In a previous life I worked in local authority, and although ostensibly I worked in IT I increasingly managed to manoeuvre my role (with the blessing of the Head of IT) to become more sustainability-focussed. At the time we had a forum on the corporate intranet dedicated to greener living – one of the topics that came up was about the ethics around flying. One post that stayed with me proclaimed that it didn’t really matter to the environment whether they got on the plane or not: the plane was going to make the trip with or without them so there would be no substantial difference to the overall carbon emissions.
Unfortunately, this way of thinking appears all too common when it comes to climate-related issues. Another common variation goes something like “what difference can I make when China are building all these coal-fired power plants”.
There is a lot of interesting psychology behind how people mentally deal with the challenges around climate change, much as they might with coming to terms with any difficult issue. Denial is often the initial response, although I like to think that as a society we are generally well past that point now with the large majority of people accepting that man-made climate change is real. Instead, we have in some cases moved on to employing tactics around the uncomfortable truths of our responsibility, whether as a nation or as individuals.
One perennial example of our national abdication of responsibility is the oft-stated 50%+ reduction in UK carbon emissions since 1990. Looks impressive doesn’t it? However, it conveniently ignores the fact that we have moved our economy towards providing services instead of goods, with manufacturing outsourced to the likes of China (more coal-fire power station please!). Taking this offshoring into account, the true reduction in our emissions is probably closer to 15%. Our atmosphere obviously doesn’t care whether the UK or someone else emitted the carbon, so considering our territorial emissions in isolation is misleading at best, however it naturally makes for a “good news” story to impress the unwary.
Going back to the plane story, it highlights how collective action is made up of lots of individual decisions even if it appears that in isolation an individual’s response has no effect. At some point in time, if enough people make the decision not to fly, the operator will decide that it is not economically viable to run the service anymore and so the plane won’t depart. This won’t be the result of an identifiable individual’s decision, instead being the result of an accumulation of decisions not to fly.
An analogy in another context would be voting – it is extremely unlikely that your vote will be the deciding factor in who becomes your next MP, so why bother?… and I’m sure a lot of people think like that… however a large number of us also understand that a collective process is the only way that the democratic process can work, and one individual decision on who to vote for/whether to vote will indeed make the difference, even if it is impossible to put that action on a specific person.
It could be argued that the only way we will effect change is through cumulative action, with other examples exist in the world of technological innovation. Many (and perhaps most) ideas will fail, however for whatever reason a small proportion will succeed, and very occasionally one or two will have an enormous world-changing impact. We cannot predict in advance what will work – all we can do is play the game and spin that roulette wheel…