Don't Even Think About It (30 page)

Professional climate scientists and campaigners (myself included) assume that our privilege will immunize our children from the worst impacts. For example, Peter Kelemen, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University, expresses a relief that his own children are “lucky, among the 3 percent, talented, athletic, well educated.” It will, he says, be the “people with less opportunity who find there is nothing they can do to help avoid destruction, displacement and despair.”

We parents also prefer not to acknowledge that having children also involves making a huge contribution to climate change. A child in an industrialized economy will triple its parents’ footprint; adding 9,441 metric tons of CO2. It is on this basis that a childless friend—coincidentally the former campaigns director of a major environmental organization—justifies her annual flights to New Zealand.

So, the choice to have children compels us to write a narrative around climate change in which the overall prognosis becomes more optimistic, our own emissions become less significant, we become less vulnerable, and we accept a world of extreme inequality of future outcomes on their behalf.

And, of course, people with children can simply immerse themselves in the daily routine of tears, laughter, and the hunt for the missing shoe and put climate change into that category of tricky challenging things they would prefer not to talk about.

Even if we do not accept the moral responsibility, we are still preparing a set of alibis to defend ourselves against any future challenge: I did not know, I couldn’t do anything, that was how things were, I did the best I could.

Or we will apologize. Institutional apologies have become a ritual in recent years. Bill Clinton apologized to the Hawaiians, African Americans, and Japanese Americans. The British have a culture based on insincere apology and, in recent years, Queen Elizabeth has said how sorry she is to the Sikhs and the Maoris—who still flashed their bottoms at her anyway. In return, the Fijians of Navatusila village have apologized most sincerely for killing a British missionary 140 years ago and eating “everything but his boots.” Psychotherapist Ro Randall sees this fashion for political apology as directly linked to apocalyptic climate narratives. She says that both show a fear of vengeance, by people or by nature itself, and that in her view, apologies are directly related to a narrative of reparation emerging from guilt and loss.

However, it is also possible that future generations may not blame us at all—they may very well follow our lead and adopt exactly the same strategy of inactivity or indifference. For the moral philosopher Stephen Gardiner, it is this intergenerational element of climate change that makes it so morally dangerous. As he says, “each generation bears the full burden of previous inaction but will derive no benefit from their own action.”

This is not to say that moral appeals based on intergenerational rights will not work, but they need to be carefully tailored to different values and cultures. In focus groups, Republicans strongly dislike moral demands to limit climate change but respond far more positively to messages about reducing our use of fossil fuels to provide a better life for our children and grandchildren.

But this does not mean that they respond well to attempts to put the two messages together. In fact, there are serious dangers that they could strongly resent the accusation that they are damaging their children’s future. As the British climate denier and blogger James Delingpole says, “Kids can’t sleep because they’re so worried about the pets that are going to be drowned by the carbon monster.” It’s that drowning puppy bobbing to the surface again—which is not surprising, as the disastrous bedtime story commercial it references was clearly drawing on the “What did you do in the Great War, Daddy?” trope.

Speaking of which, despite its appeal as a piece of period design, the poster was not considered successful propaganda and was, by all accounts, loathed by the foot soldiers in the trenches—so much so that the artist Lumley later came to disown it. What really persuaded people to sign up was the campaign by Field Marshal Lord Kitchener to raise “Pals battalions” in which friends could join up, then die, alongside one another. Climate advocates would do well to remember that in the deadly social experiment of army recruitment, it was the combination of peer pressure, trusted communicators, social norms, and in-group loyalty that persuaded people to sign up—not a moralistic slogan, however clever it seemed to be.

36

The Power of One

How Climate Change Became
Your
Fault

What makes climate change stand
out from
all
other global problems is that our individual contributions can be measured down to the last gram. We cannot identify our contribution to any other wicked problem, such as poverty, terrorism, or drug abuse—let alone quantify it. But with climate change, we can say with confidence whether our contribution is going up or down, how it compares with that of other people, and what changes would be needed to reduce it. Even though we do not make our cars, we still choose where to drive them. Even though we do not grow beef or asparagus, we still have the choice where and when to buy them, or whether to buy them at all.

The emissions that cause climate change result from decisions taken at
multiple
stages negotiated through the market. Ignoring wellhead production is a foolish error, but it is no less foolish to ignore the role of consumer decisions. People often feel powerless in the face of climate change, when, in fact, there is no other issue over which they have more personal control or involvement. Two-thirds of people in the United States and the United Kingdom and even more in Australia agree that individuals can and should actively reduce their personal contribution to climate change.

What is more, changing these personal behaviors may be the key to changing attitudes. According to “self-perception theory,” behaviors are an important cue for self-image. So, if someone can be persuaded to adopt environmental behaviors, she may over time come to identify herself as someone with an environmental worldview. Green is as green does. And green does as green is.

On this basis, in the early 2000s, environmental organizations began to focus increasingly on the personal responsibility of consumers for climate change. It was a natural step for them, combining their long-held interests in consumer advocacy, personal responsibility, and ethical lifestyles.

To bring it home, they distilled personal actions into lists of household hints: some of them significant (reducing commuting, installing insulation and efficient heating), some of them marginal (not idling the car and turning appliances off standby), and some of them virtually irrelevant (not using plastic bags and unplugging cell phone chargers). The inclusion of such minor changes was supported by a large and verbose academic literature that, in its own jargon, argued that these “easy” steps could “spill over” into larger behaviors and that “hooking people with a small request” provides a “foot in the door,” whereby they can be ushered onto the “virtuous escalator.”

