HOW COME ORDINARY AMERICANS AREN’T DOING MORE TO MITIGATE CLIMATE CHANGE? TEN REASONS
October 19, 2021
The average American emits 20 tons of greenhouse gases a year. The world average is 3. We each need to get to 3, or better yet, zero. Even the average person who wants to make a difference and shrink their carbon footprint doesn’t always know what to do or have access to the necessary resources to achieve these goals. A huge amount has been written about climate change and climate-change mitigation, yet very little of it tells the individual how to shrink their carbon footprint to zero or near-zero. Why isn’t this happening? I can see many reasons.
First, it’s overwhelmingly huge, and hard to see where to start. There isn’t a handy guide to what to do in order to get me, and my household, to zero. We know some minor things to do, such as change out all our light bulbs to LEDs, but we don’t know how much that will help. We may have signed up for renewable energy with our local utility, but we don’t know how much that’s helping.
Second, we may not feel we’re responsible. Climate change became a visible threat in our lifetimes, but some – perhaps a lot – of people say, as one of my friends did: “I didn’t consciously make this happen, so it’s not mine to fix, not my fault.” They disown the problem.
Third, upgrading to green is expensive. A rural friend said recently: “We barely get by financially as it is; we work in different directions and each need our own vehicle. Mine’s a truck that my big heavy dog can be loaded into when it’s vet-visit time. When our son hit sixteen, he had to have a vehicle too, and we can’t afford three Teslas, even if we could get such an order delivered in timely way.” And most electric vehicles don’t have much range; with charging stations being scarce and slow, it’s too big a risk of getting stranded.
Personally, I was very pleased to be able to put 21 solar panels on my little 1920s house and take advantage of the 30% federal tax credit when I bought the panels in 2015. In the very first year I got free electricity and more than $1,000 in incentive payment from my state government. But I had come into some capital, and most people don’t have the funds lying around to make this kind of investment.
Fourth, a lot of myths and untruths are floating around. Some folks believe that solar power doesn’t pencil out, not realizing that their neighbor’s investment made 20 years ago is no longer the story – costs of solar panels have dropped so much that installing them pencils out almost immediately, especially with incentive payments.
Fifth, to get full benefit from my solar panels I’d have to go “greener”. It’s not easy retrofitting a 1920s house to be green. I arranged for a professional heat loss study of my little house, and found out that the insulation in the attic was insufficient; the insulation in the walls had sagged and was no longer doing its job; although the windows had been upgraded, they weren’t state-of-the-art; the appliances were old. I had an insurance policy on the house’s infrastructure and when the gas furnace gave up the ghost, this policy paid for a replacement – but only an identical gas furnace. I should have been focused on eliminating gas entirely, since it’s a fossil fuel. But then I’d have had to pay this $4,000 or so myself. I did install some more attic insulation, and got a rebate for doing that, too.
Sixth, not everyone is focused on the common good but on “I want mine”. I was struggling to install a low-flow showerhead and grumbled about the challenge to one of my neighbors. His response was: “What the heck are you doing that for? I’m old, and I want to use as much hot water as I can before I die.” These remarks tie into an underlying fear that going green, cutting one’s own emissions, will mean a lower standard of living. In 2008, an article in Reason magazine explained how, in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to mitigate climate change, we’d all have to go back to the 1870s. No cars, no central heating, no tank of hot water….it was a dismal picture. That journalist didn’t get, however, that green innovations in almost all areas of life mean we can have our cake and eat it – we can live comfortably, even luxuriously, without causing greenhouse gas emissions. That’s even more true today than it was in 2008.
There are other reasons why personal change is not happening much. Seventh, is climate change denial. Simply put, if global warming is not caused or exacerbated by mankind, then mankind has no obligation to try to fix it. One person, a scientist by training, told me that climate change is coming about because the magnetic poles are changing place. Yes, the poles are reversing, but science doesn’t support his climate change theory! Nor is climate change just a normal geological cycle: it’s happening much faster than usual.
Reasons morph into excuses. One excuse that I hear – and this is number eight -- is that the leaders in the climate change mitigation movement are hypocrites, so why should anybody listen to them? Some climate change leaders have huge carbon footprints themselves, which makes the average person rightfully skeptical. They jet all over to promote the cause. Who gave them a free travel pass, knowing as they do that air travel is one of the worst emitters per mile that we have? Bill Gates, who in his 2021 book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster admits to a horrible carbon footprint, lives in a 7-acre house and also jets around a lot. Yes, he’s investing in advanced nuclear power and meat substitutes. Maybe all of these leaders purchase carbon offsets when they travel. Swedish teen climate activist Greta Thunberg might be one of the few exceptions to the failure to walk the talk. She traveled across the Atlantic in a sailboat and probably gets around Europe by train. Wouldn’t it be great if all these leaders would publish their own carbon footprints each year and share how they’re shrinking them?
Ninth, we don’t like being lectured at. Greta and other young climate activists have been lecturing the older generation recently about our climate failures, and how it’s all talk and not enough action. They are right. But are we starting to tune this out? It had shock value at first, but now we want to see Greta and her ilk also offering practical solutions.
Tenth, we don’t really know who’s responsible for the fix. A common theme is that it’s up to the oil companies, the car makers, the utility companies, the federal government to take care of climate change mitigation. But we can’t wait for a deadlocked Congress, and the private sector will only do so much without more sticks and carrots. I don’t believe that waiting for the big actors to actually act excuses the average household from working on getting to zero. But a really crisp and clear handbook on how to achieve this at the household level would be most welcome.
Greta Thunberg called it. In May 2021, the teen climate activist pointed out to the world that the global-scale response to the COVID-19 pandemic —shutting down whole sectors of national economies, social distancing, masking, an unprecedented race to produce effective vaccines—proves that where there’s a will, there’s a way. During the pandemic, we demonstrated that we could effectively tackle a massive challenge. Thunberg rightly believes that the world needs to step up in similar fashion to address climate change. The experts gathered in Glasgow for the 2021 climate change summit need to tackle all ten barriers to effective climate change mitigation.