Today’s the second anniversary of the ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, and we’re finally witnessing a race to the top among West Coast leaders: who’ll implement a more aggressive response to global warming?
I’m proud of our region and bullish on our prospects, for a bunch of good and well-considered reasons.
But there’s one not-so-good reason that I want to mention. In the grand scheme of things, it’s trivial. Still, it’s illustrative of what’s possible on a much broader scale and of one of the key dilemmas we face.
Two years ago, I personally ratified Kyoto for myself and my family, pledging to achieve the protocol’s 7-percent reduction target or better. I then sat down to figure out what was required of us and learned that my family had already reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 35 percent below its 1990 level—outdoing the Kyoto goal by a factor of five and doing so eight years ahead of schedule. What’s more, we achieved those results even while more than doubling the size of our family and nearly doubling the size of our house, income, and car. It showed what’s possible given consistent effort over time.
Those reductions came over fourteen years. In the short time since, I’m proud to report, we’ve reduced our carbon-dioxide emissions by an additional Kyoto’s worth. In fact, we’ve pushed our emissions down another 9 percentage points, thanks to our year of living carlessly.
Here’s a chart, following the same methods and assumptions as two years ago.
So amazing reductions are possible. And we can reduce our home emissions more by further improving our insulation and replacing our last few single-pane windows. But we’ve done most of what we can in the house to conserve energy.
And that leads to a dilemma: the biggest chunk of emissions is from air travel. In fact, well over half of my family’s greenhouse gas emissions are now caused by the flights I take to make speeches on behalf of Sightline—emissions that I sure hope are justified by the effect those speeches have on their audiences!
What should I do? Speak less? Inaugurate the year of living flightlessly? Or should I focus on the bigger, systemic forces that push up emissions and not worry about my Sightline air miles? Opinions?
Matt the Engineer
(gazing into my crystal ball) Your problem will probably be one of the more difficult ones to overcome. Of the energy we use, electricity can be solved at the source and those cars that can’t be replaced by bicycles can turn electric. Airplanes, however, need a dense energy source. Batteries just don’t cut it.Or will they?
phil
Alan, go political!I believe people are utterly confused by the welter of small, personal actions they’re urged to adopt. (Here’s a particularly egregious example—air filters and surge protectors at the top of the list!?)The reality is that without systemic change, our emissions will continue to rise. Let’s focus people where it matters: political will.
Patrick
This issue is truly a dilemma because, for many professions, abstaining from air travel is harmful to your career prospects. A few UK groups – enoughsenough.org and flightpledge.org – are giving the issue some needed attention. I believe that we have yet to scratch the surface in using technology to replace air travel, and at some point, a group of concerned people needs to take a stand to highlight outdated business practices. If a potential Sightline audience is interested in your message enough to have you speak, they should be receptive to a closed circuit telecast or other form of virtual presentation. The message you send by insisting on avoiding wasteful air travel could be as powerful as the words in your speech.
kateyb
Good points made by the comment above! While it’s nice to see people speak in person, the options for presenting live via satellite, telecast, etc. are workable. If you really have to travel to get your message across, why not go on “tour” to hit as many destinations as possible using the most environmentally friendly transportation you can?
scarlson
Absolutely! I like it! Air travel is one issue that no environmentalist seems willing to touch. Al Gore for example: he spends half of An Inconvenient Truth gazing out the windows of planes (and cars), wondering what we could possibly do to curb global warming. Meanwhile, airplane flights are so cheap a friend of mine took a one day trip to play golf. I feel like the only person who has never flown to Vegas out of boredom—or to a climate change workshop. It would make a dramatic and important point to appear via video-conference. You could find a corporate sponsor to promote their video technology (on your end), and get the hosting hotel to provide their equipment free of charge (on the event end). Carbon-neutral events are the emerging wave in conferences and expos, as we buy our way out of guilt. Your un-travel will provide real-time offsets: immediate emissions reductions. And hopefully inspire others. Go for it.
