Climate Change Is Caused by a Pollution Leak, and Shame Won’t Plug It
We are all the Little Dutch Boy
Photo: Hans Brinker / Wikimedia
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In a moderately popular tweet a couple days ago, the economist Robert Reich asked a question I often think about. “How about we stop framing the climate crisis around individual responsibility and start holding the fossil fuel industry accountable?”
He’s suggesting we do all this in light of the scary climate change report out earlier this week from the IPCC. This document is 1/4 of the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report. It’s a fragment because this is just the report from IPCC’s “working group” of atmospheric scientists, but there are two other such groups, along with a “task force” who all contribute. The full report will roll out piecemeal I guess until it is all officially published in 2022. More of the report was supposed to come out this year, but there were COVID delays.
So Reich is suggesting we “hold the fossil fuel industry accountable,” after reading about a report from the world’s biggest and most authoritative group of atmospheric scientists. This report doesn’t include input from the working groups on climate change impacts, and mitigation—just raw information about greenhouse gases and their effects on the climate, and that’s it. Very little about solar panels, about disproportional impacts on marginalized people, about seawalls around Manhattan and Osaka, and—more to the point—very few ideas about holding anyone accountable, but a lot about gases in the atmosphere.
And yet, the concept of accountability is sort of like a ghost haunting the report. For instance, look at this table from the report’s “Summary for Policymakers.”
It’s a table of “carbon budgets” measured in billions of tons of CO2, and the various effects those will have on average temperatures—in other words, this is how much CO2 everyone on Earth can collectively emit (to say nothing of methane and other greenhouse gases). It’s not a happy table. In the top right corner you’ll see the number 300 representing our best shot at a relatively pleasant Earth with 1.5 degrees of warming, by limiting ourselves to only 300 billion more tons. Given that we’ve driven the global temperature up by about one degree celsius already, and everything has already gone haywire, the IPCC released a report in 2018 on keeping the average temperature below 1.5 degrees, and how unlikely that was starting to look. So the climate has gone haywire, and 1.5 degrees—our best hope—means sending the climate somewhere beyond haywire. Everything else is a sort of hell-on-Earth scenario.
If we change nothing, we’ll emit those 300 billion tons in about five years, give or take. The Mercator Research Institute keeps a running timer on the carbon budget, and over there, they’re a bit more laid back, saying we have six years, four months, and 19 days until we’ve blown through all the CO2 emissions it would take to lock in 1.5 degrees of warming. So Mercator says we have until January 1, 2028. That’s a year so close to the present that it already has movie releases scheduled.
The thing about a carbon budget is, it seems to “blame” emissions on everyone on Earth, and that can feel a little unfair. Your average Camry-driving nobody, working some crappy job to try and scratch out a living, isn’t somehow culpable for climate change—at least probably not according to the classic definition of culpability in the criminal sense. And meanwhile, as Reich implies, a fossil fuel profiteer is in a much more obvious state of moral disgrace, and is therefore a better target for public disapprobation, assuming one has a burning desire to dole out disapprobation.
Greenhouse gases themselves are not moral agents. They’re just molecules. It would be nice if only bad people emitted them, so those people could be regarded as the malefactors who caused the crisis, but that’s not true either. Thus we get the idea of accountability for the powerful, rather than individual responsibility.
Individual responsibility is, famously, a red herring in the long search for climate solutions. Having said that, if we take everyone’s low-simmering guilt out of the picture completely, it clouds our understanding of what is, essentially, everyone’s problem. When it comes to big, global-scale problems, the human brain seems to have a “guilt” mode, and an “anger” mode, and not much room in between unless our brains have a highly developed “apathy” module—which I suspect some do and some don’t. So if we’re on autopilot, a lot of us tend to create climate good guys and bad guys, which I think is what Robert Reich is doing, not that I blame him.
To rehash a principle worked out in 1993 by the philosopher Henry Shue, most people—myself very much included—emit greenhouse gases to fulfill our basic needs, and these are called “subsistence emissions,” as opposed to “luxury emissions,” which, if I’m honest with myself, I also emit (and if you’re reading this on an electronic device so do you). Setting aside the work of Henry Shue, there are other contrasting types of climate sins. Some working people put food on the table by creating fossil fuels. Other, more powerful people (their bosses, for instance) perpetuate fossil fuel use to further enrich themselves.
But I suspect these discussions are all pointless now that we’re talking about a five or six year timeline. The time for haranguing people at this point for their moral failures vis-a-vis climate change has passed. In terms of personal ethics, pretty much everyone has their entrenched position, and very few people are going to budge. And globally we all just have to stop emitting greenhouse gases as quickly as possible, which we’re not even close to doing.