Books proliferated telling people to Measure their Carbon Footprint, get Low-Carbon, become Eco-Friendly, Save the Earth for a Fiver, Tread Lightly on the Earth, Kick the Fossil Fuel Habit, go on a Climate Diet. Or go on a Carbon Detox—the title of my own contribution to this short-lived and rapidly remaindered eco-tastic subgenre.

Maybe we all went too far and, in our eagerness to find homey messages that would engage people, we fell into the wicked trap of limiting climate change through the solutions we proposed.
An Inconvenient Truth
posited climate change as an existential threat yet petered out into a string of small options—changing lightbulbs, inflating tires, and driving a bit less. The Live Earth concerts in 2007 sought to fuel a global movement yet ended up promoting handy household tips. Six months after the concerts, I received a perky e-mail from the Live Earth team telling me how I could “re-use the
heart-shaped candy boxes left over from Valentine’s Day as picture frames, earring holders, or backpacks for dolls.”

It was not long before governments started picking up on the theme. In the United States, lists of simple actions to prevent climate change were promoted by
the Environmental Protection Agency, the Federal Highway Administration, state programs such as Cool California, and school curricula. The
New York Times
reported that kids, fired up on school eco-programs, had become “the little conscience sitting in the back seat,” lecturing their parents about their behaviors and chanting, “Every day is Earth Day.”

The unlikely leaders in this field were the thoroughly ungreen governments of Canada, Ireland, and Australia. In the early 2000s all three were intoxicated by an economic boom built on new roads, airports, and fossil fuel development. They duly ripped up their international commitments under the Kyoto Protocol or, in the case of Australia, refused to ratify it at all. And yet, strangely, all three countries then launched high-profile national campaigns to empower their citizens to take
personal
action against the global threat of climate change.

In Ireland, the Power of One campaign promoted the “breathtakingly simple idea” that each individual can “make a difference.” In Australia, a twenty-million-dollar Climate Clever campaign targeted every household in the country. The Canadian government poured forty-five million dollars into national television ads for its One-Tonne Challenge, in which the comedian Rick Mercer harangued ordinary citizens to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions, shouting, “C’mon! We’re Canadian! We’re up for a challenge!”

On the face of it, these small steps appeared to be a means to avoid the political partisanship that bedevils climate change. Political action is messy and participatory. This seemed much more benign—speaking to values of national unity while enabling consumers to make well-informed decisions. We will fight it in the malls, we will fight it in the catalogs.

But that does not mean that when the governments focused on personal responsibility, they were not being political: They were being
extremely
political and framing climate change within a wider neo-liberal ideology that promotes private property rights and free markets. As the left-wing sociologist Ulrich Beck said, “We are all now moral entrepreneurs laden with personal responsibility but with no access to the actual decisions.”

Worse still, these campaigns did not actually work. People were not up for the challenge at all and were certainly keeping well away from that virtuous escalator. Independent evaluations, now buried deep in the archives, found that the Power of One campaign was “only capturing those who were already converted” and the One-Tonne Challenge had achieved no change at all in overall energy use. In Australia, people became even less climate clever and a third fewer people considered climate change to be their most important issue after the campaign than they had before.

No one paid much attention to these brutal evaluations because these campaigns had never really been concerned with reducing emissions. In reality, they were a narrative gambit: to define climate change as a problem that lay at the very furthest end of the tailpipe in the purchasing decisions of the individual. Behind their uplifting slogans, and their appeal to national unity, what they were really saying was “climate change is
your
fault.”

And here lies the problem. As soon as one creates responsibility, one creates blame. Blame creates resentment, and talk of responsibility in the home makes that resentment very personal indeed. What none of us fully appreciated at the time was how readily these anodyne messages would be mobilized to fuel people’s sectarian prejudices.

Conservatives in particular loathed being told what to do by governments and liberal environmentalists. In one revealing experiment by a team at the University of Pennsylvania, many conservatives refused to buy a low-energy lightbulb once the packaging carried a sticker reading “protect the environment.” At my Texas Tea Party meeting, Craig recalled how he challenged an environmentalist by saying, “You’re on this computer and you’re using electricity made from the coal that you claim you hate, dug out of the ground by the man who you are telling he isn’t allowed to eat meat.” He received the loudest cheer of the night.

There is a deep irony in this. Research by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt into moral foundations of different worldviews found that it is conservatives who have the greatest moral emphasis on personal responsibility and that it is liberal environmentalists, with their highly individualized values, who are actually the group least suited to working together for a shared goal.

It was not just conservatives—left-wing trade unionists were just as repelled. Running focus groups with activists from one of Britain’s largest trade unions, I found that few things irritated them more than the phrase “lifestyle change,” which for them was poisoned by an association with middle-class environmentalism and government buck-passing. There was something very wrong here: Surely, I thought, trade unionists, of all people, would respond to a call for collective action against a common threat?

Somehow, this was all the wrong way around. Those campaigns urging people to take personal responsibility and work together to “save the planet” were saying the wrong things to the right audience and the right things to the wrong audience. So much for the hope that small personal lifestyle changes might shift people’s attitudes and bring people together; if anything, they seem to reinforce people’s prejudices and drive them apart.