundreds of scientific papers on the subject of climate change. What follows is not a series of predictions of what will happen — that will be determined in large part by the much-less-certain science of human response. Instead, it is a portrait of our best understanding of where the planet is heading absent aggressive action. It is unlikely that all of these warming scenarios will be fully realized, largely because the devastation along the way will shake our complacency. But those scenarios, and not the present climate, are the baseline. In fact, they are our schedule.
While many authors focus on the impact of 1.5-2 degrees (Celsius) of global temperature rise, Wallace-Wells rightly notes that such a small rise in temperature is a best-case – and at this point probably unlikely – scenario, especially as human activity has already warmed the earth by 1 degree Celsius. With this in mind, Wallace-Wells takes up the question of what the earth (and our lives) would be like with a 2-4 degree Celsius rise – which is where we are headed if we do not act quickly.
“The Uninhabitable Earth” generated quite a bit of controversy, as many people (including some climate scientists) thought that he was being too alarmist. However, as Wallace-Wells makes clear in the above quote, he is portraying just one possible future. He notes that it is unlikely that all of this will happen, as humanity will at some point hopefully wake up and act. However, if we do not, Wallace-Wells paints a picture of where “business as usual” (BAU) will take us.
Incidentally, because a number of individuals have questioned the scenarios that he lays out, Wallace-Wells has also created an annotated version of the article where he notes and responds to the objections.
A few questions for thought:
1) Is Wallace-Wells too alarmist? While his objective seems to be to startle us into action by laying out what the future could hold if we do nothing, does he risk doing the exact opposite by incapacitating us with fear? There is certainly quite a bit of doom and gloom in the article. Expressed another way, how did you feel, or what did you want to do, after putting down the article? Did you feel prompted to action? Or did you simply want to cry?
2) Regarding the above question, does taking an alarmist tack risk alienating certain readers? Climate change deniers and skeptics frequently refer to people who are trying to alert us to the dangers of climate change as “climate change alarmists,” as they characterize them as trying to frighten us into action. As an obvious alarmist in this sense, Wallace-Wells fits into a category that some people might summarily dismiss.
3) Wallace-Wells focuses on a number of specific consequences of climate change, including Heat Death, The End of Food, Climate Plagues, Unbreathable Air, Perpetual War, Permanent Economic Collapse, Poisoned Oceans. Which did you find the most compelling and worrisome? Why?
A final thought: some people might be quick to dismiss Wallace-Wells as he is looking forward to an uncertain future. However, a quick look to the recent past makes it hard to dismiss Wallace-Wells as simply an alarmist. At the close of 2019, journalists Sarah Ruiz-Grossman and Lydia O’Connor published an article on “7 Numbers Show How Dire Climate Change Got This Decade” (meaning the twenty-teens). Allow me to end by repeating them:
1) The past five years were the hottest ever recorded on the planet
2) Four of the five largest wildfires in California history happened this decade
3) Six Category 5 hurricanes tore through the Atlantic region in the past four years
4) Arctic sea ice cover dropped about 13% this decade
5) Floods with a 0.1% chance of happening [i.e. a one in a thousand chance of happening] in any given year became a frequent occurrence
6) There were more than 100 “billion dollar” climate disasters, double from the decade before
7) Meanwhile, we pumped a record 40.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the air in 2019
“2°C: Beyond the Limit, Fires, floods and free parking” (Readings, 2) Watch video.
If you asked most people a decade or so ago what they thought that the consequences of global warming would be for California, they would likely have mentioned sea-level rise. After all, with over 800 miles of coastline and roughly two thirds of its 40 million people living in coastal counties, it seemed as if flooding was the greatest danger to the state from the climate crisis.
As it turns out, it’s not.
The problem, having to do with temperature rise and corresponding wildly unpredictable weather and environmental conditions, has really hit home for Santa Barbara and the surrounding area.
As the Washington Post’s article on California’s changing climate makes clear,
“Since 1895, the average temperature in Santa Barbara County has warmed by 2.3 degrees Celsius, according to The Post’s analysis. Neighboring Ventura County has heated up even more rapidly. With an average temperature increase of 2.6 degrees Celsius since preindustrial times, Ventura ranks as the fastest-warming county in the Lower 48 states.”
“Warming here already has exceeded the threshold set in the 2015 Paris climate accords, which President Barack Obama joined and the Trump administration has promised to leave. The agreement concluded that average warming worldwide should be held ‘well below’ 2 degrees Celsius to avoid potentially catastrophic consequences — but it already has warmed by more than 1 degree Celsius.”
With such extraordinary temperature increase, all sorts of impacts follow. For example, fires are now a reality of life due to dry conditions and lack of rain. The 2017 Thomas Fire at Santa Barbara, at 281,000 acres, was the largest wildfire to date in California in modern history, though it was surpassed in size by the Ranch Fire less than a year later.
This is not an isolated problem, as “A quarter of California’s 40 million residents now live in high-risk fire zones.”
It is not just fires, as the article reveals, what California locals call “global weirding” has resulted in strange midday temperatures soaring to 115 degrees Fahrenheit followed by sudden cooling, which resulted in deaths of livestock animals and scorched orchards.
Something startling happened while I was writing this short lecture snippet.
I penned the above paragraphs, which explained that California would likely experience far more than just sea level rise as a result of climate change, on Christmas morning, 2019. My plan was to come back the next day and finish this lecture.
But that night my phone flashed with an alert that a rotating storm cell was off the coast of Santa Barbara and that the city needed to immediately brace for a tornado. Everyone was advised to take shelter in the their homes and “move to an interior room on the lowest floor of a sturdy building and avoid windows.” While a tornado did not hit Santa Barbara that night, the National Weather Service confirmed that one touched down in the nearby Ventura harbor that was generated by a different storm cell.
Now, if you are in another state or part of the world, this may not seam like a big deal. But the central coast of California is one of just a few true Mediterranean climates on the planet. The Ancient Romans had a name for this sort of welcoming climate, they called it locus amoenus a “pleasant place.” For over two thousand years, people across the world have wistfully pinned for such a perfect pastoral climate, with none of the temperature variations and various storms that most of the planet experiences.
While a handful of small tornados have been recorded over the past hundred years in the Santa Barbra area, they are extraordinarily rare and generally insignificant. That two rotating storm cells capable of generating dangerous tornados formed during one storm is exceptionally unusual and perhaps unprecedented.
I mentionable this because it underscores that climate change will likely produce a range of consequences that, like these tornados, may well be altogether unexpected. This is not to fault the predicative computer models produced by climate scientists, but rather to underscore that in addition to the sort of things that we can model and expect, like protracted drought conditions that set the stage for wildfires, there may be a range of others that we just don’t see coming.
And this is not just limited to the physical consequences of climate change (like droughts, fires, and tornados), but even more so when the human implications are taken into account. California produces almost half of fruits, nuts and vegetables grown in the U.S. If there is significant change to the climate of this region, it could have profound consequences for the food supply and security of the country.
The climate crisis is not only here. The climate crisis has now come home to California.
Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming (Readings, 3) Watch video.
If you ask me, education can play a crucial role in the climate crisis. Coming from an educator, it’s probably not surprising that I believe this.
What you may find surprising is that climate change deniers also find educators and education of central importance. And, they are doing something about it – in a big way.
A 2016 report from the National Center for Science Education (NCSE) revealed that as many as 30% of K-12 teachers teaching climate change teach that this is a two-sided argument and that “‘many scientists’ see natural causes behind recent global warming.” Conversely, more than half of K-12 teachers do not teach climate change at all. And those who do teach it only devote an hour or two to the issue.
Part of the problem is that many of these teachers are themselves unclear on the facts. The most referenced of all papers on climate change notes that 97% of scientists are in agreement that anthropogenic climate change is real and happening. However, when questioned about this scientific consensus by the NCSE, only 30% of middle-school and 45% of high-school teachers selected the correct answer from a broad range (“81 to 100%”). In other words, even if they thought that just 80% or 90% of scientists were in consensus, they would have still selected the right answer – but they didn’t.
So, what are so many teachers confused about the climate crisis?
This confusion is not too surprising, as teachers have been targeted by fossil fuel affiliates like the Heartland Institute (I will talk more about this organization in a minute or two), which mailed 300,000 unsolicited and free copies of the book *Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming*, a portion of which we are reading, to K-12 teachers across the U.S. in 2017. As the Heartland Institute notes, this book purports to explain “why the claim of ‘scientific consensus’ [in other words, that 97% figure] on the causes and consequences of climate change is without merit. The authors comprehensively and specifically rebut the surveys and studies used to support claims of a consensus. They…then provide a detailed survey of the physical science of global warming.”
Although sent to K-12 teachers, the real targets are – of course – children, as the goal is to teach them climate change skepticism by way of the people that they trust most in this regard: their school teachers.
Assuming that each of the teachers that received this book teaches around 30 children, this approach could potentially teach climate change skepticism to 10 million American children.
As you will see when reading Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming, this does not read like the rants of a fringe group, but rather is built upon carefully constructed arguments. Don’t be at all surprised if it causes you to become a little skeptical yourself. That’s why it was written – and written carefully.
Incidentally, even if K-12 teachers are correctly informed and desire to teach the climate crisis, in a number of states (Maine, South Dakota, and Virginia, for example) bills have recently been introduced that would hamper their efforts. The Virginia bill argues that this is necessary because “many teachers in public elementary and secondary school classrooms are abusing taxpayer resources and abusing their ability to speak to captive audiences of students in an attempt to indoctrinate or influence students…under the guise of ‘teaching for social justice’ and other sectarian doctrines.”
Some states are attempting to go even further in mandating that students be taught that the scientific consensus on climate change is simply wrong. A bill introduced in Montana in 2019 states that “when providing educational and informational materials on climate change,” the following findings should be observed: “reasonable amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere have no verifiable impacts on the environment; science shows human emissions do not change atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions enough to cause climate change; claims that carbon associated with human activities causes climate change are invalid; and nature, not human activity, causes climate change.”
As the book Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming makes clear, Americans are clearly being influenced by a massive campaign of disinformation that has been ongoing for decades now, supported by a range of groups that includes a number of conservative think tanks (generally referenced as CTTs), such as the Cato Institute, the Heartland Institute, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which are funded by fossil fuel companies (like the Koch brothers) and interests.
Dating from the Reagan administration and earlier, these groups have long seen themselves, to quote the Cato Institute, as the defenders of “America’s heritage of individual liberty, free markets, and constitutionally limited government.” In practice, the Heartland Institute, which published the book that we are reading from, Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming, has, example, fought bitterly against issues like tobacco regulation, which was one of its earliest initiatives in the 1980s. At the time, it received massive funding from the tobacco industry.
With respect to climate change, a 2013 study by two scholars, Riley E. Dunlap and Peter J. Jacques, which looked at over 100 English-language books denying anthropogenic climate change dating from the 1980s to 2010, found verifiable links to CTT groups for 87% of those emerging from publishing houses (links with self-published denial books, now proliferating, are more difficult to trace). That number was once even higher: 100% of all books from the 1980s and 95% from the 1990s.
Simply put, if you pick up a book denying that anthropogenic climate change is real, it is very likely that it was published or financed by a conservative think tanks funded by the fossil fuel industry.
And this is just the tip of the iceberg; CTTs support a range of websites, blogs and other online activities, as well as more traditional advertising. A billboard campaign by the Heartland Institute featured a photograph of convicted “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski, who thinks of himself as an environmentalist, beside the words, “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” A television commercial by the Competitive Enterprise Institute argued that the greenhouse gas CO2 is not, in fact, a contributing factor to climate change. To the contrary, it is represented as “essential to life. We breathe it out. Plants breath it in…They call it pollution. We call it life.”
These conservative think thanks also directly attack science and scientists. In response to the definitive reports on climate change produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Heartland Institute commissioned its own group, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which has produced over a dozen reports, comprising thousands of pages.
The book from which we are reading, Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming, is in some sense similar to the IPCC Summary for Policymakers, as it is produced by the NIPCC in order to deliver its findings to policymakers and others. With this goal in mind, “[m]ore than 50,000 copies of the first edition were sold or given away in five months to elected officials, civic and business leaders, scientists, and other opinion leaders” (pages xv-xvi).
With the second edition, from which we are reading, the Heartland Institute widened their free distribution of the book, as they posted the entire book online as a free PDF (which we are reading). In addition, as noted above, the Heartland Institute mailed 300,000 copies of the second edition of this book to teachers across America.
In short, Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming is designed to make a range of individuals question whether anthropogenic climate change is real: policymakers (i.e. politicians and business leaders), educators – and by extension, millions of children – and others, by making the text available to everyone as a free PDF.
I am curious to hear what you think about the portion of Why Scientists Disagree About Global Warming that you read and the larger issue of this campaign of disinformation in general, as well as how it is specifically being aimed at children by way of educators.
