You can’t consume your way out of global warming
Bout time someone figured that out.
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Hint one: You can’t consume away global warming.
Hint two: Capitalism fails without growth in consumption.
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It’s not the Obamas in particular, it’s all the 0.1 percenters in general who advocate energy austerity for the little people as a way to solve climate change. Check the guest list in the article for a few names who I imagine would tell me I need to start bicycling to work.
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It is true that rich people make the decisions about how civilization works.
We could just as easily gripe about the 0.1 percenters who advocate for suburban sprawl that requires us little people to spend half our incomes on our cars.
Or, we could gripe about the 0.1 percenters who advocate for agricultural policies that give us little people diabetes.
There is nothing specific to climate change about this kind of class resentment. In the quoted example it’s just a way of defending the status quo by changing the subject.
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And it is what kind of economics we employ that decides who the rich people are. Making it a feedback loop.
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Sure there will be a small bump after I release my human consuming monsters but in the long term it will work.
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E. F. Schumacher was onto it in the 1950s!
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Try Butterbur. I’ve taken for over a year now and it’s worked great for my allergies. Can’t promise it will help you, but it can’t hurt. I used to get this brand from Amazon, but I’m trying another one for now.
“You can’t consume your way out of global warming”
I challenge your thesis! I’d posit that if you consume enough humans you could have an effect on global warming.
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Just to hold atmospheric carbon stable, given current industrial emissions, you’d need to plant a few billion trees per year. Every year. Forever.
Trees are nice and all, but they ain’t gonna solve this. For that, you need to permanently shut down every coal mine and oil well on the planet. Yesterday.
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Ok. Is that a lot?
Planting a few billion trees a year just sounds like a good idea to me. When you run national programs at scale, and then add up worldwide, hopefully that’s what the numbers get up to. It’s needed, since the loss to deforestation is estimated around 5 - 10 billion trees per year.
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You’re missing the “every year, forever” part. You’d rapidly run out of planetary surface to plant your trees on (or to store the wood of the mature ones you cut down; if you burn it or leave it to rot, it releases its carbon back to the atmosphere).
The net carbon absorption of a mature forest is zero; carbon is stored in growing trees, but released in equal amount from dying old ones. They only impact the atmosphere when you increase or reduce the total forest amount; it just doesn’t work as a solution to a continuous-need requirement unless you have an infinitely large planet.
We need to cut emissions, massively, urgently, belatedly. There’s no avoiding that.
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I’m not missing your argument, no. I chose to respond to a different part of your comment. I should have been more clear.
It sounds similar to the defeatism espoused by some opponents (you are saying to solve it would require the impossible). The all or nothing of “solve this” leads to the all or nothing of doing nothing! What I was trying to express to you is, if we want to address climate change, we have to think big. We have to push to make progress on many fronts simultaneously. Can we agree on that?
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Addendum: forestry is likely to play a role in carbon control, but its chief contribution is after you shut down all the coal mines, when we’re desperately trying to drag atmospheric CO2 back down to survivable levels (it is probably already in excess of this; we haven’t seen the full impact of current emissions yet).
And if you’re imagining a world covered in biodiverse Tolkienesque old-growth forests, you’ve got it wrong. What it’s going to be are a shitload of fast-growing monoculture plantations that are clearfelled, turned into timber and paper and replanted as soon as they mature.
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I’m not arguing for defeatism, I’m arguing for urgency and realism.
I think we should be giving serious consideration to figuring out the best way to, for example, permanently disable a coal mine via direct action. The governments of the world had their chance to respond; they failed. We don’t have time to wait for them to fuck it up again.
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Great interview and I am a big fan of Saul Griffith.
I do have a bit of a problem with the notion that the environmental movement has been promoting an idea that we can consume our way out of the problem. It’s quite the opposite, with most of the environmental movement (rightly) considering our hyperconsumptive society to be one of the key barriers inhibiting climate action.
Environmentalists have been pushing for systemic change for decades. It’s the governments that have been promoting these figleaves because they are too timid and in hock to vested interests who stand to lose a lot from the systemic change that’s so badly needed.
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Sunfolding isn’t a consumer product. At least I don’t know many people who are installing concentrated solar power systems in their back gardens…
Mostly agreed, but you can cut down said trees and manufacture durable wooden products (well desigend houses for example) that lock away the carbon for hundreds of years and free up space for more tree growing (sustained soil quality permitting).
Any chance we can save the world without demon trees mountain cedar?
Aye. By unbalancing the pH of the World Ocean, we’re turning it increasingly toxic to the aquatic food chain. At some not so distant point we reach a tipping point where the species start to collapse like dominoes. In addition to the billions of people worldwide who depend on seafood for sustenance, with the fish goes the microorganisms that account, if memory serves correctly, for about 60% of the biosphere’s carbon sequestration capacity. Trees are important too, but if we hit that tipping point in the ocean, we are good and truly fucked.
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You can’t consume your way out of global warming
So I shouldnt invest in Al Gore’s latest enviro-scam?
