Catalyzing Uncertainty (Part 2)

In my last blog post I asked “What will be our mark? Our legacy? What will we do in the face of this crisis that Peter Friederici calls a “climate breakdown.”?”

I wondered what any one person could do, what I could do to make some mark on this crisis before I die.

Being Virtuous

But am I virtue signaling when I make a personal change, as Rebecca Solnit has suggested? And does it matter if I am? Does my individual action make a difference? According to the messaging of the early aughts, I have a carbon footprint and it’s my responsibility to make the changes we need to see by being a better consumer.

I think I can claim some virtue here, even if not FULLY perfect:

• I planted about 2,000 trees on my farm.
  

  My garden’s bounty. Photo by Meg Turville-Heitz

• I grow some of my own food to “reduce the miles” it travels, and buy organic when it’s available.
• I always ask for the paper bag if I didn’t bring my own to the market.
• I ditched my pickup truck (only really possible as I scaled back the farm) and bought a hybrid.
• I got rid of my oil furnace for LP gas.
• I keep my thermostats in the low 60s in winter and near 80 in summer (and only AC when it’s super humid).
• I reuse my plastic as much as I can – though I’m probably eating a plastic bag a month.
• I’ve replaced all my bulbs with LED
• I eat less red meat
• I have set my Internet browser so that searches don’t yield AI results.

There’s probably more, things like recycling that I do because it’s a habit now. And I tend to hang onto things long after they should be replaced. Every little bit helps, it really does. From an economic standpoint, what I save in gas I can spend on more organic.

But do these changes really matter in the long run? When we tally up all the carbon footprints of all those people watching their wasteful consumption, eating less meat, flying less, buying electric, installing solar, are we really making a dent in things? And should I feel guilty if I hop on a flight to go to World Fantasy Convention in Brighton, UK, or burn off my gardens, or run a heating mat for my outdoor cats, or a heated waterer for the chickens?

They make a difference, yes, albeit a small one. And no, I don’t need to feel guilty.

The Carbon Footprint

It’s great propaganda. Awesome really, one of the most successful campaigns in recent decades.

When ExxonMobil shifted from climate denial to suggesting climate change solutions (also called greenwashing), it focused not on its own footprint, but on yours or everyone else’s. A study out of Harvard by Geoffrey Supran and Naomi Oreskes compared the oil company’s new focus on climate solutions to propaganda tactics used by the tobacoo industry. In a study of ExxonMobil’s ads, Supran and Oreske showed that the drift of public narrative to “we are all to blame,” emerged just as the company worked to shift responsibility from the fossil fuel industry and onto consumers.

Even our shorthand “carbon footprint” is a term straight out of Big Oil’s marketing toolbox intended to place the responsibility on us, not them.

BP hired a PR firm to drill home that message with its carbon footprint calculator. It’s been successful, and sure, we all have a little skin in this game. We could see that during the height of the pandemic when 2020 emissions may have dropped by as much as 8 percent over 2019.

But it’s also deceptive.

For months, we stopped driving, and flying, and going out. We shut down big office buildings and non-essential businesses. But it amounted to less than 10% of our consumption. Where’s that other 90%? It’s bound up in our reliance on fossil fuels.

An MIT project calculated the carbon footprint of a variety of different lifestyles and found that even the homeless and sequestered monks have an unsustainable footprint because the underpinning structures of society, from roads to government to libraries, are all fundamentally reliant on fossil fuels.

And that level of greenwashing engaged in by corporations over energy isn’t a thing of the past. Google’s claim that a single query of the Gemini AI service only uses the equivalent of watching nine seconds of television or a couple of drops of water, has been challenged as incomplete, handpicked data that compares apples to oranges when it has better references available. Ketan Joshi argues that selecting a median text query as the baseline doesn’t reflect how Google has been encouraging the use of AI images and video, which use far more energy. Much like the carbon footprint, the “per query” approach masks the aggregate impact of multiple queries per second and the massive amounts of energy needed to support huge data centers, which consume tremendous amounts of mostly fossil-fuel-sourced energy, and water, to support them.

The Collective

Just as measuring a collective impact of energy consumption is important, so is thinking in terms of the collective impact of consumer demand. Rebecca Solnit argues that while individuals alone aren’t going to solve the climate crisis by changing our behavior, collective action just might.