Walden (Readings, 4) Watch video.
Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 classic Walden is a fascinating book that has been read very differently at different times.
Walden recounts (in literary form) Thoreau’s experience of living a rustic life on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord, Massachusetts. In the second half of the 20th century especially, readers were fascinated by Thoreau as a proponent of a back-to-nature lifestyle. The idea of leaving our overly mechanized lives behind in order to live simpler lives closer to nature fascinated the 1960s generation, some of whom actually built wilderness cabins and communes in emulation of Thoreau. He also played a role in inspiring books such as Into the Wild.
However, Thoreau can also be seen as the great grandparent of the modern minimalist movement, as he famously reduced one of Walden’s core messages to a two-word imperative: “simplify, simplify.” This is arguably Thoreau’s most useful message for the 21st century.
In this sense, Thoreau did something altogether extraordinary (arguably far more extraordinary than living in a semi-wilderness setting) – yet, nonetheless, something all of us should arguably do at some point in our lives: He stepped out of his regular routine to ponder the sort of life that he considered worth living. In practice, he took a couple of years of his life to, as he puts it, “front only the essential facts of life.” He wanted to strip away all the stuff and crap surrounding him to find the meaningful life under it all. Among other things, he considered housing, clothing, and food.
Distressed by his neighbors, who even in the 1850s were building increasingly lavish houses, Thoreau pondered what would be the simplest dwelling possible for a single person. His answer? A wooden version of a single-person tent, with a floor just big enough for a bedroll. To keep things simple from the start, he proposed recycling a used railway storage box, which could be purchased at the time for a dollar, for the purpose. Ultimately, he settled on a larger structure, which at 150 square feet may seem lavish by comparison but is nevertheless about the size of an average garden shed (which his cabin at Walden Pond resembled).
When Thoreau turned his attention to clothing, he railed against the fashion industry, which even then was centered in Paris, for encouraging us to buy into fleeting trends: “The head monkey at Paris puts on a traveler’s cap, and all the monkeys in America do the same.” Because “every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new,” clothing was (as it is even more today) being discarded as unfashionable when it was still quite usable. To simplify things, Thoreau suggested not giving in to the whims of fashion. Instead, own just a few pieces of sturdy clothing and, for good measure, “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.”
With respect to food, Thoreau made repeated appeals for the simplicity of vegetarianism: “I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals.” As early as Walden, he also rejected imported foodstuffs, like coffee and tea. His last work, unpublished in his lifetime, was a celebration of local and seasonal wild fruit, which he extolled as superior to their imported counterparts, such as oranges and bananas that were being shipped into U.S. ports (like nearby Boston) by way of sailing ships.
In general, though he was certainly given to his share of philosophical musing, throughout his life Thoreau repeatedly drew his (and our) attention to the most basic of our day-to-day needs, which, he provocatively argued can be satisfied far more simply than we usually imagine.
But Thoreau did something more, something bigger and altogether extraordinary: he challenged us all to ponder the role that we were given at birth. This has profound environmental implications.
Think of life like a play, a theatrical performance, that has been scripted for you. When you were born, you stepped into a role, exceptionally intricate, that was written long before you were even conceived. For example, where you would live, how you would get around, what you would eat, all this was spelled out for you, in detail. It’s not that you weren’t given some latitude in playing the role. For example, you could choose the car that you wanted and could afford. However, you could not easily choose to forgo having a car – not if you wanted to play the role successfully (i.e. be seen as a success).
Like many generations before, my generation lived the life scripted for us. In that sense, we did not take up Thoreau’s challenge to reconsider the life written for us. What’s worse, in many ways ours was an over-the-top performance in the role, as we did so many things bigger and more outlandishly. For example, in dramatic contrast to Thoreau, we live in houses that are 2 1/2 times larger than those of our parents (which, incidentally, were already six times larger than Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond).
The new generation coming on the scene, that of my students, cannot live the life scripted for them, as this would be environmentally disastrous. To some, this will be frustrating, perhaps enormously so, as the pressure to conform to that role (which comes from a thousand directions in our culture) can be pretty intense. Even little things, like forgoing a car and meat-eating, can be met with a backlash from those, happily living the scripted role, who see this as a threat to that way of life.
If you happily accept the role handed to you, this might be especially frustrating. Yes, the generations that came before you had lots of things that you will not have. Let’s face it, we had awesome amounts of stuff. However, it is not at all clear that any of this made us happy. Indeed, it has arguably done just the opposite.
In any event, what this new generation needs to do is to take up Thoreau’s challenge and reconsider and rewrite the script. This can be seen as an opportunity – a huge and exciting one. However, it is also an enormous challenge.
So, my question is just what do you make of Thoreau and his challenge to an overly bloated life? Given that he is responding to life in nineteenth-century America, imagine what his reaction would be to our consumer world. Is Thoreau onto something, should we all “simplify, simplify”?
As usual, I will select a number of your comments and respond to them in a future episode.
The Waste Makers (Readings, 5) Watch video
Have you ever wondered how, why, and when Americans became rampant consumers? As consumerism has a profound environmental and climate footprint, it is worth pausing on this question and its history.
In one sense, unchecked consumerism has been going on for a very long time. In my course on literature and the environment, we read a blistering attack on consumerism by the English writer Sir John Denham from nearly 400 years ago. And he is hardly the first. However, in the U.S., consumerism really ramped up in the seventy years separating us from the Second World War.
Radical cultural change is it interesting phenomenon. Once it has taken place, we often quickly adjust to the new normal. To people born into a changed era, it generally doesn’t seem unusual at all, as it is all that they have ever known. The new normal is simply normal.
However, people caught in the middle of profound cultural change have an interesting vantage point, as they can see the changes particularly clearly – and hence often react to them strongly.
In the 1950s, as consumerism really took off in the U.S., journalist Vance Packard was a particularly keen observer of the change in American culture. Immediately after that decade closed, Packard published a best-selling, scorching indictment of consumerism entitled The Waste Makers.
While Packard was not an environmentalist per se, and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (which in many ways inaugurated the modern environmental movement) would not be published until two years after The Waste Makers, from the title onward the book focused on consumerism as a culture defined by the production of waste – which is obviously environmentally disastrous. Although Packard didn’t take up industrial waste, he focused in on the fact that American consumerism was quickly evolving into a waste machine.
Although we don’t often think much about it, as the words suggests, “consumerism” is the process of consuming stuff and eventually discarding what we have consumed as waste. Packard drew attention to the fact that Americans were increasingly being encouraged to both consume more stuff and to discard it more quickly.
Born in 1914, Packard matured during America’s Great Depression. Hence, “normal” to him meant consuming something as completely as possible before discarding it. A jacket, for example, might be worn for many years, even though it would become frayed and need assorted repairs along the way. However, the “new normal” of 1950s consumerism meant that we would keep a jacket a fraction of that time, discarding it as soon as it went out of fashion – which the industry that produced it made sure that it quickly did. If you look carefully, you can see the early roots of fast fashion here.
While the garment industry arguably pioneered this model of discarding what is entirely usable but no longer fashionable – which is why we call it the “fashion” industry – Packard drew attention to the fact that all sorts of additional industries were jumping on the fashion bandwagon.
The automobile was a prime example. The ubiquitous car that Packard grew up with, Henry Ford’s Model T, famously came in just one color (actually, that’s a lie marketed by Ford, but that’s neither here nor there) and didn’t significantly changed much over it’s 20-year production history. In contrast, taking its cue from the fashion industry, in the 1950s automobile mobile manufacturers were significantly changing cars every two or three years in a successful effort to sell more and more cars – and in the process create more and more waste.
But is this as bad as it sounds? Aren’t the needs of individuals and corporations arguably both served when they provide us with stuff? The problem is that time and time again corporations have chosen their needs over those of consumers, often with a horrific results. Let’s look at an example.
Since the 1920s, scientists have known that there was a link between smoking cigarettes and cancer. By the early 1950s, the American public was alerted to the problem through series of articles entitled “Cancer by the Carton” in the Reader’s Digest, which was an incredibly popular magazine at the time. By the end of the 1960s, all cigarettes sold in the United States were required to have a prominent label informing consumers that “Cigarette smoking can cause lung cancer and heart diseases.”
Knowing that they were selling a poisonous substance that was, moreover, addictive, what did the tobacco industry do? Did they, horrified at what they had done, apologize to the public and immediately stop? To the contrary, they doubled down, denied the science, and did everything they could to continue profiting from extraordinary human suffering for as many decades as possible. Even today, when a successful campaign has significantly reduced cigarette smoking in the United States over the past few decades, even today half a million people in the U.S. die every year from smoking. Smokers, on average, die ten years sooner than nonsmokers. (source)
But, wait, it gets worse. In 1987 – 35 yers after the articles on “Cancer by the Carton” made Americas aware that cigarettes killed – the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company launched its Joe Camel advertising campaign for its for Camel cigarette brand. Four years later, an article in the Journal of the AMA (American Medical Association) revealed that this cartoon camel had become nearly as recognizable to six-year-old children as Mickey Mouse. One third of all cigarettes illegally sold to minors by this time were – you guessed it – Camels.
Astonishingly, the tobacco industry got into the business of making consumers out of children. As unbelievable as it may sound, the goal was to addict them to a poisonous substance that would take 10 years off their lives – all in order to keep profits up.
Are all corporations as evil as the tobacco industry? No, of course not. Nonetheless, this is in instructive example, as it reveals that, unchecked, corporations have been willing to do extraordinary things in the name of profit. Even knowingly kill people, by the millions.
As the publisher of The Waste Makers notes, it was “An exposé of ‘the systematic attempt of business to make us [into][ wasteful, debt-ridden, permanently discontented individuals’…[and]…how the rapid growth of disposable consumer goods was degrading the environmental, financial, and spiritual character of American society.”
I am curious what you make of The Waste Makers. In particular, what do you think of the various types of planned obsolescence that he outlines? He also weighs in on an issue that I took up in discussing the film The True Cost: just who is responsible for out obsession with consumer stuff that is wreaking havoc on our planet? Is it us consumers? Or is it the companies that manufacture all this stuff?
Incidentally, Packard continued writing books for some time. Like The Waste Makers, his last book, published in 1989, is arguably as timely today as it was then: The Ultra Rich: How Much Is Too Much?
As usual, I will select a number of your comments and respond to them in a future episode.
Project Drawdown Watch video
Ok, let’s say that we get serious about not only stopping the rise of global greenhouse (GHG) gasses, but getting to the point where these emissions are actually declining. How do we even begin such an undertaking? Specifically. what do we need to do? Install more wind turbines? More solar?
There are two ways of approaching this problem, one personal, one global. Let’s start on a personal level, as we hear all sorts of solutions bandied about, from switching lightbulbs to unplugging our phone chargers.
In his book Sustainable Energy — without the hot air, the late David MacKay drew attention to the fact that the BBC News noted that “[t]he nuclear power stations will all be switched off in a few years. How can we keep Britain’s lights on? … unplug your mobile-phone charger when it’s not in use.” This is certainly a good thing to do, but, as MacKay aptly notes,
Obsessively switching off the phone-charger is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon. Do switch it off, but please be aware how tiny a gesture it is. Let me put it this way: All the energy saved in switching off your charger for one day is used up in one second of car-driving.
So what then are the big offenders in terms of our individual climate footprints?
A few years ago the ever-reliable Union of Concerned Scientists put together a concise article on the subject that, among other things, explained where our primary personal emissions come.
1) Transportation. For the average American, owning and driving an automobile accounts for around a quarter of our individual climate footprints.
2) Housing can account for another quarter of your climate footprint, especially if you live in a large suburban or rural home. The main problems are heating, cooling, and home energy use.
3) The production of our food also is responsible for an extraordinary greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.
As I noted in a previous lecture, if you just addressed these issues (by getting rid of your car, living in efficient housing, and eating a largely plant-based diet and wasting less food), as well as reconsider your relationship to stuff, you could likely cut you climate footprint in half, perhaps even a good deal more.
Alternately, we can approach this issue globally rather than personally. Project Drawdown, which is arguably the “most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming,” considered and ranked the “100 most substantive solutions to global warming.” If enacted, these solutions could not only halt the rise of GHGs, but actually drawdown these emissions.
While all of these solutions are needed, the top 25 are particularly noteworthy, especially as, taken together, the top three solutions would do more to drawdown global GHG emissions than the bottom 75 combined.
What is perhaps surprising is that many things that we might imagine would be in the top 25 are absent and, alternately, some that we may have never heard of top the list.
For example, we are often told that switching to energy-efficient lighting in our houses can make a meaningful difference in the climate crisis. While doing so is certainly important and can indeed make a difference, its relative importance needs to be taken into account, as globally reducing food waste can have nearly ten times the impact of switching to LED lightbulbs residentially. Hence, perhaps not surprisingly, this lightbulb switch does not even enter the top 25 most important changes, while reducing food waste is number three.
