Sustainability Isn't - The Gentleman at Large

The environment is so hot right now.

Anymore it seems like most everyone is either going blue in the face as we connect the dots between natural disasters, a warming climate, and its anthropogenic nature (and the fact that we have been predicting this for decades), or passing the buck down the road a few more years until those coal industry checks clear.

The newly minted Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is hard at work to build a caucus around a Green New Deal, right wing leadership is doubling down on being comically uninformed, and everyone else is pretty much drowning, burning, or sleeping peacefully at night now that they’ve bullied their city council into banning straws. Because that will fix all this, obviously.

And the straw thing is important. I’m serious. Not because a ban on plastic straws will fix anything, but because it is the most recent iteration of wildly misguided greenwashing from the left. It represents a failure to understand the scope, scale, and nature of the problem so profound that it is hard to take these people seriously as they mock our current president for suggesting that superfires could be prevented by raking leaves. It is the same.

And to be clear, there is a fundamental difference at play: the President of the United States is the single person on earth best-suited to make a meaningful difference on climate change. His failure not only to act, but to actively divest from the inadequate measures that were already in place is a disgrace. His smug refusal to acknowledge the consensus of the scientific community and the seriousness of the problem makes it easy to understand how the rest of us might grasp at straws* for any way to make a positive change, no matter how ineffective.

Unfortunately our best intentions, whether its banning straws, or giving up single-use cups, or switching to a more fuel-efficient car are nothing more than emotional palliatives to give us the sensation of control.

The premise is correct. Meaningful action on climate change is necessary to avoid catastrophic mass extinctions on earth in our lifetimes. This action needs to have grass roots at its base, but not in the way that we are seeing it. For instance, your new Clean Canteen looks cool clipped to your new Fjällräven backpack, sure, but you’ll need it to replace as much as 1,000 paper cups to offset the environmental impact of mining, manufacturing, transporting, cleaning, and eventually disposing, of that stainless steel cup. And that paper cup takes about 0.55 megajoules of energy to manufacture, while your Toyota Prius burns about two megajoules of gasoline per mile.

When we say that climate action requires meaningful, grassroots change, we mean that we have to make actual changes. The marginal feel-goods of sipping your chair from a designer mug are not it. It means a fundamental, catastrophic shift in how we operate, which can only happen in a broad way through financial incentive. Meaningful change does not mean forcing auto makers to average 22mpg rather than 16mpg; it means agreeing that gas should cost $15 a gallon and we should invest that tax revenue in livable cities and public transportation. It means “hopping on a plane” should cost $5,000 each way.

It means recognizing that the US Military is the single largest consumer of fossil fuels on earth, and the primary driver of US foreign policy is energy security. It means divesting from coal-fired power in favor of renewables, sure, (heating and domestic energy use account for 25% of fossil fuel emissions globally) but it also means that we’re going to be hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and that if you can’t stand the heat maybe you shouldn’t buy a house in Phoenix. It means, simply, using much, much less of everything.

And of course you may recognize themes here from some socialist hellscape. It’s un-American, you say. It will never happen.

And, unfortunately, you’re right, for the time being anyway. Because we, as humans, are not that good at looking far into the future. We are, however, excellent at engineering our way out of a pickle. And whether those engineered solutions are levees, or storm walls, or vast climate-controlled hydroponic factory farms (for when drought/fire/disease wipes out our agricultural hubs), they’ll probably do a fair job of keeping humanity around. We’re good at that, and will not effect meaningful change until we are forced to by real catastrophe.

So screw it. There’s a few cigarettes left in the pack. I wonder if we can smoke ’em all in one go.

Happy Thanksgiving!

*pun very much intended. sorry not sorry.