What I’m about to propose may or may not be helpful either but: speaking for myself, I feel like it un-clouds the issue if I first and foremost think of climate change not as a moral problem with some mushy sociological cause, but as a tangible, universally shared problem, caused not by the badness of certain people, but by, essentially, a pollution leak.
In some ways, COVID is a helpful analogy. Some of us got a little carried away finding people to blame for the pandemic—like Donald Trump, or Xi Jinping, or Tucker Carlson—but in the end, the pandemic is not caused by assholes. It is caused by an 80-nanometer wide bundle of proteins called a virus. It’s been necessary over the past couple years to rob some people of some freedoms—mandating where they could go and when, and for how long, requiring them to wear stuff on their face, and now, requiring them to be injected with experimental medications. These aren’t punishments for immorality. They’re just necessary measures we’re taking to hopefully staunch unnecessary deaths.
Individual responsibility when it comes to COVID is something we all got comfortable with pretty easily. But it’s much easier to wear a mask and get vaccinated than it is to, say, never drive or fly in a plane again. Then again, like I said before, COVID is only a good analogy in some ways. It’s obviously a very different type of problem. Society isn’t literally powered by COVID like it is by fossil fuels, so this analogy breaks down quickly under any scrutiny. Don’t try and use this analogy at home, folks. I’m a trained analogy professional.
Let’s go with this analogy instead: We’re all little Dutch boys, and the very fabric of our society is like a big dike, and it’s leaking greenhouse gases like crazy.
If you’re like me, and you think about climate change all the time, the gut-wrenching, mundane reality is that everywhere you look, there are greenhouse gas emissions, and even worse, that fossil fuels are amazing, and that the globalized economy—including all the ways we currently feed and care for people—depends on them. Things like electric cars and solar panels are getting cheaper all the time, but acquiring them and putting them to use is still out of reach for most people, and meanwhile, the vast public infrastructure we need before we can seamlessly phase out fossil fuels just isn’t there.
This also means workaday, average people all over the world are burning gasoline in full knowledge of the problem they’re adding to, but they’re doing so because they need to. And then also, sometimes because they want to. In other words, almost everyone is adding to the giant pollution leak for fun.
If I drive my gas-powered car to the store to buy diapers for my baby, how can you possibly blame me, you dick? Isn’t it obvious that compared to me, the CEO of Exxon is the real villain? But in this good-and-evil conception of the world, what am I when I drive my gas-powered car to the beach instead of walking there? Am I a villain, but only in a microscopic way compared to the CEO of Exxon? Or am I still not a villain at all, because hey, life is hard, and I deserve to go to the beach sometimes, and public transportation isn’t that good in LA, and my car is a hybrid, so it doesn’t burn like, A TON of gas, so I’m off the hook?
I think this is all silly. I’m trying to live my normal life, and someone who works on an oil rig is trying to live their normal life, and someone who lives in the Kalahari desert and has a negligible carbon footprint that comes entirely from burning twigs is trying to live their normal life, and—God help us all—on some level the CEO of Exxon is just trying to live his normal life.
Don’t get me wrong; the CEO of Exxon makes for a troubling example here, because Exxon’s behavior as a company may possibly qualify as criminal, but if you’ll concede for a moment that the CEO of Exxon, Darren Woods, eats food, and defecates, and reproduces (I know not everyone will concede these things, but they are true) then in a sense, we’re in this mess together because we’re all bundles of cells, stuck on Earth, the only place we know of where cells thrive.
Me, Darren Woods, the oil rig worker, and the Kalahari desert twig-burning person all may have varying degrees of culpability in climate change, but we all need earth to not heat up, and we’re all just kinda watching the big, global pollution leak that’s heating it up. We’re in this together, whether we acknowledge it or not, and whether we’re making it worse by driving a Camry, or making it worse by being CEO of an oil company.
As Robert Reich implied, the answer to this problem isn’t to blame ourselves—the result of that would be paralysis, and climate change is too big of a problem for us to solve individually. But it’s also not going to do anything if we get all the Darren Woodses in the world onto witness stands, which is definitely what some people want to do after reading the new IPCC report. There’s not going to be a big, courtroom climax for the climate change issue, where the biggest polluters self-righteously incriminate themselves like Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men. Fossil fuel executives aren’t going to be dragged away in handcuffs, leaving all the rest of us good people to get to work undoing all their evil. There’s no climate come-to-Jesus moment coming for anyone. Not by 2028 anyway.
Back to my analogy: greenhouse gas pollution is leaking out of its many holes in the global dike, and everyone on Earth is a Little Dutch Boy, and we all have the same amount to be gained by stopping the big leak. Except our tiny fingers aren’t going to do shit. In light of that, it’s pretty disturbing that we’re all still struggling to even conceptualize a solution to the problem, as Robert Reich—a pretty smart guy!—is trying to do.