Similarly, even though electric vehicles have taken on an iconic, almost savior-like status as a solution to the climate crisis, they are also not among the top-25 solutions, while the #1 solution, eliminating the use of Hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) in refrigerant and air conditioning systems, is rarely mentioned in the press – especially when compared to electric vehicles.
If we combine and consider together related solutions that are near the top of the list, they clearly then lead the list. Perhaps surprisingly, the #1 thing that we can do to roll back global greenhouse gas emissions does not involve wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, or any sort of similar technologies.
Instead, when taken together, wasting less food and eating a largely plant-based diet (#3 & 4 on the list) is bigger than anything else on the list, including wind or solar. Food production is the second largest producer of greenhouse gases on the planet. Yet, we waste between 1/3 and 1/2 of the food that we produce. For Americans, much of this happens at the consumer level.
I know, this shift in diet doesn’t sound nearly as glamorous as a self driving electric car, but it would nonetheless be ten times better for the planet.
Similarly, combining and considering together the education of girls family planning, would bring them to #2 together. Simply put, we need to educate more girls and women (which dramatically curbs population growth, as the more education a woman has, the fewer children she has) and promote family planning (globally, there are roughly 85 million unintended pregnancies every year). These two things together would roll back 103 gigatons of GHG emissions.
This is not to say that we should place responsibility for this particular issue with girls and women. To the contrary, the responsibility lies with the institutions that restrict a woman’s access to education and control of her own body. And too, it is obviously the case that contraception is a male responsibility as well.
Why is population so important? Sixty years ago, the global population was about 3 billion. At the time of this recording, it is 7.75 billion. By 2050 it will be approaching 10 billion. The simple fact is that this many people are profoundly taxing the resources of our planet. Hence, reducing the population of our species is one of the main things that we can do to mitigate the climate crisis.
Taken together, these two cultural changes alone can take us nearly a quarter of the way to where we need to go to get GHG emissions under control. Note that very little is needed by way of technology here, as the necessary changes can be made right now by both individuals and a range of groups and institutions.
Note also that quite a few of the suggestions made by Project Drawdown involve land use, relating to tropical forests, silvopasture, regenerative agriculture, temperate forest, peatlands, and so forth. In fact, eleven of the top 25 things that we can do to draw down emissions involve land use of one sort or another.
Interestingly, nine of these eleven issues related to land use also involve food production. Hence, eleven of the things that we can do to draw down emissions involve food, if we add to this list reducing food waste and switching to largely plant-based diets.
Nonetheless, while land use and food production dominate the top 25 “solutions” suggested by Project Drawdown, all-in-all, a diverse group of actions are required to draw down GHG emissions.
I am curious what you make of this compelling list of solutions to the climate crisis.
After all, this is what many, many people have been asking for: a roadmap to globally reducing our greenhouse gas emissions.
Social justice, environmental justice, climate justice, and the injustice of it all Watch video
Let’s do something different today.
Since this week’s short films are on the Green New Deal, it would be pretty redundant if I made two videos on the Green New Deal.
So, let’s take up the climate crisis and justice, which are in ways related to the Green New Deal.
As I have repeatedly noted (you’re probably tired of hearing me say it!), this course focuses on the sort of cultural changes that we need to make in response to the climate crisis. While, as I noted in a previous video, personal actions (like switching to largely plant-based diets and away from flying and automobiles) are absolutely essential, we need to do more.
We need to collectively address this problem. Although the climate crisis is obviously a global problem, different parts of the world (i.e different countries) have their own individual challenges with respect to the crisis.
In some, like the U.S., the challenge is to reel in our environmentally disastrous lifestyle. Economically, this means that we arguably need to enter into a period of degrowth, where we work out how to live rich and meaningful lives while reducing our population and economy – and in the process emitting far fewer greenhouse gases.
Alternately, in the developing world, the challenge is how to raise the quality of life for everyone, so that everyone there can also live rich and meaningful lives, while not raising greenhouse gas emissions to unacceptable levels in the process – which is, sadly, exactly what the U.S. and the developed world did.
Because every country is facing somewhat different problems, the Paris Agreement signed at the COP21 in 2015, left decisions on climate action up to individuals countries.
In some cases, these climate actions may be related, as countries in the developed and developing worlds will both will need to rely on renewable energy sources like wind and solar.
However, in the developed world, part of the challenge will be to use far less energy than we currently are using. In the developing world, by contrast, the challenge will be to use more energy – such as by electrifying villages across the planet – but to do so responsibly and sustainably.
Simply put, the developed world needs to enter into a period of degrowth; the developing world, sustainable, responsible growth. In both cases, this will involve profound cultural change.
Because this is a course taught in the U.S., it has addressed a range of what might fairly be called “first-world” problems. To much of the world, these may well seem absurd.
For example, this course has considered reducing our meat consumption, which is hardly a problem for places like Bangladesh, where the per capita meat consumption is 4 pounds per year (compared to 265 pounds per year in the U.S.). To put that in perspective, people in American not only eat more meat than people in Bangladesh, we eat 6,600% more meat.
I know, it is difficult to even imagine such a huge difference, especially when it comes to food. Nonetheless, the U.S. has an obesity epidemic, which impacts 40% of Americans, while one in ten people across the globe experience chronic hunger daily. Returning to the example of Bangladesh, approximately 40 million people are close to starvation there and “40% of the country falls under three categories: hunger, starvation and chronic hunger.”
We have also taken up the issue of air travel. In the U.S. there are 2.5 flights per person per year. While not everyone is taking this many flights, as a country we obviously fly quite a bit, with frequent flyers flying a great deal. In contrast, in Bangladesh just 1 in 55 people fly every year.
If you had trouble wrapping your head around the fact that the average person in American eats 6,600% more meat than the average person in Bangladesh, the difference with air travel is even harder to imagine: as the per capita air-travel in the U.S. is 14,000% greater than in Bangladesh.
Finally, we have also taken up car ownership, which is hardly a problem in a country like Bangladesh, where only four people in a thousand own a car. In contrast, in the U.S. 838 people in a thousand have cars. The difference here is even more mind boggling, as per capita automobile ownership in the U.S. is 21,000% greater than in Bangladesh.
Recall from the documentary The True Cost that Bangladesh is where the Rana Plaza disaster happened. In case the film left you wondering why people would take jobs in such horrible conditions for such low salary, if one out of four of your friends was starving, it would probably be quite an incentive to take any job on offer.
All this brings us to the questions of social justice, environmental justice, and climate justice, which are all interrelated.
The horrific conditions under which people are forced to work in Bangladesh is an example of a “social-justice” problem.
The environmental damage done to the places by, for example, factories that pollute there, (which we often call point-source pollution) is an example of “environmental justice.” The phrase is a little confusing, as we really are talking about injustice here, which includes the facts that these factories are frequently located in areas where people are generally quite poor. Bangladesh is an obvious example: as poverty there is so great that the people have little choice but to take any sort of development, even if it destroys their local environment.
“Climate justice” looks to how global climate change impacts people across the globe, with the poor being impacted the most. For example, by flooding related to sea-level rise. “Each year in Bangladesh …10,000…square miles…(around 18% of the country) is flooded, killing over 5,000 people and destroying more than seven million homes.” Let me just repeat that: this many people, 5000, are killed and this many homes, seven million, are destroyed each and every year. “During severe floods the affected area may exceed 75% of the country” of Bangladesh. The last time that this happened, “30 million people were made homeless.”
There is an extraordinary, deadly gulf between the wealthiest and poorest people on earth. It not only impacts our planet’s poor directly through things like working conditions, it also does so indirectly through the contamination of their countries, such as Bangladesh.
Climate justice also comes into relief here, as wealthy counties are far better equipt to protect their people from its impacts.
Take the Thomas Fire, which I have previously mentioned and which came pretty close to my house in December of 2018. At one point, 8,500 firefighters mobilized to fight it. And then there was the firefighting equipment, including aircraft from across the nation and nearly 300 fire engines from eight nearby states. All told, it cost hundreds of millions of dollars to fight this wildfire.
I am, of course, profoundly grateful for all this, especially for the firefighters who risked their lives putting out this fire.
But how many other countries could have afford to mount a response like this? How many would even have the equipment on hand to mobilize?
In other words, if I lived pretty much anywhere in the developing world, during the Thomas Fire my little old wooden house would have burned to the ground along with all my possessions – and the rest of my town. Perhaps my family and I would have survived, perhaps not.
This is an example of climate justice – or more accurately, climate injustice.
In part because my country put 25% of all greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere, we now have the wealth to protect ourselves from the devastation that the climate crisis is already bringing to our planet.
On the other hand, the 30 million people made homeless by the last great flood in Bangladesh, have no such protection.
Incidentally, in 2018 the Trump administration slashed funding to Bangladesh to two thirds the level of the previous administration. The slash was even greater with respect to the health sector, where funding was reduced to less than half by the Trump administration.
So, what can be done regarding all this?
Yes, we can buy fewer clothes, but what about the social, environmental, and climate justice issues in places like Bangladesh?
The Green New Deal – which I think is absolutely necessary – is primarily focused on the U.S. economy. But what responsibility does the U.S. have to the rest of the world, to places like Bangladesh?
Specifically, as a trading partner – and in terms of social justice – what responsibility do we have to mitigate the sort of cultural problems that led to the Rana Plaza disaster?
Regarding environmental justice, should we play a role in making sure that countries like Bangladesh have strong environmental laws – which would prevent the production of stuff for the U.S. and the rest of the world from destroying the environment of Bangladesh?
Finally, with respect to the climate crisis, should we help Bangladesh when they suffer the consequences of it?
Communicating the Climate Crisis: vegans and freegans, vegetarians and climatarians Watch video
So, in addition to personal action (i.e. lifestyle changes), climate activism, and becoming politically active, today I would like to talk about yet another thing that we can each do to intervene in the climate crisis: communicate.
The reading for this week is the chapter by Professor Richard Somerville on “Communicating Climate Change Science” (Chapter 8) from the book Bending the Curve: Climate Change Solutions, which is, incidentally, a University of California publication.
As the Overview to the chapter notes, in it you “meet ‘Uncle Pete,’ a fictional character closely based on fact. Uncle Pete does not accept climate change science. Many people know a real person who strongly resembles Uncle Pete.”
The chapter thus seeks to prepare you for encounters for your own “Uncle Pete” – and similar skeptics that you may have already met.
Since the article takes up the formidable challenge of communicating the reality of the climate crisis to skeptics, in today’s talk I would like to consider a related but in many ways very different challenge: how to communicate action to people who are not skeptics, like your friends.
If you are like me, many of your friends are already convinced of the reality of the climate crisis, as we often surrounded, for a variety of reasons, by people who see such issues similarly.
Hence, it may well be the case that what interests your friends most is knowing what can be done about the climate crisis. More to the point, what they can do about it.
While such people are very different from Somerville’s “Uncle Pete,” they offer a very real opportunity for communication, though of a very different sort. Moreover, many of the things that Somerville underscores, like preparation, stories, metaphors, and language, can also help you communicate with your friends and family.
So, exactly how does one open up a space for such communication?
Even though it sounds paradoxical, I would argue that the best thing is to not initiate talking about the climate crisis, let alone initiate talking about your personal actions.
In a book on mindfulness mediation, Jon Kabat-Zinn nicely suggests the same regarding meditation “Every time you get a strong impulse to talk about meditation and how wonderful it is, or how hard it is, or what it’s doing for you these days, or what it’s not, or you want to convince someone else how wonderful it would be for them, just look at it as more thinking and go meditate some more. The impulse will pass and everybody will be better off – especially you.”
We’ve all had friends who became enthusiastic about something and then immediately began to talk ears off about it. This is, unfortunately, not a very successful way to spur people to action.
So, when is the best time to communicate new ideas? In general, I wouldn’t decide this for others, but leave it to your friends to tell you when they are ready to hear about it.
Allow me to give a few examples.
Up until relatively recently, I was a pretty hardcore vegan for five years straight. Before that I was a vegetarian. Before that a pescatarian. Before that, I did not eat a whole lot of animal products.
Whenever I was out to dinner with friends, this sometimes became obvious before I even ordered, as I would often ask the server for information about the food. Consequently, friends frequently asked me about my eating habits. When I replied that I was vegan, that often shut down the conversation.
Why? Well, because people know what being a vegan entails. Hence, for most people there is little need to ask about veganism as a lifestyle.
Moreover, as many people are vegans because of strong ethical convictions, they are often seen as feeling particularly virtuous and morally superior. Mind you that this may well not be the case, but, having been a vegan for years, I can tell you that people often assume that this how you feel – and how you feel about them, and their moral decisions (i.e. what they imagine that you perceive as their moral failure).
Consequently, experience has taught me that announcing that you are vegan can not only pretty much shut down all conversation on the subject, but can make for an uncomfortable meal for all involved.