Collective action, Solnit says, is the kind of thing that forces regulatory change and incentive that led to the expansion of solar initiatives, biking lanes, public transit and energy standards for new construction and vehicles. Based on consumer demand more options exist at restaurants for vegetarian/vegan diets. More and more outlets provide biodegradable packaging in a move away from single-use plastic.

Mark Kaufman in his Mashable article notes how collective action can also emerge through example. Keeping up with the Joneses is still a thing. If your neighbors put solar on their roof, you’re more likely to do it, too.

Friederici argues that collective action creates meaning, and through that we can reach a place of hope. There must be hope to escape the paralysis that locks us into inaction.

Like a Durkheimian collective effervescence together we empower ourselves to effect change. Durkheim saw this as the space where people form rituals and religious practice. It holds meaning.

It was massive collective action that powered the environmental movement of the 1970s. It wasn’t just the individual “adopt a highway” kinds of acts that changed us. It was teach ins, Earth Day, and letter campaigns and being able to point to the real devastation of an oil spill or the absurdity of a burning river that forced government to create the EPA, enact the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act. It was scientists, businesses, and the 20 million people who turned out in 1970’s first Earth Day, whose demands for an answer to deadly smog in the face of industry’s resistance, led to emissions regulations that “cleared the air.” (See this great documentary that illustrates this).

Change is in the Narrative

But climate change is different. It’s big. It’s pervasive. It doesn’t have discrete moments we can point to other than the build-up of mounting disaster. It involves hard science and variability. It costs a lot. A LOT. We’re talking paradigm shifts at a global scale. We have been reliant on fossil fuels for so long, people have a hard time even wrapping their head around what we did before, what we could do.

It’s the perfect vacuum for politics to slide into. It’s the difficult place where lies go to build conspiracy theories in order to support the politics of power.

Supran and Oreskes noted that ExxonMobil’s advertising, while offering individual solutions, also used deceptive language. For example, suggesting a “risk” of climate change, rather than the reality of it, or intimating that renewable energy is unreliable, and that the fossil fuel industry offered meaningful leadership on climate change, added to the narrative of uncertainty.

“Unwelcome opinion can be argued with, rejected, or compromised upon,” writes Hannah Arendt in a 1967 article. “But unwelcome facts possess an infuriating stubbornness that nothing can move except plain lies. The trouble is that factual truth, like all other truth, peremptorily claims to be acknowledged and precludes debate, and debate constitutes the very essence of political life.”

In essence, politicians must lie in order to push an agenda against facts, and as I discussed in my previous post, it’s the fertile ground for denialism as bad actors suggest there’s uncertainty about climate change and its impacts, even as we are living through them. The word “Environmental” itself has in some circles come to be a euphemism for “lefty liberal.” Thus, the Biden administration’s climate change initiatives that focused on mass transit, fuel efficiency, electric vehicles and heavy investment in renewable energy has all been sidelined by the current administration, which claims that climate change is a hoax perpetrated by the libs.

Friederici argues that the narratives we use make a difference. Words have power and politicians don’t hesitate to point to our collective American folklore of the rugged individualist who pulls himself up by his bootstraps to suggest we can engineer our way out of everything. But can we? Global is a big lift. So instead, we turn to euphemisms, so that words like “climate change” are scrubbed from websites with terms that sound less overwhelming, like “extreme weather,” offered to make a disaster feel isolated and part of normal variation. It pushes action down the road past a potential point of no return.

The very nature of the scope and scale of climate change and what we know about it can be overwhelming, leading to “climate grief.” Outdoor workers and conservationists often face mental and physical health issues as a result of their work in a changing climate – some of that the result of feeling hopeless in the face of politics as usual.

Friederici and Solnit and others find hope in the work being done at the state level, such as the highlights in the New York Times’ 50 states/50 Fixes project, as more and more media begin reporting on climate change and turning toward solutions journalism. The public, including many businesses, like insurance companies, see the impacts of climate change in their own back yards and have begun to demand action.

We need to find that rallying moment, like the 1970s movements, a mission to move beyond the politicization of “climate change” to demand action.

Will changing the narrative, and building that collective effervescence, be enough?

_________________________

For those of us that feel the struggle to find hope in every setback, my next post will address some of the health and mental health issues that arise out of climate change/conservation work in a time of regulatory rollbacks and backsliding, and some things that we can do to mitigate them.

Cover Photo of Chequamegon Bay at sunset by Meg Turville-Heitz

 

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