Paul
Have to agree with Phil here. The global warming response train needs two rails to run. Everyone so far has focused on the personal responsibility rail, which is necessary but not sufficient to stave off the worst impacts of climate change. We need to build a parallel collective responsibility rail for this train to get anywhere. THAT’S where the leverage is. And the first stop there is to set the goal. And then make it known.
Dan
What should I do? Speak less? Inaugurate the year of living flightlessly? Or should I focus on the bigger, systemic forces that push up emissions and not worry about my Sightline air miles? The typical Murrican who flies also moves all over the place, to maximize their earnings potential and to seek moderate climate; this moves them away from family. Until the macro/microeconomic forces that drive people to mobility and migration are quelled, not much to do in the meta. Sure, the few folks who live in amenity-rich density (above average income, likely migrants) can walk for nonwork trips, but unless they curtail visiting the fam for the holidays…Note I haven’t written about work trips yet…
adev
A few years ago I filled out a form in Co-op America Quarterly designed to show me what I would have to do personally to comply with Kyoto. It seems to me it was to figure a gross carbon output, as opposed to reducing what I contribute by 35 percent, but I can’t recall for sure. In any event, my partner and I live in a 16×20 cabin, off the grid, drive 3 miles to work, when we don’t bike or ski, and we still barely made it within the goal—and that was only by fudging on the airline travel, which we have to do to access the wider world.
Matt the Engineer
[adev]’s comment goes to the heart of an issue that nobody talks about much. Yes, it helps to take a bunch of little steps. But in the end we’re dumping huge amounts of carbon into the air by not going all the way. Will we all have to live in tiny cabins with giant solar panels, walking to work and never travelling? Even then you’d never heat your home – if everyone switches to wood we’ll run out of trees.Perhaps it’s time to start considering energy at the source. I think we have to start building nuclear power plants again. Because we’re afraid of the problems of nuclear plants it’s been 3 decades since we’ve built one in the US. Don’t get me wrong – we should keep going on solar, wind, and hydro. But when we start talking about replacing heat and transportation fuels with something that doesn’t use carbon, we’re talking about a lot more watts than we can afford using solar panels.
Dan
I think we have to start building nuclear power plants again. I’m all for it, if we can store a small amount of waste in, say, your child’s room.
Matt the Engineer
I’m not saying it’s a perfect solution. It’s just the best one given the following constraints:1. We want a carbon neutral world.2. We don’t want to mandate population control.3. We want to reach this goal in a resource-efficient manner.Yes, nuclear waste is a problem. But I believe it’s mostly a monetary problem. Reprocessing would remove a vast quantity of high level waste (and treats uranium as a recylable product), but we dropped reprocessing in the ’70’s when nuclear fell out of favor. We’re the only country that burries most of our nuclear waste instead of reprocessing it.Here‘s a good primer on why waste really isn’t much of a problem.
scarlson
Clearly, there is no one solution to the climate change crisis: not one government policy, nor one behavior, nor one technology switch alone that will take care of the problem. We need a whole host of solutions. Back to Alan’s question, why not do both? Live a year without flying for Sightline, and use it to promote political, behavioral, technical, and infrastructure solutions? As Paul says, these are parallel rails. I’ve heard plenty of speakers who flew in for the day then go on to talk about climate solutions. I might wake up and listen better if you speaking from a big video screen, explaining why you didn’t fly to the conference (plus, you’ll be home by the end of the day).
Alan Durning
Great discussion, all.I’m going to think more carefully before flying this year and I’ll definitely consider the video-link option. But most conferences that I speak at lack the infrastructure for such things. So it will only work once in a while. Still, something that we can experiment with adding to our toolchest.