How, then, does one go about communicating the importance of diet with respect to the climate crisis?
Here’s my approach to such communication. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it has generally been working for me. It is certainly better than announcing to the world that I was vegan.
When asked about my dinner choices, I generally reply that, while I have been pescatarian, vegetarian, and vegan, I now largely think of myself as a “climatarian,” though I admit to being intrigued by friends who are “freegans.”
As you might imagine, people almost always immediately ask “What’s a climatarian?” “What’s a freegan?” Instead of shutting down conversation (i.e. communication), as the label “vegan” risks, these words initiate it.
So, I explain that a climatarian is a way of eating, like the similarly sounding “vegetarian.” A relatively new term, as it was coined in 2015, it denotes someone who eats with the climate in mind. For example, a climatarian would choose a turkey burger over a beef one, as 2.5 times more greenhouse gases are emitted in producing a pound of beef than a pound of turkey.
Of course, eating a pound of lentils is far better than either a pound of turkey or beef, as the beef requires – astonishingly, as I noted in another talk – the release of 30 time more greenhouse gas than the lentils. However – and this is an important point to communicate – not all climatarians are purists. The main thing is to try, as much as possible, to be aware of the climate impact of the food that you eat, and to act on this knowledge the best that you can.
But is this enough? Shouldn’t we all be eating a largely plant-based diet and forgoing turkey along with beef? Yes, that is true, but we are not only talking about bringing about greater awareness here (i.e. communication), but starting people on a path.
Because becoming a vegan can entail radical lifestyle changes and the notion of being vegan carries with it a great deal of cultural baggage – and, let’s be honest, much of it negative in the eyes of the carnist public – it risks being seem like an alien, far-off shore.
Climatarianism, by contrast, can be seen as a bridge to that other shore – a welcoming bridge that anyone can step out on to, at any time.
For example, on hearing about climatarianism, people often ask me, if we are at a restaurant, to walk through the menu in our hands to compare the relative climate impact of the food on offer. As a consequence, more than once my dinner companions have chosen more climate friendly options right then and there. As with the example of beef and turkey, people are often surprised that one tasty menu item can sometimes have half the climate impact of a similar option.
Of course, Somerville’s advice regarding preparation is worth repeating, as researching the relative climate impacts of different foods in advance is necessary here. However, this is the sort of knowledge that we all need to acquire if we want to eat with the climate in mind.
In any event, a single meal can thus result in someone not only learning about the relative climate impact of different foods, but also result in them acting on that knowledge, on the spot.
Yes, it would be great if telling people that you are vegan could instantly result in them swearing off of animal products, but, in my experience, this can completely backfire and have the opposite effect.
Climatarianism, however, offers them a new way of thinking about food choices – and, for many people, thinking about the climate impact of their food choices is indeed entirely new. If everyone were to think this way, it could have profound climate impact.
Climatarianism is fundamentally different from veganism insofar as it does nor present people with an either/or choice of either animal products or not. You’re not telling people to stop eating that pizza, but maybe to decide to get one covered with veggies rather than three different kinds of meat.
In terms of overall climate impact, it would be better if most Americans cut their climate footprint from food in half with choices like turkey over beef then if just 5 or 10% of the population switched to largely plant-based diets.
And, who knows, perhaps climatarianism will serve as a bridge to veganism for some people, as it offers them the first tentative steps in that direction, even though it my take years – as it did for me, as I went from being pescatarian to vegetarian to vegan.
As with “climatarian,” just the mention of the word “freegan” opens the door to climate communication – and perhaps action.
Since many people have never even heard the word “freegan,” it is a wonderful opportunity to explain that, while eating a largely plant-based diet can have profound climate consequences, wasting less food can have an even greater impact. It has been my experience that most people are truly startled by this fact.
Incidentally, as Wikipedia concisely notes, “Freeganism is often presented as synonymous with “dumpster diving” for discarded food, although freegans are distinguished by their association with an anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist ideology.”
It’s true that some people are pretty hardcore freegans. For example, Peter Kalmus, who is a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, collects food to eat that has been put out by his local supermarket because it is past its expiration dates.
On the other hand, as with being climatarian, being freegan is pretty flexible.
For example, if we are at a restaurant, we can take home everything that we order – and actually eat it at some point. When at home, we can prepare sensibly-sized portions and eat everything on our plate. Similarly, we can work at being freegan when we cook as much of what we have purchased as we can – such as leafy beet tops, as well as the root.
True, we have not dumpster dived for our meal, but we have eaten food that otherwise have likely wound up in landfill.
In other words, as with climatarianism, freeganism is not an either/or lifestyle choice like veganism. Instead, anyone can make freegan decisions throughout the day.
Communicating through your actions can be a very effective form of climate activism. It at once underscores that you really care about this issue (rather than just give it lip service) and that anyone can do the same, even if doing so just involves ordering a turkey burger.
After all, to get anywhere you need to make a first step.
Such communication can happen in all sorts of ways. People are always asking me about my electric bike, as they are truly curious about just what is. It is even the case that, noticing that I have a limited wardrobe (OK, noticing that I wear the same clothes a lot), people sometimes find polite ways of asking if I am a minimalist, which is, in fact, something that I work at being.
In fact, I get asked about lots of things: being an urban farmer, living in a small (though not tiny) house, swearing off flying, having only one child, climate activism, my meditation practice, and so forth. I do not advertise any of these lifestyle choices, but rather wait until people want – and are themselves ready – to hear about them.
When they are finally ready, people often come to me with scores of questions, as they really want to learn about sometime like urban farming or meditation.
This communication strategy also leverages personal climate action. Not only do these actions have direct impact on the crisis, but they encourage others to act as well, as they underscore how seriously you take this crisis – and that you are willing to “walk the talk,” as they say.
Such personal actions also underscore an often ignored truism: Before you can change the world, you need to change yourself. Otherwise, to be honest, you may well cause more trouble than good. To again echo that injunction often attributed to Gandhi, “Be the change you want to see you in the world.”
In any event, I am curious to both hear what you think about Somerville’s advice on how to talk to “Uncle Pete” about the climate crisis, as well as ways of communicating with concerned friends and family who want to do something about this crisis, but are not quire sure just how to go about it.
Drawing down greenhouse gas emissions by being the change
You may be wondering why I included Peter Kalmus twice in this course, first in the documentary on Being the Change and now in the book of the same title upon which the film is based.
In fact, I find this week’s reading to be more akin to Project Drawdown than the documentary on Kalmus.
Project Drawdown gave us a glimpse the big picture, what we need to do to globally bring down greenhouse emissions. However, as someone in our class aptly noted, “Most of the solutions…are not things that I can do personally right now. I cannot switch to wind power, solar power, or nuclear power when I am currently living on campus. I also cannot implement agricultural practices or improve my rice cultivation methods.”
In contrast, Peter Kalmus looks at what each of us can do to drawdown our own greenhouse emissions, like bike and eat with the climate in mind.
True, we have been discussing theses things for a number of weeks now, but not through the eyes of a scientist. As a climate scientist, Kalmus is able to do the same sort of calculations that we saw in Project Drawdown, but, in his case, he focuses on the issue in a far more personal way.
For example, he notes that when he went vegetarian 2012, it reduced his greenhouse gas “emissions by about 1,500 kg CO2e per year. ” Going freeganism reduced his “food emissions by an additional 1,000 kg CO2e per year.” As he notes, Kalmus’s vegetarian and freeganism hence reduce his food emissions to 400 CO2e per year, which is .4 metric tons. Since he also “began growing food, [and] trading surpluses with neighbors,” presumably this number is even lower.
What is interesting here is that Kalmus is not just calculating what sort of emission reductions are possible, he is actually testing to see if this is possible, let alone rewarding.
He also does a great job of bringing the relative impact of his actions into focus. “My five most effective actions were quitting planes, vegetarianism, bicycling, freeganism, and composting.” In this class we have, of course, talked about cars, planes, and animal products as a problem, but Kalmus not only underscores that these are major issues, he shows how he acted on them and the results.
Kalmus also draws attention to seemingly little things that might escape our attention.For example, “[w]hen we first moved into our house in 2008, there were five pilot lights emitting a whopping 1,600 kg CO2e per year.” This translates into 3527 pounds, or over 1.5 metric tons. Recall that we each should annually be emitting no more than 2 metric tons each.
I am curious which reductions in particular that Kalmus calms and his family took interested or surprised you most. For example, he notes that by switching to using a clothesline they reduced their “household CO2e emissions by 550 kg.” This one little change saves half of a metric tons of CO2 or equivalent gases annually. Note too that there is an incredibly small amount of CO2 embedded in a clothesline, especially when compared to the manufacture of a clothes dryer.
Because he is a climate scientist, Kalmus really likes to backup what he says with cold, hard facts. For example, he that “[t]he average American diet emits 2,900 kg CO2e per year,” which is almost 3 metric tons – and hence can completely blow your individual carbon allotment.
Another eyeopening statistic is that “each dollar spent on new stuff represents roughly 0.5 kg embodied CO2e emissions (counting manufacturing, packaging, and shipping).” As “[t]he average US person spends a little over $6,000 per year on new stuff…average emissions are something like 3,000 kg CO2e,” which translates into three metric tons per American – and hence can also completely blow your individual carbon allotment.
Kalmus also notes that “US landfills emit 1,300 kg [i.e. 1.3 metric tons] CO2e per person per year. Let this sink in for a moment: our society has reached a point where even one person’s trash, taken by itself, generates more CO2e than the average Bangladeshi generates for everything.”
While you might expect Kalmus to focus solely on personal actions, his chapter on “Collective Action” reveals that he has more holistic view of the situation.
For example, he succinctly notes that “Global warming is a market failure. Burning fossil fuels imposes huge costs on society that aren’t included in the price of the fuels, primarily by causing global warming and respiratory illness. It’s crucial to fix this market failure because few of us will voluntarily stop burning fossil fuels in a society that still strongly rewards this behavior.”
As Kalmus notes, he takes up the the question of activism, in order to “balance” his focus on personal action: “In this chapter, I’ve presented my opinions as a human, not as a scientist. Although my job is to do science, as a human I have as much right to respectfully express my opinions as anyone else. I’ve done so here in order to balance my emphasis on individual action and emissions reduction elsewhere in the book
I am interested to hear what you make of both Peter Kalmus’s approach to the climate crisis through personal action, as well as his underscoring the need for activism.
California’s Folsom Lake Reservoir During the 2011-17 Drought
Top Ten Environmental Films (and some bonus suggestions)
Films, Introduction. Watch video.
While I am a specialist in the written word, I really like films. Don’t get me wrong, a writer can be incredibly expressive, but a picture – and in some cases, even better, moving pictures – add something entirely new to the equation.
Consequently, even though I am not a fan of listicles, I have put together a list of my top ten environmental films, along with alternative or supplemental suggestions for most of them. And, for good measure, I have thrown in a quick list of ten more films that you might find interesting.
In a variety of different ways, these films all take up the climate crisis.
Some take up the job of introducing the sheer breath of the problem, while others focus in on specific aspects of the crisis. Some lay out the problem, while others offer up solutions. Some take a somewhat detached stance, while others are far more personal, introducing us to the people who are rolling up their sleeves and doing something about the crisis. In some cases, these people have made radical changes to their lives.
Not all these films are perfect. Some even have major flaws, like Cowspiracy, which greatly exaggerates the impact that a switch to largely plant-based diets could make. Why, then, recommend such a film? Every one of these films made me stop and think – and taught me something new.
Just watching these films will likely give you better understanding of the climate crisis and what people are doing about it than most Americans have. This is not to say that it would not be useful supplement screening these films with a range of complementary readings. Consequently, I also have created a top-ten list of environmental readings.
Look at it this way, in the same amount of time that it would take to binge watch a single season of a TV show, you can get an interesting window into the climate crisis – and what we can do about it – just by watching these films.
Before the Flood and An Inconvenient Sequel (Films 1) Watch video
“If you could know the truth about the threat of climate change — would you want to know?”
This is the question posed by the National Geographic film Before the Flood, which features Leonardo DiCaprio. It is a great question that throws down the gauntlet to potential viewers, as hitting the pause button would obviously answer with a decided “No” – although, presumably, you would not have even purchased or clicked on the film if you did to what to know the truth.
But what is the truth and, as a filmmaker, how do you present it in about an hour and a half? Keep in mind that we are not taking up how to present one aspect of the climate crisis, such as wildfires or climate migration, but the whole shebang, from the fact that Miami is now flooding on sunny days to the disturbing fact that fossil fuel interests are spending millions of dollars trying to convince the public that the climate isn’t even changing.
The approach that the film takes is interesting and arguably effective. You introduce the audience to a protagonist, DiCaprio, who wants to know the truth about the climate crisis and sets out to find it – in this case, by traveling the world in search of answers. Along the way, he talks with people as diverse as as Barack Obama, Pope Francis, Elon Musk, and Dr Sunita Narain (The Director of India’s Centre for Science and Environment, who really takes the U.S. to task in the film for failing to lead in the crisis).
