I may post some photos from yesterday's march in Saint Paul, but I thought today instead I would share a Twitter thread by happify, one of my favorite people, that I want to preserve here.
For a great deal of greenhouse gas emissions, we've got three basic categories of responses to try to lower CO2 equivalents in the atmosphere:One thing I would add is that this kind of frugality could appeal to conservative moral leanings (since it is, at its core, conservative in the most literal sense). So it might be a base to build connections across one part of the divide.
1. change energy sources
2. sequester carbon
3. reduce energy use
Mainstream climate change response seems to be maybe:
89% change energy sources,
10% sequester carbon (and of that, maybe 8% tech fetish, 2% soil/plants),
1% reduce energy use.
Obviously changing energy sources isn't enough because:
1. producing renewable energy has its own manufacturing emissions costs
2. energy use is still increasing dramatically
3. many (most?) renewable energy sources come with significant environmental tradeoffs
4. greenwashing
I'm so excited by biomass sequestration and love the work people are doing around this, but on its own it's not enough because:
1. carbon doesn't necessarily stay sequestered (e.g. fires) and
2. our ecosystems are super complex and there's a ton we don't know about how they work.
Sequestration is cleaning up the mess you're making.
Renewables are trying to straighten up your mess.
Energy use reduction is making less of a mess to start with.
Which leaves energy use reduction. I honestly and 100% do not understand why the ratios aren't inverted, with 89% of our attention going to reducing energy demand/consumption as quickly as possible, at scale. Just with a basic problem-solving lens, why is this not dominating?
Maybe it's like major blood loss. You can:
1. staunch the bleeding
2. care for the body so it can replenish the loss and doesn't suffer in the interim
3. try to give blood infusions.
It's like we're skipping the first and not even talking about it.
It seems like somehow it's a difficult concept for many people in positions of influence and power at all levels (from neighborhood organizations to policy-makers) to grasp, let alone act on. Staunch the bleeding. Basic triage.
Addressing energy use to staunch us bleeding out is why I'm active in pushing to reduce:
1. flying
2. driving
3. exterior surface area per capita in housing
4. single use stuff
5. new consumer goods
...maybe we can build energy use reduction as a motivating, unifying force? Because it IS part of what we talk about in so many circles, both explicitly and implicitly. How can we center it in our decision-making processes?
12 comments:
Major reduction could be got by reducing and keeping low the populations of advanced countries.
True, particularly among people with the most wealth to spend on flying and high-carbon living. The question is always how best that can happen, the answer (as identified by Project Drawdown) is to empower women and girls - then it happens on its own. It just takes time.
Time we don't have.
The average fertility rate (births per woman) in OECD countries is now 1.6, with 2.1 = stable population size. Source: http://www.oecd.org/sdd/37962718.pdf Since you are talking about "advanced countries," I assume that means the OECD countries. Population is a big ship that takes time to turn; the increase that continues to happen is less to do with births and more to do with longer lifespans. If you haven't watched this Hans Rosling video, I recommend it. https://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_on_global_population_growth?language=en
Were you not thinking of OECD countries in your original post about reducing energy use? If not forgive my faulty assumption.
I watched the higher-tech version of the Rosling talk a year or two ago, the one with the laser graphics. He's optimistic but says nothing about longer lifespans - he's clear that the natural growth in the "first world" has essentially stopped or reversed. The continuing increase in the US population is due to something else, something he doesn't mention.
His point about emerging economies is relevant - the greater their aspirations, the more energy they use. So in order to reduce energy use, their aspirations should be capped or reduced, right?
Also check out his comment here: https://www.businessinsider.com/africas-population-explosion-will-change-humanity-2015-8 See the graph too. Growth is still happening.
Love your photos btw
One problem with reducing energy use is that to get enough of it, people would need to get control of the world's economy, so as to use it to make useful things, instead of so much wasteful and mindless competition. Such control would be a good thing, but the people who are currently riding high on the present competition would not like it. They could heat some wars up, in order to resist it, or just spread more lies about hippies and such. The people would have to have replaced them with more reasonable people, before doing too much restructuring. Doing that - by educating people, within the current system - without triggering a dangerous reaction would probably take a lot of time. So we need all three, I think.
Yes. Wouldn't it be great to have a conversation about solutions without the monied interests in power triggering wars to maintain their positions and power? People in the streets... that seems like the only solution. The people of Hong Kong are my inspiration at this point.
Here's another recent article on a path forward that encompasses projected population growth worldwide and economic growth in Africa, degrowth in OECD-type areas. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/sep/21/vaclav-smil-interview-growth-must-end-economists Based on a new book that sounds like it will be important reading.
His gigajoule/p/y figures are key:
US is about 300
Japan is about 170
The EU is about 150
China is now close to 100
India is 20
Nigeria is 5
Ethiopia is 2
This makes it clear that it is critically important to stop the number of people inside the United States from getting any larger, because each extra body is another 300 gigajoules a year used up. Japan's population is shrinking, but ours isn't. We need to change that.
Worth noting too that the US and EU are places that women are already empowered, so there's not many gains to be had on that front in those places.
Which is why there is the argument in the original post for energy use reduction, particularly in the U.S. That's part of what Vaclav Smil was saying: "We could halve our energy and material consumption and this would put us back around the level of the 1960s. We could cut down without losing anything important. Life wasn’t horrible in 1960s or 70s Europe. People from Copenhagen would no longer be able to fly to Singapore for a three-day visit, but so what? ...People don’t realise how much slack in the system we have." Halving Europe's figure would make it 75. The U.S. has a lot farther to decrease in part because of land use and many other policy choices that have made our lives extra-high-energy-consuming. The U.S. total fertility rate was 1.73 per woman in 2018. I want to keep that rate low as well, but consumption and the many systems we have that contribute to it are the real culprits.
Fertility of 1.73 is already below replacement, so the population of the US should be shrinking. Yet the population is still growing. Longevity gains tabled off long ago, so it's not that people are living longer. There must be another source of population increase, and, in addition to reduction in per person energy use, a genuinely ecological perspective calls for stopping and even reversing that source of increase. One additional body inside the US means 300 GJ more energy used per year.
You have probably realized by now that I am not going to agree with you that keeping immigrants out of the U.S. is part of the solution. So I suggest that we leave it at that: you believe it is, and I do not.
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