And perversely, the individual responsibility model is what we’re currently trying to use to solve this problem—giving people morally better consumer options. Joe Biden has essentially decreed that half of all American car buyers must buy electric cars by 2030. But this is an unwise starting place not just because it’s way too slow, and not just because it puts the impetus on the individual, but also because it makes absolutely no sense as a way to plug a giant pollution leak.
Let’s look at a different leak to see why: In 2010, during the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, when everyone was watching that live feed of the oil shooting out into the Gulf of Mexico, the only solution to the problem was to plug the leak. Buying an electric car, and thinking that’s helping fixing climate change is absurd, because it doesn’t touch the leak. It’s like solving the Deepwater Horizon oil spill by going down to the beach in Louisiana, filling a puddle with saltwater, and then saying “Hey everyone I’m NOT spilling oil in here! You’re welcome!” Doing nothing at all would be just as good, if not better.
Let me be more explicit: Buying a Tesla doesn’t cut emissions—in fact, manufacturing it leaks a bunch of greenhouse gas pollution, so it isn’t even the metaphorical finger in the dike. Sticking your finger in the dike would mean preventing a car from ever being made. I’m not saying you, the reader of this newsletter, should go stop a car from being made, because I don’t know how you would go about doing that legally, and (as I’ll explain in a moment) there are bigger, more important leaks to focus on.
The more leaks we can plug, the less the world will heat up. Every time we make some consumer choice like buying an electric car, or putting solar panels on our house, that’s not actually virtuous. It’s morally neutral. We’re not just failing to stick a finger into a dike with a billion holes. At best, all we’re actually doing is not poking a new hole, and then we’re patting ourselves on the back for it.
But here’s the thing: There are tiny finger-sized holes in the dike that we can stick our fingers in until the cows come home and that won’t do much. But there are also giant, monster holes in the dike blasting away like those discharge outlets on the Three Gorges Dam.
And here’s an idea for a place to start: let’s plug up those giant pollution leaks. Let’s not start with the Teslas or the Camrys. Let’s go with the giant pollution leaks that don’t help anyone buy diapers, or take the kids to grandma and grandpa’s house. Not because of morality, but just because they’re the spots where the problem is most concentrated and easiest to solve without causing other problems.
I don’t have a policy white paper on this, so I might not have the most efficient plan in this regard, but I have some ideas. Every time a superyacht leaves a port, for instance, that’s a gargantuan pollution leak that serves no purpose. Every time a private jet takes off, that too seems like a gargantuan pollution leak that serves no purpose. The passengers of these yachts and private jets might see themselves as morally upstanding—maybe they relax on their superyachts during their time off from digging wells in the global south. That doesn’t matter. This isn’t about putting people on trial for their morality anymore. Humanity would just be plugging the biggest pollution leaks because they’re big, and we need results.
Again, I don’t know how to stop a private jet from taking off, or keep a superyacht in its port. And what’s more, it might be silly to focus on these profligate consumer choices. The effort I’m describing might be better spent on certain power plants, or pipelines, or wells. Someone else should (please!) figure out what the biggest and most immediately preventable greenhouse gas leaks are.
If we started doing this with the big leaks, and worked our way to the smaller ones, it would allow us to pad out the timeline on our carbon budget. That would in turn, maybe, put us in a situation where we can have a nice, orderly transition to green energy instead of the abrupt drop-off that’s looking more and more necessary as we continue to do nothing.
And I’ll readily admit that short of doing something illegal, I don’t know how to plug what I’m calling “leaks,” because honestly when I say “plug a leak,” I’m talking about disabling polluting devices or equipment that someone (or some company) owns. This may sound a little harsh I know. But to me, robbing people of their right to use their superyachts seems less morally problematic than preventing millions of people from visiting their elderly relatives during COVID.
Anyway, to me, these which-leak-to-plug-and-how questions are at least answerable, and if we as people can figure out the answers, we can start solving the world’s biggest problem, and fast. These are things we can do that will bring down emissions. Whereas any question about how to “start holding the fossil fuel industry accountable,” per Reich’s suggestion, is unanswerable.
And anyway, portioning out accountability is an attempt to use a calculator to solve a moral problem. The best machine we have for doing this is our extremely flawed justice system. And even if that justice system does its job, and we decide who is accountable and who isn’t, and how much, that doesn’t stop the world from heating up. Figuring out how to plug a leak, meanwhile, is a physical problem, and solving it would, y’know, fix climate change.
In the Little Dutch Boy model for climate change action, if you have to have your superyacht confiscated, it’s not because you’re a bad person. Maybe you are and maybe you’re not. But the more important issue than who is good and who is evil is that this is simply what has to be done for everyone’s sake. We don’t know what else to do, and the situation is now dire enough that this is what it’s come to. Sorry!
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