In a sense, DiCaprio acts as a surrogate for the viewer, who also wants to know the answer to the question with which I opened: “If you could know the truth about the threat of climate change — would you want to know?” If you answer “Yes” by not hitting pause, then buckle in, as you and DiCaprio are embarking on an epic, whirlwind journey. Incidentally, the climate footprint for all this travel and production was, according thot the filmmaker, “offset through a voluntary carbon tax.”
This general approach is, incidentally, used by a range of environmental films, from Gasland to Cowspiracy. In Gasland, Josh Fox’s family receives a letter from a gas company wanting to lease their property to set up a fracking operation on it. Knowing little or nothing about hydraulic fracturing, Fox then sets out on a journey for answers, with you, the viewer, along for the ride. Similarly, in Cowspiracy you and Kip Andersen embark on a quest to learn about the environmental impact of eating animal products. (A little trivia: DiCaprio, who has long been a committed climate activist, was an executive producer of Cowspiracy.)
Are Fox, Andersen, and DiCaprio really as uninformed as their onscreen personas appear? Probably not. Still, what do you think, is this an effective rhetorical device?
In Before the Flood the approach is notably somewhat different. Unlike Josh Fox in Gasland, DiCaprio’s online persona is not professing ignorance of the situation. He hardly can, as early in the film he draws attention to the fact that in 2014 he was appointed as the UN climate ambassador. Still, he acknowledges that, since he is hardly an expert in the climate crisis, he still has much to learn. He then sets out to learn it, with viewer in tow.
In both of his “Inconvenient” films, Al Gore takes an entirely different approach.
Gores 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth was a phenomenon. Although it is not in the top-ten highest grossing documentaries of all time, it is number eleven. Partly on the merit of the film, Gore was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with 1500 scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Gore received half, the scientists split the other half).
A good deal of an An Inconvenient Truth was given to establishing Gore’s credibility. No, he is not a scientist, but he has been working on the climate crisis since the 1970s. He also works with a range of climate scientists. In short, the film hopes to make clear that you should listen to him, as he is presented as the right person to deliver this message. In Gore’s 2017 followup to An Inconvenient Truth, aptly named An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, the filmmaker takes largely the same approach by working to establish Gore as an internationally recognized expert.
In contrast, early on in Before the Flood, DiCaprio wonders if the UN did the right thing in appointing him as their climate ambassador. As he baldy puts it, “I mean to be honest they may have picked the wrong guy.” If you have watched Before the Flood and An Inconvenient Sequel, I am curious to hear what you think about these different approaches.
One of the reasons that the iconic An Inconvenient Truth did not make my list of best environmental films is that a great deal has changed in the fourteen years since its release. For example, while Gore was correct in asserting in the film that climate change played a role in exasperating Hurricane Katrina, the 2005 storm that divested Florida and Louisiana, killing 1,200 people, scientists now have a much clearer understanding of how this works. And, sadly, there have been a rage of horrifying storms since Katrina, like Superstorm Sandy and hurricanes Mathew, Harvey, Irma, Michael, Maria, and Dorian.
An Inconvenient Sequel also takes on the job of introducing viewers to the politics lurking behind all this (which Gore, a former vice president for two terms, is obviously in a position to know a good deal about), including visiting a Texas city with a Republican mayor who firmly believes in renewable energy. The film also introduces the viewer to the COP 21, where the Paris Agreement was signed, by taking us there with Gore. Another little piece of trivia: after its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, an An Inconvenient Sequel was edited to include Donald Trumps’s announcement that he would withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement – along with Gore’s response.
Before the Flood and An Inconvenient Sequel are different films with very different approaches, they both take up the formidable job of communicating the breadth of the climate crisis to viewers in about an hour and a half. I am curious to hear what you think of each – or both, if you have watched each and are thinking about the two of them together.
Fire in Paradise (Films 2) Watch video
So, just what are the consequences of the climate crisis? (Note that I said “are,’ rather than “will be,” as the consequences of the crisis are now, sadly, here – and more are arriving daily.)
The fact is there are many, many consequences appearing across the planet.
The documentary Fire in Paradise looks at just one: wildfires caused by drought conditions exacerbated by the climate crisis. In fact, it looks at just one such fire.
Unlike many of the documentaries that we are watching in this class, this film does not focus on the climate crisis in the sense that it does not survey the problem or offer solutions. To the contrary, while Fire in Paradise does spend some time addressing the climate crisis, the focus is really on the horrific consequence for one Northern California town.
Consequently, if you didn’t first watch this little blurb of mine, you might wonder why I even included this film in a course on the climate crisis. Fair enough.
When the climate crisis entered into the public imagination in the closing quarter of the 20th century, we generally referred to it as “global warming” and saw the potential consequences in these terms. In other words, the big concern was sea level rise. As nearly half of the worlds population lives on or near the coast, sea level rise was rightfully an issue of great concern.
However, for the other half of the worlds population, it was often seen an issue of less immediate concern.
Moreover, it seemed rather far off to many Americans, not only in the sense of being far off in time (decades from now), but also not much of an issue close to home in the United States. The countries that would suffer, like the island nation of the Maldives in South Asia, where are the average ground elevation is just 1.5 meters, seemed far away. And since scientists were predicting a gradual increase in sea level, it seem like we would have time to respond, perhaps by building levees and other infrastructure.
We now know, however, that not only will climate change bring about many more changes than just sea level rise, but that they will come far faster than we imagined and hit close to home – regardless of where your home is on the planet.
Since this course is taking place in California, I thought it appropriate to consider the impact that it is having here, and now.
Four of the five largest wildfires in California history happened in the past decade (the teens).
One of them, the Thomas fire, happened here in Santa Barbara just two years ago. At the time, it was the largest wildfire in California’s recorded history, though it has now been surpassed.
We could approach this from a statistical, scientific perspective. Doing so would reveal that we are in the midst of an ever worsening situation with respect to wildfires in California.
But what does this mean in human terms? As we are approaching the climate crisis from a human, cultural perspective in this class, this is an important question. The documentary Fire in Paradise takes it up.
As it turns out, I can also address this question personally, as the Thomas fire came within almost a mile of my house. At one point, it was spreading at one acre per second, which is absolutely astonishing. The smoke was so bad that I needed to leave town, as I was very concerned for my daughter (and her lungs), as she was a just a toddler of the time. It was an emotional moment when we left, as it was not at all clear that we would have a home to which to return.
Fortunately, our home, as well as the city of Santa Barbara, was spared.
Unfortunately, many people in nearby Montecito also thought that the danger was over, only to be caught in mud and debris flows a month later. Because vegetation had been burned by the Thomas fire, there was no sufficient plant and root structure to deal with an extraordinary (and extraordinarily unusual) weather event, when 1/2” of rain fell in a five-minute period. Because this downpour took place at 3am, many people were not even aware of what was happening. In some places, the debris flow was over 15 feet in height, moving entire boulders with it. Moving at a speed of up to 20 miles an hour, it was impossible to out run. Over 20 people were killed. In some places, the debris flow continued all the way down to the ocean, crossing a major interstate highway (Route 101) in the process. Because it deposited nearly 12 feet of mud, water, and debris on the 101 at some places, it was closed for nearly 2 weeks.
Having burned over 280,000 acres, there had never been anything like the Thomas fire in recorded history in California. However, in just half a year, it would be surpassed by the Ranch fire, which burned nearly a half a million acres.
Astonishingly, Ranch fire would be surpassed in the same year by the Camp fire, which is the subject of the PBS documentary Fire in Paradise. Surpassed not in the sense of burning more acres, which it didn’t, but rather by being the most destructive. In fact, it was the most expensive natural disaster in 2018 – not only in California, but worldwide. In addition, it was the deadliest wildfire in the California history.
The documentary Fire in Paradise puts a human face on the climate crisis, which will impact all sorts of people across the planet, in all sorts of ways.
Although some people (climate change deniers) would like us to believe that the climate crisis is just scientists wildly speculating on the future, incidents like the Camp fire make clear that the climate crisis is all too real – and that it is here, now. Even in sunny California. Even in incredibly wealthy parts of California, like Montecito, where scores of celebrities have homes.
I am curious to hear what you think – as well as how you feel – about of all this and the documentary Fire in Paradise.
As something of a postscript, as I am writing this (the first week of January in 2020), wildfires are burning across Australia. Currently, over 12 million acres have been burned. Of the 20 largest wildfires in California history, 15 took place in the 21st century. The fires burning in Australia are four times as big as all these 15 wildfires combined.
Let me repeat that, four times as big as 15 of the largest wildfires in California history, combined.
A Climate of Doubt and Merchants Of Doubt (Films 3) Watch video
A great battle is underway. Millions of lives hang in the balance. Hundreds of people millions risk becoming refuges in what may well be the greatest diaspora in human history. The world economy may teeter; entire nations disappear. As in all wars, animals and plants will also suffer; tens of thousands of species will become extinct. No place on the face of the globe will be left untouched, from the upper limits of the atmosphere to the deepest ocean floors.
What will cause all this? Climate change brought about by a range of human practices. To mitigate as best we can the above and a great many more consequences, we need, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other experts, to limit global warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit). To do this, something like 88% of the earth’s coal reserves, 35% of its oil, and 52% of its natural gas must remain in the ground, unextracted.
The problem is that these resources are of enormous economic value. Some of the wealthiest companies on the planet are in the fossil fuel business. For the most part, they primarily measure their worth not in terms of money in the bank, but rather by the value of unextracted fossil fuels that they control.
If we mandated that the above percentages of these resources remained in the ground, it would staggeringly reduce the values of these companies. Imagine having $100 in the bank and being faced with the prospect that 88% of it could never be taken out. For all practical purposes, you would now have $12, not $100. You would not likely be pleased. Not surprisingly, these companies are not at all happy.
Consequently, these companies have doubled down and are now fighting for their financial interests, rather than those of the planet and its life, including human beings. When I said that a great battle was currently underway, this is what I meant: a battle between the fossil fuel industry and its many affiliates and champions (such as politicians who it funds) and, on the opposing side, a range of individuals who want to act quickly and decisively to mitigate the climate crisis, thereby keeping the earth as welcoming and habitable as possible for human and a range of beings with which we share the planet.
Have you ever wondered how climate change became such a political issue, such a battleground, in America? Like everything else, this has a history. While we can see it as a long history spanning decades, the last dozen or so years has been incredibly important.
The documentaries A Climate of Doubt and Merchants of Doubt both take up this history, though in somewhat different ways.
A Climate of Doubt, which is a PBS Frontline documentary, chronicles a decisive moment in American history when the politicalization of climate change came to a head. Although the film is now eight years old, it is of historical interest, as it chronicles when the tide began to turn in favor of fossil fuel interests.
While you might have been under the impression that this sea-change took place with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, the situation really goes back a few years further.
Here is how the filmmakers described their documentary in 2012:
Four years ago, climate change was hot. Politicians from both parties, pressed by an anxious public, seemed poised to act. But that was then. Today [i.e. 2012], public opinion about the climate issue has cooled, and politicians either ignore the issue or loudly proclaim their skepticism of scientific evidence that human activity is imperiling the planet. What’s behind this reversal? FRONTLINE correspondent John Hockenberry…goes inside the organizations that fought the scientific establishment, environmental groups, and lawmakers to shift the direction of debate on climate issues and redefined the politics of global warming.
But how exactly, is this battle being fought?
At first glance, this may seem to be a battle for scientists to wage with the fossil fuel interests. However, the underlying science is no longer seriously in question. As you may have heard (I mention this fact elsewhere in this series and the paper introducing it has been referenced in the media more than any other on climate change), a 2013 study that looked at roughly 12,000 journal articles dealing with climate change found that 97% of these scientists concluded that it is real, underway, and is principally anthropogenic.
Instead, this is largely – as amazing as it may seem – a battle of words. A debate on whether the climate crisis is real or not being staged for the public.
Ultimately, as years pass and the real-world consequences of anthropogenic climate change become impossible to deny, fossil fuel companies and their allies will lose this war. However, each year that they sway public opinion away from the truth regarding climate change and our acting on that knowledge, the more severe will be the consequence, as many more trillions of pounds of fossil fuels will annually be extracted and burned while we wait.
From the point of view of the fossil fuel industry, their goal is to take every last dollar that they possibly can out of the ground before legislation hampers them from doing so. How much will be extracted? Quite a bit depends on this debate over the nature and validly of climate change.
What is fascinating here is that there is no real debate. The thousands of scientists researching this issue have concluded beyond any reasonable doubt (they certainly no longer debate the issue among themselves) that anthropogenic climate change represents a real, pressing, and significant global danger. Nonetheless, a media spectacle is being staged by fossil fuel interests with the goal of influencing public opinion.