Ross
I beleive that carbon offsets should never be used. Imagine a a world covered with windmills, ethanol plants, solar panels where all fossill fuels have been offset and burned, devoid of most life because of run away warming.I think Alan, David Suzuki and others should also stop most of thier flying and strive for 1 tonne themselves. The speakers could speak in their own area and network with and support speakers in other areas. Suzuki could contract local film makers and organizers to do his “What would you do if you were Prime Minister” tour.Our local activists bring in speakers, like Guy Dauncy, who drive up here and suggest planting trees to offset driving instead of getting a free speaker, like myself. I guess they don’t want to hear what I have to say. What I am saying does not fit what they want to believe.Fossil carbon is fossilized forever. In human time scale carbon released in the atmosphere is there forever. It does not matter how many windmills or tidal plants you build, the carbon will still be in the biosphere forever.Ross
Ross
I beleive that carbon offsets should never be used. Imagine a a world covered with windmills, ethanol plants, solar panels where all fossill fuels have been offset and burned, devoid of most life because of run away warming.I think Alan, David Suzuki and others should also stop most of thier flying and strive for 1 tonne themselves. The speakers could speak in their own area and network with and support speakers in other areas. Suzuki could contract local film makers and organizers to do his “What would you do if you were Prime Minister” tour.Our local activists bring in speakers, like Guy Dauncy, who drive up here and suggest planting trees to offset driving instead of getting a free speaker, like myself. I guess they don’t want to hear what I have to say. What I am saying does not fit what they want to believe.Fossil carbon is fossilized forever. In human time scale carbon released in the atmosphere is there forever. It does not matter how many windmills or tidal plants you build, the carbon will still be in the biosphere forever.Ross
Ross
I beleive that carbon offsets should never be used. Imagine a a world covered with windmills, ethanol plants, solar panels where all fossill fuels have been offset and burned, devoid of most life because of run away warming.I think Alan, David Suzuki and others should also stop most of thier flying and strive for 1 tonne themselves. The speakers could speak in their own area and network with and support speakers in other areas. Suzuki could contract local film makers and organizers to do his “What would you do if you were Prime Minister” tour.Our local activists bring in speakers, like Guy Dauncy, who drive up here and suggest planting trees to offset driving instead of getting a free speaker, like myself. I guess they don’t want to hear what I have to say. What I am saying does not fit what they want to believe.Fossil carbon is fossilized forever. In human time scale carbon released in the atmosphere is there forever. It does not matter how many windmills or tidal plants you build, the carbon will still be in the biosphere forever.Ross
Herb
Despite the previous commenter’s insistence by posting three times, I suggest that carbon offsets might be a good idea. Up here in Canada with the non-profit organization, Zerofootprint.net, you can offset a 1 tonne of carbon for $10!Say you fly 10 times a year, that’s only $100, and it’s in Canadian dollars! There are American versions, of course, but I’ve just been investigating local options. I’m still skeptical that it only costs $10 to offset a tonne of carbon. In the end it would be a lot cheaper then retrofitting the house or car.
Michelle F.
Alan – for what it’s worth, one of your speeches had a pretty drastic impact on my life. I was at the San Diego Green conference last year for work, and hearing your talk was one of a couple pivotal events that made me change my lifestyle for the greener. I went home inspired and started browsing online resources, starting with sightline.org. Within a couple days I came to realize just what my “normal” Southern California lifestyle was costing, personally and environmentally. Since then, I have moved back home to Wisconsin, close to family and in a neighborhood where I can and do walk to everything. I became a LEED accredited professional and convinced the only sustainability-focused engineering firm in town to hire me. I joined the local food coop, stocked up on winter clothes at Goodwill, and found a $10 used bike there while I was at it. I still have a long way to go, but hopefully this shows how your speaking can positively affect the environment, even if you fly to do it. Thanks for waking me up!
Alan Durning
Wow, Michelle F.Maybe I should keep flying.
Gary Durning
I think it’s important to realize what kind of flying one is doing. For instance Alan’s aka my Father’ flying is for buisness in which he conducts to make his living. My flying on the other hand is for vacation and visiting family, usually I fly to the east coast but also out of the country a couple times for vacation also. It would make sense for me to cut down on my flying, but my dad doesn’t really do very much unneccesary flying. If I am to cut down on my flying, I need to better alternative then spending a week on the train to get to Washington DC. The time costs of not flying make it unaffordable to take an alternative rout. I also think that nuclear energy is and should going to make a comeback in the United States. I’m sure we can devise a way to store the radioactive material properly, using innovation and commen sense.