We don’t have to do anything about climate change

I mean that in the sense that we don’t have to do anything. I don’t have to write this text and share it, but I’m doing so because the thoughts in it keep bugging me and I have a vain hope they’ll do so less if I write them down and share them.

I keep running into problems though. It is such a very large problem, intertwined with all the moral and ethical quandaries of global human civilization and I’m incapable of not getting bogged down in detail. So here’s my third try of the month. This time in bullet points and less self-criticism:

• The Climate Crisis is very real and has barely started. If the Earth was a car and average temperature the speed, we’d not even be at the point where we’re letting of on the gas, and we’re not sure what the top speed is for where the pedal is now. After 30 years of warnings being watered down by political influence and scientific traditions of caution with uncertain but dire prediction, scientists are speaking up more. Global heating is accelerating, warns scientist who sounded climate alarm in the 80s (The Guardian Nov 2 2023)
• The consequences will be civilization shattering. It is only a question of when. We got a taste of how sensitive supply lines in modern society are to interruptions during the pandemic. Now imagine what will happen when weather gets more extreme, less stable and crop failures more frequent. At some point multiple essential crops will fail at the same time and we will have have global famines and runaway food prices making the current inflation pains pale in comparison. Prices of some basic European foodstuffs keep skyrocketing (ABC news Nov 2 2023)
• Blaming “oil companies” is easy, but they wouldn’t exist if we didn’t buy the products, and the people working in and for them are mostly just making the same decisions we all make to not sacrifice in ways that would affect themselves greatly and the world just diffusely. Oil companies and their employees are replaceable parts in a system that can only change by changes in demand and by changes in policy.
• The issues of the climate crisis are deeply intertwined with global inequality, and our inability to deal with that will have its own consequences for international trade and cooperation. Action to protect against climate crisis ‘woefully inadequate’, UN warns (The Guardian Nov 2 2023)
• Our individual impact is profoundly underexplored, and there are no simple answers to what individuals should and shouldn’t do. Someone living in a place without public transport can’t just give up their car. Someone without great options can’t just quit working for a problematic company. Someone flying a private jet is a much larger burden than an upper middle class average person, but there are many more upper middle class average people, so Elon Musk might be among the worst people alive, but that doesn’t mean your contribution is meaningless. (Elon Musk’s private jet emitted 132 times as much carbon as the average American does in an entire year)
• So here’s my personal list of changes I’ve made:
  • I’ve shifted from “My wife is vegetarian, but I eat meat occasionally” to “I’d rather not buy meat at all”. Poultry and pork rivals some alternative protein sources when measured on protein alone in some studies and some practices in non-meat agriculture are destroying ecosystems, but it is hard to get around the fact that it requires approximately 10x the resources to produce vegetables as it takes producing meat, since 90% goes to running the cow until slaughtering time. So until meat is all produced with grass from marginal pasture unfit for growing human food crops, I’m off the meat. Food and Climate Change: Healthy diets for a healthier planet (UN website )
  • I don’t fly. Living in the US, and living in the US as a Norwegian, this suuuucks. But long distance travel is extremely carbon intensive. A solo road trip of the same length isn’t great either, but for most people those are rarer. If you are an average American, a single transatlantic round trip adds 10% to your carbon emissions for the year, and except for micronations and petro-states, “average American” is the worst carbon emission average in the world.
  • I try not to buy new things or replace things that aren’t fundamentally broken. Fashion, home renovation and upgrading appliances that aren’t broken is a large part of our climate impact.
  • I only have one car. It’s a hybrid. I commute by bike or bus when possible, but much of the US is terrible for doing day to day activities without a car. It wouldn’t be impossible, but I too have a limit. Buying an electric car wouldn’t make sense. I don’t drive much, electric car production has a higher initial carbon footprint, and I’d be using electricity in an energy ecosystem that is not producing enough green energy.
• If you believe sacrificing something for the sake of future generations is a good thing, please do so. It’s hard to convince the average human that disaster is looming when those doing the talking aren’t acting like disaster is looming. (I’m looking at you, Al Gore, with your multiple huge homes. Putting in green technology is great, but putting green technology in a smaller house would be so much better.)
• If you don’t believe sacrificing something for the sake of future generations is a good thing I envy you. I’d rather you weren’t just one among a large proportion of humanity, but it must be nice to think “per capita” is a satanic trick and not basic sensible statistics.
• If you do, but aren’t, please reconsider. There is hope, but it requires a ground swell of willingness to reduce, reuse, recycle, instead of the political backlash to reality based policy we are currently seeing.

Thank you for reading.