Unlike many debates, winning over opinion to one side or the other isn’t necessarily the goal. True, on the one side, scientists would like to convince us that anthropogenic climate change is indeed real, but, as far as climate change deniers are concerned, all that matters is that a broad swath of the public is confused or unsure whether human beings are indeed significantly changing our planet’s climate. In this sense, their goal is to create doubt, as an individual doubting the validity and scope of a problem is unlikely to make sweeping life changes and support the spending of trillions of tax dollars in an attempt to remedy it.
In their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, two historians (Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway) explored how effective campaigns of disinformation were waged by tobacco and fossil fuel interests in order to block government interventions into their industries. Surprisingly, as Merchants of Doubt made clear, these two campaigns used some of the same rogue scientists to build their cases.
In 2014, a documentary of the same name was made of the book. Here is how the filmmakers describe it:
Merchants of Doubt takes audiences on a satirically comedic, yet illuminating ride into the heart of conjuring American spin. Filmmaker Robert Kenner lifts the curtain on a secretive group of highly charismatic, silver-tongued pundits-for-hire who present themselves in the media as scientific authorities – yet have the contrary aim of spreading maximum confusion about well-studied public threats ranging from toxic chemicals to pharmaceuticals to climate change.
I am curious to hear what you thought of either one of the other (or both) of these “doubt” documentaries and the battle underway for the support of the American public.
Minimalism (Films 4) Watch video
One of the films that was in the running that I did not select as one of my top 10 (or top 20) was the 2009 film No Impact Man. There is, however, an interesting scene in the film where the title character, no impact man Colin Beavan, has a discussion with his toddler daughter about consumerism. As he explains to her, a consumer desiring to make environmentally sound purchases is faced with an extraordinary job, as this can require a great deal of research. In an effort to short circuit all this, Beavan suggests simply consuming less, a lot less.
It’s a simple idea. So simple in fact that even a toddler can apparently understand it. In a certain way, it also forms the basis of the response to consumerism known as “minimalism.”
In one sense, minimalism is hardly new, as most human beings throughout history have probably gotten by with the bare minimum, or nearly so, needed for life. Even today, for a broad swath of people across the planet, this is likely still true. But what we were talking about here is voluntary minimalism. Relatively wealthy people who could buy lots of stuff, but choose not to for environmental or other reasons. In that sense, minimalism is a First World solution to a First World problem.
In America, at least as early as the nineteenth century, people began amassing stuff as consumer culture began to build momentum. One of the earliest critics of this phenomenon was Henry David Thoreau who, I think, can rightly be considered one the great grandparents of American minimalism, as he pondered the bare minimum necessary for life – and then acted on what he learned during his relatively short Walden experiment.
In recent years, minimalism has emerged as a cultural movement designed to counter rampant consumerism. Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus, featured in the film Minimalism: A Documentary About the Important Things, are two leading proponents of the minimalist lifestyle. As this film makes clear, one of the interesting aspects of minimalism is that people are not necessarily adopting this lifestyle for environment reasons. As Millburn and Nicodemus explain on their website:
“Minimalism is a tool that can assist you in finding freedom. Freedom from fear. Freedom from worry. Freedom from overwhelm. Freedom from guilt. Freedom from depression. Freedom from the trappings of the consumer culture we’ve built our lives around. Real freedom.”
Many people believe that responding to the climate crisis on a personal level will mean we have to do without quite a bit, which means that we will have to live drab lives of deprivation. What I find intriguing about minimalism is that this group of individuals voluntarily has decided to do without quite a bit because they they believe that this is a better way to live. This was also Thoreau’s message. Intriguingly, after experimenting with a life of minimalism, Thoreau, Millburn, Nicodemus, and many others have all confirmed that this is indeed a better life.
So, is minimalism an important response to the climate crisis? One thing to consider is no impact man Colin Beavan’s assertion that simply consuming less is enough. It would be great if it were, in fact, this simple, However, seemingly similar products and practices can have very different environmental footprints, especially when you consider the energy used to make them, their useful lifespans, this sort of materials of which they are made, the conditions under which they are manufactured, and so forth. Hence, it is not enough to just consume less: we need to make sure that we make the right decisions when we do consume.
Nonetheless, although Minimalism is not an environmental film, per se, living a minimalist lifestyle can have significant environmental impact. I am curious to hear what you think about the film. Is minimalism a viable and meaningful option?
While minimalism is a great start, a number of theorists have been considering the next step. Two such thinkers are Juliet Schor in her book True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction Economy and Tim Kasser in The High Price of Materialism. While both books are well worth reading, New Dream has conveniently put together two short videos that nicely introduce both works.
Incidentally, New Dream, formerly The Center for a New American Dream was, as their website explains, “founded in 1997 by a group of forward-thinking activists and philanthropists who sought to draw greater attention to the links between individual action, social justice, and broader environmental impacts, and between excess materialism and negative impacts on human well-being, including children’s development.”
InTrue Wealth, Schor in many ways takes a minimalist approach. However, minimalism, from Thoreau through to modern minimalists, has largely been a personal choice. Schor considers what if an entire society took up a similar approach by adopting a new economic model, what she calls a “plentitude economy.” The idea is simple, people would work less (maybe a lot less, like in Sweden, where the workweek is 30 hours) and hence have more time for things that would make their lives better and more rewarding, like growing some the their own food and other DIY projects. They would also have far more time for activities that would make them happier.
In short, Schor’s message is that while personal changes (of the minimalist variety, for example) are obviously terrific and absolutely necessary, we also need to think in terms of larger system change, involving the sort of economic and political change that she recommends.
Tim Kasser’s The High Price of Materialism (both the book and the video snippet from New Dream) considers the impact that materialism, in the sense of ramped-up consumerism, has in our lives. It is not a pretty picture, as materialism makes us less happy and more anxious, depressed, and selfish, for a start.
Again, I am curious to hear what you think. Can we maximize minimalism (so to speak) by to building our society and economy on less materialistic values? Would this indeed be better for us and the planet? Could we actually make this happen? In other words, could we get enough people to go along with it to actually re-invent our materialist culture?
As usual, I will select a number of your comments and respond to them in a future episode.
The True Cost (Films 5) Watch video
As the film The True Cost makes clear, in the developed world, we consume an extraordinary amount of stuff. And its not just clothing, but all sorts of stuff. From small stuff like smartphones to big stuff like cars. Incidentally, my country, the United States, arguably leads the world when it comes to consuming all this.
Environmentally, this is a double edge sword, with each side cutting both people and the earth.
First, all this stuff is made of natural resources. A smartphone, for example, is made of dozens and dozens of different materials. Some of them, like the lithium used for the battery, cause significant social and environmental problems through their mining, which directly harms workers (including children working in mines), as well as the environment by contaminating air, land, water, etc.
Second, making stuff requires an enormous amount of energy, which in turn emits greenhouse gases. The manufacturer of an automobile releases at least a dozen tons of carbon dioxide or equivalent gases into the atmosphere. Some luxury SUVs are responsible for three times as much (35 metric tons).
So, just who is responsible for all this? Is it as consumers? Or is it the companies that manufacture all this stuff?
A variety of corporations and their advocates have long argued that we consumers are the problem. After all, they just make what we want. If we didn’t want it, they wouldn’t make it, and there wouldn’t be a problem. So, it sounds simple enough. If we are to believe them, we consumers are to blame.
But are we?
Something to think about is that corporations have long been in the business of making consumers out of ordinary people. Ideally, insatiable, rampant consumers. It sounds a little like The Matrix, but corporations are in the business of making us into the beings that serve them best: consumers. Unfortunately, neither we nor the earth are much served by this enterprise. To the contrary, it can be incredibly detrimental to our species and our planet (as well as all the other species with which we share the earth).
In order to help explain all this, please allow me to repeat a story that I included in my most recent book on Writing a New Environmental Era [and] Moving forward to Nature.
Quite a few years ago, while visiting friends, I noticed that their young daughter, who was six or seven at the time, was watching TV. Glancing over from time to time, it was obvious that the show was geared toward young girls. What caught my attention were the ads. Most were selling what you would expect: toys, sugared breakfast cereals, a local theme park.
One ad, however, was another sort of beast altogether. It was for a major cosmetic corporation, showing models having fun on a Caribbean beach. It repeatedly cut to scenes of them applying makeup, which they were having a frolicsome good time doing. Realizing that this ad was running on a show pitched at young girls, I waited to see how it would end. Were they really trying to sell lipstick to six-year-olds?
As it turns out, they weren’t. The ad was not designed to sell a particular product, but rather to sell a brand that makes a broad range of products. It was really just sixty seconds of young women made happy by cosmetics (well, made happy by a particular brand of cosmetics). So, were they trying to get six-year-olds to switch to their brand of eyeliner? If they really were trying to sell cosmetics to young girls, you would expect that at least some of the models would have been children. Why where there instead just young women onscreen?
After thinking about it, the frightening answer hit me like a ton of bricks. This cosmetic company decided that they needed to make more than just cosmetics. Astonishingly, they had also taken up the business of making consumers.
First, they present girls with images of happy and appealing young women. Next, they cut to the source of the happiness: applying and wearing makeup. There is no suggestion that young girls themselves should be wearing the makeup; instead, it is held up as an essential part of what it is to be a woman.
It may take a decade or more, but by repeatedly and subtly suggesting to girls that the road to womanhood is paved with cosmetics, a generation of consumers is created whose very sense of self (in this case their gendered self) depends on the products on offer. With so much at stake – indeed, the fragile, emerging self-identity of a human being – the desire to have, and fear of being without, the product becomes extraordinarily important, as it is presented as an essential part of a happy and successful adulthood.
Although we may think that industries exist to serve us by providing all sorts of appealing consumer goods like cosmetics, it is arguably the other way around: human beings exist to serve these industries. Human consumption is what empowers them. An enormous amount of care and attention is thus given to fashioning human beings willing to work long hours making disposable income so that these industries can thrive. (It really does sound a little like The Matrix, doesn’t it?)
Today, the project has been profoundly ramped up, as girls and young women are themselves recruited to help create this new generation of consumers. They do so by first cultivating a following on social media. Once a trendsetting young woman has a sufficient number of subscribers on YouTube, she can monetize this achievement by, for example, selling cosmetics on her channel. In this sense, the project comes full circle, as the trendsetter herself was arguably fashioned by the cosmetic industry for this role. Ironically, she may see having been conscripted by the cosmetic industry as a great personal achievement. Maybe it was, as girls and young women are certainly encouraged to look up to individuals of this sort.
Of course, all sorts of industries are in this business and it certainly doesn’t just involve girls and young women.
The film The True Cost shows us the ugly underside of this consumption machine, which is disaster for both us and the planet and especially for the people making our clothes. In terms of clothing, the average American purchases over sixty new items of clothing every year, not including incidentals like socks and underwear. Thus, although we consumers are seemingly the ones that benefit by this, it is the corporations selling all this stuff that really profit. Our job is to buy, briefly wear, and then dispose. And repeat. And repeat. While The True Cost focuses on the fashion industry, this ramped up consumerism impacts all sorts of products.
Incidentally, 150 years ago Henry David Thoreau desperately tried to convince us of the truth about all this when he argued that the goal of the clothing industry was “not that mankind may be well and honestly clad, but, unquestionably, that corporations may be enriched.”
So, at the risk of repeating myself, “just who is responsible for all this? Is it us consumers? Or is it the companies that manufacture all this stuff?” Thoreau certainly thought that industry was principally to blame.
I am curious what people make of all this. Do you agree with Thoreau? Having been given a glimpse inside of the fast fashion industry by The True Cost, what is your response? While this film is about the fashion industry, are other industries now following suit? In other words, in addition to fast fashion, do we now also have things like fast consumer electronics?
The episode of Patriot Act on “The Ugly Truth Of Fast Fashion” provides an interesting supplement to The True Cost. Although it doesn’t shockingly take us inside of the fashion industry, as The True Cost did with the scenes from the Rana Plaza disaster, this Patriot Act episode nonetheless makes, it seems to me, an effective critique of fast fashion. However, what I find particularly interesting here is the format. At one third the length of The True Cost, quite a bit has to be crammed into this episode, yet it does not feel rushed. And, of course, it manages to make us laugh out loud in spite of the horrific subject matter.
To me, this episode of Patriot Act raises an important question: how should we go about informing the public of issues like this? A full length documentary is a traditional – and I would argue nonetheless great – approach, but it is not without its shortcomings, as it may not attract a huge audience. So, should we be experimenting with other ways of getting the message out, like the biting comedy of “Patriot Act”? Any other ideas for spreading the message?
As usual, I will select a number of your comments and respond to them in a future episode.
Cowspiracy or Wasted Watch video
Author Jonathan Safran Foer recently published a book entitled We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast, where he argued that each of us should adopt a plant-based diet if we want to save the planet from catastrophic climate change.
Hence, saving the planet begins when we eat, breakfast and otherwise. Since such a switch could make a significant dent in the climate crisis if adopted by everyone, I definitely applaud this as a step in the right direction and think that is on to something.
According to Project Drawdown, which is the most comprehensive plan ever put forth to reverse global warming (and which is a reading for this course), the #1 thing that we can do to roll back global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions does not involve wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, or any sort of similar technologies.
Instead, what is required is a cultural change regarding food: we need to waste far less of it and to switch to largely plant-rich diets. Doing so will result in a staggering reduction of 137 gigatons of CO2 or equivalent gases.
In comparison to this reduction, globally shifting from fossil fuels to electricity generated by photovoltaic (solar) panels will roll back less than half this amount of emissions. The adoption of electric vehicles? Far less than ten percent. We should, of course, work on exploring a variety of technologies to help reduce our emissions, but it is important to keep their relative impact in perspective.
Worldwide, agriculture is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases, yet between 1/3 and 1/2 of all the food that we produce on this planet is wasted. Regarding the switch to a largely plant-rich diet, the same amount of greenhouse gasses are released in producing one pound of beef as are released in producing thirty pounds of lentils, also a great source of protein.
I know, changing how we eat doesn’t sound nearly as sexy as a self-driving electric car, but it would nonetheless be ten times better for the planet.
This is not to say that these changes will be easy. Indeed, it is arguably far easier to change cars (such as by making them electric) than to change people’s actions. And what and how we eat is deeply personal and often central to our cultural identity.
Nonetheless, we need to seriously roll up our sleeves and address the climate crisis at the breakfast table.
Cowspiracy is a documentary on the environmental impact of eating meat. Here is how the filmmakers describe it:
Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret is a groundbreaking feature-length environmental documentary following intrepid filmmaker Kip Andersen as he uncovers the most destructive industry facing the planet today – and investigates why the world’s leading environmental organizations are too afraid to talk about it.
Animal agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation, water consumption and pollution, is responsible for more greenhouse gases than the transportation industry, and is a primary driver of rainforest destruction, species extinction, habitat loss, topsoil erosion, ocean “dead zones,” and virtually every other environmental ill. Yet it goes on, almost entirely unchallenged.
Please note that filmmaker Kip Andersen gets a few of his facts wrong. Animal products account for about 15% of total greenhouse gas emissions, not over 50%. Nonetheless, it is still a striking, though-provoking film.
By the way, what do you make of the fact that Andersen builds his argument on incorrect facts? Does it help it, by making the situation seem worse than it is? Or undercut it by harming his credibility?
You may already know about the environmental implications of large the plant-based diet, but here is a little fact that may come as something of a surprise: while how we eat (at breakfast and otherwise) can have a real impact on the climate – and the environment more generally – switching to a largely plant-based diet is not the biggest thing that we can do in terms of food.
Instead, we need to waste less food – far less food. This, as Project Drawdown made clear, would have a bigger impact in dealing in climate change than switching to largely plant-based diets.
Hence being freegan can be even more important than being vegan.
Not sure what a “freegan” is? This is hardly surprising, as the word only recently entered the English language. As the venerable Oxford English dictionary notes, a freegan is a “person who eats discarded food, typically collected from the refuse of shops or restaurants, for ethical or ecological reasons.”
I know, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound very appetizing.
But the idea is important, as food markets throw away an enormous amount of food. For example, if one egg in a carton of 12 is broken, supermarkets are required (at least here in the state of California) to discard the entire carton. If they do so with freegans in mind, they might coordinate with local freegans to allow them to pick up this and all sorts of otherwise discarded food, such as those past the sell-by date listed on the package.
Sound like “dumpster diving” and the fringe activity? In many ways it is, but in one of the films that we will be watching, Being the Change, Peter Kalmus, who is a climate scientist at NASA jet propulsion laboratory in Pasadena, notes how he and his family are freegans. Well not mainstream yet, it certainly is gaining momentum.
Wasted! is a documentary on food waste. Here is how the filmmakers describe it:
Wasted! The Story of Food Waste aims to change the way people buy, cook, recycle, and eat food. Through the the eyes of chef-heroes…audiences will see how the world’s most influential chefs make the most of every kind of food, transforming what most people consider scraps into incredible dishes that create a more secure food system. Wasted! exposes the criminality of food waste and how it’s directly contributing to climate change and shows us how each of us can make small changes – all of them delicious – to solve one of the greatest problems of the 21st Century.
Produced by the late celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, Wasted! The Story of Food Waste takes up this issue in interesting ways and considers whether we need to develop new relationships to food.
In my little lecture that asks “Are you an architect of the future,” I take up the issue of food and climate further. But, for now, I am curious to hear what you make of Cowspiracy and Wasted!
The Green New Deal, films Watch video
In a way, the Green New Deal, and the debate over it, pulls into sharp focus much of what we have been considering in this course.
As I have repeatedly suggested, if we are to successfully mitigate the climate crisis, we will need to make sweeping changes to human cultures across the planet – especially the American consumer culture that we have exported nearly everywhere at this point.
In the case of the U.S., this is a big job, as it will require us to rethink the American Dream, at least insofar as we in the U.S. (as well as the rest of the developed world) need to take a long hard look at the aspects of our culture that require the emission of enormous amounts of greenhouse gases.
This fact is not lost on the opponents of the Green New Deal, such as Donald Trump who tweeted, who tweeted that “I think it is very important for the Democrats to press forward with their Green New Deal. It would be great for the so-called ‘Carbon Footprint’ to permanently eliminate all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military – even if no other country would do the same. Brilliant!”
To be clear, the Green New Deal proposed by AOC and her colleagues did not suggest that “all Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military” be “permanently eliminate[d].” Nonetheless, Trump has certainly put together a nice, short list of issues that we need to consider.
We have already taken up the first three, cars, planes, and cows, as largely writing these three things out of our lives would, for quite a few Americans, cut their climate footprints in half – perhaps far more than half if you are a frequent flyer.
And we have also noted that it is imperative that we dramatically reduce fossil fuel extraction, which includes the next two things on Trump’s list: leaving oil and gas in the ground as much as possible.
Finally, some Green Party candidates (not to be confused with the Green New Deal that we are considering) have suggested that we cut military spending in half, in part because the US military is frequently used to protect fossil fuel interests, which was arguably the case with both Gulf Wars, rather than protect our land and people. Hence, they argue, if we stop acting as a global police force for the fossil fuel industry, the U.S. could cut its military spending in half.
(Incidentally, have you ever wondered why the U.S. military has been so active in the Middle East? In recent decades, we have fought two Gulf Wars there, costing billions and billions of taxpayer dollars and where thousands of U.S. lives were lost. Well, 80% of the planet’s proven oil reserves are located in this region of the world. Maybe this is just a coincidence…)
In any event, it is important to note that that the Green New Deal proposed by AOC and others (House Resolution #109 of the 116th Congress) makes no mention, to use Trump’s list, of “Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas & the Military.”
With respect to transportation, for example, the Green New Deal proposes “overhauling transportation systems in the United States…including through investment in (i) zero-emission vehicle infrastructure and manufacturing; (ii) clean, affordable, and accessible public transit; and (iii) high-speed rail.”
Since the wording here is not specific, there is still room for zero-emission cars. Similarly, although the inclusion of high-speed rail seems to be offered up as an alternative (at least in certain instances) to air travel, there is no mention of eliminating planes in the Green New Deal.
Moving down on Trump’s list to “cows,” the Green New Deal proposes “working collaboratively with farmers and ranchers in the United States to remove pollution and greenhouse gas emissions from the agricultural sector as much as is technologically feasible.” As farmers are generally people who raise crops and ranchers raise livestock like horses cows and sheep, the wording here is interesting, as beef and lamb, the two chief problems with respect to methane, or not at all ruled out.
Finally, regarding Trump’s final three issues, “Oil, Gas & the Military,” the Green New Deal proposed by AOC makes no mention of any of these, nor, for that matter, does it reference coal or fossil fuels at all. It also makes no mention of the military.
Why isn’t any of this mentioned when it is obvious that we will need to confront “Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas &…Military” spending to protect fossil fuel interests?
Having not drafted it, I am not exactly sure, but it seems likely to me that, at least in part, the proposal is intentionally vague to avoid the sort of attack that Trump made on it.
Why was Trump eager to discuss these issues and AOC and her colleagues reluctant – especially when these issues will clearly need to be addressed if we are to substantially mitigate the climate crisis?
It seems pretty clear: in drawing attention to them, Trump is hoping to turn public opinion against the Green New Deal, as Americans like beef, cars, air travel, and all the things that fossil fuels give us. Americans also tend to get anxious at the suggestion that we won’t have a strong military to protect us from the rest of the world, as the rest of the world is not always happy with us (often for a variety of pretty good reasons relating to our military acting as an international police force for the fossil fuel industry).
Knowing this in advance, AOC and her colleagues likely pulled all references to “Planes, Cars, Cows, Oil, Gas…the Military” and a range of similar issues, lest public opinion be swayed away from the proposal because Americans tend to like these things.
Nonetheless, as Americans, we could, and arguably should, be doing far more than is even intimated in the Green New Deal.
For example, “One out of every five people around the world without access to power lives in India.” The government of India would, quite reasonably, like to see this situation remedied. One easy solution would be coal, as India is sitting on vast stores of it. However, it would, of course, be a worldwide climate catastrophe if all this coal was dug up and burned in order to generate electricity.
What’s to be done?
As Naomi Klein notes, some people have called for a “Marshall Plan for the Earth,” which would involve the developed world helping the rest of the world, like India, develop sustainably. In practice, this could involve knowledge and technology exchange, as well as loans and funding.
How might this work in practice? If you watched Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Sequel, you might recall that at COP21 Gore was feverishly negotiating with the U.S. company Solar City to license part of their solar technology to India – free of charge, which they quite commendably agreed to do.
Why should be developed world, and the US in particular, go along with this proposal for a Marshall Plan for the Earth? There are a number of reasons, but two stand out:
1) The U.S. “has been the world’s leading economic power since 1871.” Not coincidentally, this corresponds with our developing a massive fossil-fuel economy. Unfortunately for our global climate, this had a byproduct: as I have noted before, 25% of the carbon dioxide put into our planet’s atmosphere by human beings was put there by the U.S. Since we caused so much of this problem, we have a clear – as least as far as I am concerned – moral obligation to help remedy what we have done.
2) Even if we are not moved by the above moral argument, it is in America’s best interest to help the world develop sustainably. Why? If the rest of the world follows our lead and develops by way of fossil fuels, it will be a disaster for the planet. Sooner or later, that coal burned in India will translate into problems for the US, such as coastal flooding, wildfires, extreme weather, etc.
But here is the problem, if just mentioning the fact that we will need to curb our love of beef and cars risks turning the American public against climate action, how do we get Americans to go along with something like a Marshall Plan for the Earth in an era increasingly defined by nationalism, reduced international aid, and closed borders?
This takes us to the root of the problem with climate action. At least climate action in America.
On the one hand, we need to make sweeping changes to our America way of life that will involve cars, planes, cows and a whole lot more. In this sense, the Green New Deal does not go far enough – at the very least it could be far more specific – in outlining just what sort of changes that we will need to make if we hope to get through this crisis, such as a Marshall Plan for the Earth.
On the other hand, just mentioning cultural changes related to beef, cars, and airplanes risks turning Americans away from serious climate action – which is likely why AOC and her colleagues didn’t mention them but Trump did.
To put the issue more simply: while the Green New Deal is the best proposal for climate action that we currently have – and, let me be very, very clear in noting that I certainly endorse it and will vote for it – it is at once not doing enough and at the same time is too much for many Americans to get behind.
I am curious to hear what you make of the Green New Deal, now that you have read the legislation proposing it and watched some short documentaries on it. Is it enough? Or is it too much to endorse? Most importantly, how exactly do we get enough Americans to go along with the Green New Deal to vote it into being?
Being the Change or Tomorrow Watch video
Ok, we have talked quite a bit about what each of us can do about the climate crisis. This has included personal actions, climate activism, becoming political active, communication, etc.
In terms of personal actions, we have talked about largely plant-based diets, food waste, automobile ownership, air travel, a minimalist approach to stuff, and so forth.
But what if you wanted to jump ahead to the endgame? In other words, what if you wanted to actually live a largely sustainable life right now? Would it be possible, here, in America, in California?
To be clear, what we are talking about here is reducing our greenhouse emissions to 1/10 of the average American’s climate footprint.
And would it be possible for more than just an individual? In other words, could a family, let’s say two parents and two children, live this sort of lifestyle in America today?
If so, what kind of life would it be? Could it possibly be a good life? A fulfilling life that made everyone happy?
At one point in the 2009 documentary No Impact Man, the lead character, his partner, and their small daughter are huddled in their dark Manhattan apartment, with seemingly no electricity and only candles for light. Is this what a sustainable future would be like?
Fortunately, there are other options.
The documentary Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution chronicles the life of Peter Kalmus and his family (Kalmus, his partner, and their two children) as they attempt to live sustainable lives.
Incidentally, as Peter Kalmus is a climate scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, he is particularly well position to accurately assess his own climate footprint.
And that footprint, as it turns out, is exceptionally small.
As Kalmus notes in the book of the same name upon which the documentary is based, his personal greenhouse gas emissions are about 1/10 of the average Americans. Specifically, Kalmus’s emissions are about two metric tons annually. You might recall that this is about where we should all be to be in accord with the Paris Agreement from the COP 21.
As Kalmus notes in the book, “[t]his level of reduction, while incomplete, allows my family and me to continue a normal suburban life. This suggests that a similar reduction is well within reach for many of us. And as more people make significant reductions, and systemic alternatives to fossil fuel become increasingly available, going the rest of the way will become easier” (page 145, Kindle location 2561). Kalmus adds that “I still emit nearly twice the average Bangladeshi, and infinitely more than a wild, nonhuman Earthling [ i.e. animals].”
It is interesting to note that this approach comes from a scientist – and a climate scientist at that. Given his background, we might expect that Kalmus would advocate for technological solutions like self driving electric cars and a new generation of solar cells made with nanotechnology, instead he talks about bicycle riding and humanure.
By the way, the title, Being the Change, is a reference to that quote attributed to Gandhi that I keep mentioning: “Be the change you want to see you in the world.” What might being the change be like in this context? Watch the film or read the book.
Here is how the publisher describes the book on which the film is based:
We all want to be happy. Yet as we consume ever more in a frantic bid for happiness, global warming worsens. Alarmed by drastic changes now occurring in the Earth’s climate systems, the author, a climate scientist and suburban father of two, embarked on a journey to change his life and the world. He began by bicycling, growing food, meditating, and making other simple, fulfilling changes. Ultimately, he slashed his climate impact to under a tenth of the US average and became happier in the process.
Being the Change explores the connections between our individual daily actions and our collective predicament. It merges science, spirituality, and practical action to develop a satisfying and appropriate response to global warming….
The core message is deeply optimistic: living without fossil fuels is not only possible, it can be better.
Wait, “living without fossil fuels is not only possible, it can be better?” Really?
We are often told that the climate crisis will mean that we will need to do without a great deal: cars, planes, spacious houses, beef, scores of appealing consumer goods, and so forth. At face value, this sounds like a bland life of deprivation, especially when we think about the people that have all this – people who, as we say, “have it all” – like some people in my generation in the developed world.
Moreover, influencers – the people that we are encouraged to want to be – unabashedly flaunt the fact that they have mountains of this stuff.
Consequently, it may seem that the road to happiness is paved with carbon. Or more accurately, that you need to be responsible for the release of literally tons of carbon per month if you want it all – if you want happiness.
Peter Kalmus, in his own humble way, boldly suggests otherwise. That, in fact, we have it all wrong; this stuff (and our preoccupation with it) will not make us happy. In fact, such preoccupations will likely have the opposite effect.
I know, this runs completely counter to what the companies hourly selling us all this stuff tell us: that having it will make us happy – and not having it will make us miserable. And all those images of contented influencers posing in private jets confirms it.
Not only does Peter Kalmus believe – from personal experience – otherwise, a range of people are now coming to the same conclusion.
The film Tomorrow (Demain) documents the lives and efforts of some of theses people. Here is what the filmmakers have to say about it:
TODAY, we sometimes feel powerless in front of the various crises of our times.
TODAY, we know that answers lie in a wide mobilization of the human race. Over the course of a century, our dream of progress commonly called “the American Dream”, fundamentally changed the way we live and continues to inspire many developing countries. We are now [however] aware of the setbacks and limits of such development policies. We urgently need to focus our efforts on changing our dreams before something irreversible happens to our planet.
TODAY, we need a new direction, objective… A new dream! The documentary Tomorrow sets out to showcase alternative and creative ways of viewing agriculture, economics, energy and education. It offers constructive solutions to act on a local level to make a difference on a global level…
TOMORROW is not just a film, it is the beginning of a movement seeking to encourage local communities around the world to change the way they live for the sake of our planet.
I am curious to hear your thoughts on Being the Change and/or Tomorrow. Is this indeed “the beginning of a movement,” the beginning of a profound change in the way that our species inhabits this planet?
Are we destroying the planet in a misguided pursuit of happiness?
Happy is not an environmental film. Why, then, are we watching it?
Lately I have been thinking about what may well be the greatest irony of the human race. If we do not survive the climate crisis, it will be a sad epitaph for our species.
From even before Plato, thinkers in the West have long pondered what constitutes the “good life.” In the United States, we have been preoccupied with this question ever since we declared ourselves an independent country and made the “pursuit of happiness” one of three “unalienable rights” in our Declaration of Independence.
What now constitutes the “good life” in the U.S.? In other words, how are we pursuing happiness? The American Dream now seems to center on wanting more, wanting bigger, and wanting better. More stuff, bigger houses, better cars, etc.
The problem is that this has not at all made us happy. In fact, in recent decades, Americans have become less and less happy. While this would be a sad irony in itself, the great tragedy is that many of these pursuits are destroying our planet. Americans put nearly a quarter of all greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Indeed, at the same time that Americans have been becoming less happy, we have been pumping more greenhouse gases into our planet’s atmosphere.
What is in many ways even worse is that we are now exporting this environmentally disastrous aspect of the “American way of life” to the rest of the planet. It would be one thing if we were releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere for more noble reasons, such as to ensure that everyone on the planet received enough to eat, but this is all largely unnecessary. Do we each really need sixty or more items of new clothing every year?
In short, we have frenetically and futilely been pursuing happiness at the cost of the planet. As noted above, the great irony is that, as greenhouse gas emissions soared as a result of our pursuit of happiness, our happiness has actually declined.
So, here is my question: Are we indeed destroying our planet in a profoundly misguided pursuit of happiness?
In order to wrestle with this question, let’s look at happiness compared to greenhouse gas emissions for a number of pretty happy countries.
First, it’s true: after many decades of studying depression and unhappiness, a range of scholars, from psychologists to sociologists, have recently turn their attention to happiness, as has the United Nations. The United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network, using Gallup Polling data, released the World Happiness Report in 2019.
The report revealed that United States ranked #19 worldwide in terms of happiness (source). With respect to the climate crisis, we emit about 16 metric tons of CO2 per person (source), which gives us the dubious distinction of being one of the world leaders when it comes to GHG emissions.
Alternately, the five countries with the happiest people on the planet (Finland, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, and the Netherlands) all have individual emissions that are on average about half of the United States, in spite of the fact that they are all in very northern climates and hence use quite a bit of energy just for heating.
In fact, a whopping 81% of Finland’s greenhouse gas emissions comes from the energy sector (source), which is hardly surprising, as the capital of Finland, Helsinki, is further north than the capital of Alaska, which is Juneau. In general, living in a cold climate demands far more energy than living in a warmer one, even if air conditioners are widely used in the later. One study found that living in Minneapolis demanded three-and-a-half times more energy than living in Miami (source).
Living in places that are even further north consumes even more energy. Energy-related carbon dioxide emissions for the average Alaskan are twice as large as the average person in the U.S. (source).
Moving from Finland to the sixth most happy country in the world, Switzerland, average per capita greenhouse gas emissions there are one third of the United States in spite of the fact that it too is not a very warm country (two thirds of Switzerland is in the Alps mountain range).
Number seven on the list of happy countries in Sweden, also a pretty cold place (Sweden’s capital, Stockholm, is also further north than Juneau, Alaska). Nonetheless, their per capita greenhouse omissions are approximately one fourth of the United States.
Let’s pause for a moment on this: the seven countries on the planet with the happiest people, in spite of demanding significantly greater energy use because of their northern locales, have climate footprints that are one half, one third, or one fourth ours.
The climate footprints of happy people can be even smaller if they live in warmer climates. Costa Rica, which ranks number 12 in terms of worldwide happiness (hence Costa Ricans are significantly happier that Americans at number 19) has greenhouse gas emissions that are about one seventh of the United States. That’s right, the average American contributes as much to the climate crisis as seven pretty happy people in Costa Rica.
The example of Costa Rica reveals an interesting element here, as the average American is thirteen times wealthier than the average person in Costa Rica (as measured by mean wealth per adult, source). As our relative climate footprints reveal, we Americans are presumably using quite a bit of this wealth in ways that are damaging the planet.
However, with respect to income, let’s face facts: it is difficult to be happy if you are a very poor. If you are trying to raise a family in the U.S. on an annual income of, say, $40,000, a range of hardships would certainly threaten your happiness. However, studies have found that beyond a certain point, more money does not bring greater happiness. That number may be lower than you would imagine, as these studies revealed that it is around $75,000 in annual income for an individual (source). While this is more than the annual median personal income in the U.S., it is certainly not Kardashian wealth.
Moreover, no one (to my knowledge) has attempted to isolate and remove the influence of the overwhelming marketing bombarding us, which tells us daily (or hourly or even by the minute. especially online) that we need to buy a range of products to be happy.
Let’s return to the example of Costa Rica, as it reveals, simply put, that you don’t need a lot of money to be happy. Nor does a greater happiness necessarily come with, comparatively, a relatively high climate footprint.
Now, let’s return to those very happy but very cold Scandinavian countries. For the most part, their economies and cultures are built on something called the “Nordic model.” While these are, of course, democratic countries, they also very much embrace things like collective bargaining and strong unions. Hence, they are sometimes called “democratic socialist” countries.
Bernie Sanders nicely explains what these countries offer: “So long as we know what democratic socialism is. If we know that in countries, in Scandinavia, like Denmark, Norway, Sweden — they are very democratic countries, obviously, the voter turnout is a lot higher than it is in the United States. In those countries, health care is the right of all people. And in those countries, college education, graduate school is free. In those countries, retirement benefits, child care are stronger than in the United States of America, and in those countries, by and large, government works for ordinary people in the middle class, rather than, as is the case right now in our country (the U.S.), for the billionaire class.” (source)
Even though we might think that happiness is a deeply personal matter, governments have a major role to play in facilitating our “pursuit of happiness.” When they are doing their job responsibly, caring for the wellbeing of their citizens rather than large corporate sponsors, we are likely to be much happier.
But, specifically, how are people in these Scandinavian countries happier and how does this relate to the climate crisis?
Let’s look at Sweden. Recall that the average Swede is considerably happier than the average American even though their climate footprints are one fourth of ours.
The average person in Sweden, who makes almost as much money as the average person in the U.S., works five days a week, six hours a day. That’s right, the average work week is 30 hours. Only a very tiny percentage of people (1%) work more than 50 hours per week. By contrast, 40% of Americans work more than 50 hours per week; half of them work than 60 hours per week (source). Hence, one in five Americans literally works twice as many hours per week as the average Swede.
Everyone in Sweden receives 25 paid vacation days per year, and larger companies typically offer even more. All parents receive 480 days of paid paternity leave to split between them (source). As there are 235 working days per year (52 weeks times 5 day minus 25 vacation days), that’s one year of paternity leave – per parent.
There are, of course, differences between Sweden and the U.S that impact their climate footprints. For example, Sweden currently relies more on nuclear energy than the U.S.
However, over a third of their electricity comes from hydroelectric sources – a whopping three times more than the U.S. (source). In terms of consumption rather than production, we have twice as many cars per person as they do. Our houses are, on average, roughly twice as larger than theirs.
I am not saying that life in Sweden is perfect. There are problems there, like everywhere else.
But just look at the relative climate impact between Sweden and the U.S. Everything else being equal, the average Swede has a carbon footprint that’s a quarter of the average Americans. But everything is not equal, as it is a much colder climate. Americans living in a comparable climate (Alaska) are emitting twice as much carbon dioxide as our nation’s average. Hence, adjusted for their colder climate, the average Swede is may well be emitting something like one eighth of the average American’s greenhouse gas emissions.
Currently, the average person in Sweden is responsible for 4.54 for metric tons of CO2 per year. If, for reasons of argument, we adjusted that for the average American climate, it would then get cut in half, to around 2.25 metric tons of CO2 for American – which would be right around where we need to be to meet the goals of the Paris Accord signed at Cop 21.
Of course, these are back-of-napkin calculations, but people in the developed world can – and do! – not only get by, but live quite well with relatively small climate footprints.
In terms of our current discussion, they can also live happier lives than most Americans.
We are often told that adapting to climate change will mean that we have to live drab of deprivation and require us to do without quite a bit.
However, if we make this sort of changes that we have been looking at in this course, might we come out the other end, decades from now, happier? I will leave you with this question.
Copyright 2020 by Ken Hiltner