IV. Never mind that, along with Americans, Australians, and Saudi Arabians, Canadians have some of the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world, and the country is number nine on the list of top ten cumulative carbon emitters since 1750.
V. In contrast to Catholics, conservative Protestants, like those in my audience at the university, are not generally opposed to birth control.
13 CARBON AND THE COMMON GOOD
“We… no longer feel in control of our everyday lives. As we retreat to smaller circles of kith and kin, the Commons goes to seed.”
ERIC LIU, YOU’RE MORE POWERFUL THAN YOU THINK
“Everyone was surprised how many planets we’d need to support our lifestyle.”
MIDDLE SCHOOL GYM TEACHER, AFTER ATTENDING ONE OF KATHARINE’S TALKS
Back when the number of humans could be measured in hundreds of thousands, even millions, the planet was, for all intents and purposes, infinite. Its atmosphere would absorb any pollution, its water was plentiful, its oceans were full of fish, and if food stocks started to run out or land area became insufficient, there was usually more to be discovered.
Over time, the planet stayed the same size. Humans, on the other hand, expanded exponentially. Our consumption habits, particularly in rich countries, expanded even more. Today, nearly every acre of arable land is already parceled out, or home to increasingly endangered ecosystems and species. Water supplies are already insufficient in many parts of the world and are becoming increasingly tenuous as our groundwater withdrawals increase. Overfishing has already led to the collapse and near disappearance of many key food stocks, from Newfoundland’s cod to Atlantic bluefin tuna. Occasionally we can roll back the clock: the demand for whale oil for lamps drove whales nearly to extinction before they were saved, ironically, by fossil fuels and electricity. But increasingly, those stories are few and far between compared to those that illustrate, for the hundredth time, our mismanagement of our commons.
THE TRAGEDY OF THE CLIMATE COMMONS
It might be hard to picture something as big as our planet as a shared commons, but this simple metaphor explains many of the challenges of our global resource problem today. It comes from the idea that, during the Middle Ages, many English villages had a common area, or green, where local small farmers grazed their livestock. The best way for an individual farmer to use the green to maximum benefit would be to graze as many animals as possible on it. But if everyone did that, the land would be overgrazed and soon would yield no grass for anyone. As these English farmers recognized, shared land must be grazed according to the common good, limiting the number of beasts each farmer grazes by mutual consent to ensure the land continues to provide for all.
The fundamental concept of a “commons” as a shared resource was introduced by economist William Forster Lloyd in 1833. It wasn’t popularized, though, until 1968 when another economist, Garrett Hardin, coined the phrase “tragedy of the commons” to describe what would happen if people exploited a shared resource such as common grazing land guided only by self-interest. His point was that our planet is a similarly shared space, but that we had failed to recognize that it also has limits.
Both men used this useful concept to draw some extremely offensive conclusions regarding optimal strategies to manage the commons, however.I It took fifty more years and a woman to prove them wrong. In 2009, economist Elinor Ostrom received the Nobel Memorial Prize for showing that real-life commons can be, and in fact often are, managed effectively without need for top-down regulation. The resources need to be well defined (e.g., local fishing stocks, shared grazing land, collection of firewood) and managed by a local community who understand the risk of depleting that resource.
In the case of the planet, however, and humanity’s carbon emissions, these conditions are difficult to meet. When the commons is not well defined (which it isn’t in this case, because the “commons” essentially includes this entire planet) and is not managed by a tight-knit community that understands what it has to lose by mismanaging its resources (which it isn’t, because the “community” in this case includes everyone), its sustainable management often requires formal regulations.
WHY WE LACK INCENTIVE TO ACT
Shouldn’t our planet’s atmosphere, its fresh waters, its oceans, and its land surface, the resources we can’t exist without, be protected? Most of us would say, “Yes,” validating Ostrom’s findings. Then how did the simple issues of environmental protection, pollution prevention, and climate change become so polarized?
It’s undeniable that the most rapid growth in income in the history of human civilization was brought about when the combustion of fossil fuels replaced human and animal labor. But that has led to the myth that we must choose between the environment and the economy: as if an economy could float around in outer space without the resources the Earth provides. This conflict is obvious in the U.S. where distrust of government, regulation, and taxes has been burned into the collective cultural psyche since the Revolutionary War and respect for the free market has been elevated by many to the status of a doctrine.
In other countries where we have similarly benefitted from the consumption of fossil fuels and the destruction of our global commons, we might not distrust our governments as profoundly as so many do in the U.S.II However, we value our comfortable lives and are concerned that government intervention may threaten them. We may feel as though those advocating for better management of our global commons want to rip the carpet out from under our feet, leaving us cold and uncomfortable for the hypothetical benefit of people we don’t know and aren’t connected with. We view solutions as posing an imminent threat, to our quality of life or our jobs or the economy. Why? Because as humans, again, we tend to value things more if we fear they will be taken away.
Individually, as the tragedy of the commons describes, we don’t perceive an incentive to act. I say perceive, because of course there is a great deal of incentive to act; we just don’t see it. The Loss of Nature and the Rise of Pandemics is a prescient report by the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). It was published in March 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic sped around the world. It points the finger at humanity’s overexploitation of nature, including habitat biodiversity loss, as one of the factors behind zoonoses and the spread of new diseases. Few people realize that everyday pollution of air, water, or soil is responsible for one in six premature deaths worldwide. And when disaster strikes, who pays to rescue families from the roofs of flooded buildings, replace washed-out bridges, compensate farmers for crop losses, and provide other forms of disaster relief? Each one of us does, through our taxes and our rising insurance premiums, as well as the costs we face individually for Sheetrock after a hurricane, trucking in water and buying hay bales to feed cattle during a drought, and the devaluation of our home if it’s located in a high-risk area for flooding.
But because we’re not paying directly for our personal exploitation of the environment, our pollution of the air, water, and soil, the accumulation of millions of tons of plastic waste in the oceans each year, and our heat-trapping gas emissions, we each individually lack the incentive to reduce our impact on the global commons that is the Earth. So is it any surprise that there is such a rancorous, ideological reaction to solutions that, by definition, require collective action? If we can’t see the risks clearly and up close, why would we act?
WHY IT’S NOT JUST A PEOPLE PROBLEM
Almost every time I talk about the challenge of managing our global commons, there’s at least one person who says, “Well, there’s an obvious solution—population control.” And this idea is nothing new. Enforced limits to “breeding,” as Lloyd called it, were one of the objectional conclusions both he and Hardin drew from their work. But, as Betsy Hartmann points out in her classic Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control, “high birth rates are often a distress signal that people’s survival is in danger.” It’s poverty and patriarchy that are responsible for high birth rates, she argues
, not the other way around. As women’s status improves, birth rates fall.
So while it’s tempting for male theorists in rich countries with low birth rates to lean back in the armchair of life and opine on such issues, the reality of a woman’s life, particularly in low income countries with the highest population growth, is very different. It’s not about giving women fewer choices; it’s giving them more. The approach of enforcing control also ignores the fact that global resources are not used in a manner that is either equal or fair. “Overconsumption by the rich has far more to do with climate change than population growth of the poor,” Hartmann explains. “The countries where birth rates remain relatively high have among them the lowest carbon emissions per capita on the planet.”
To quantify inequalities in the distribution and use of the Earth’s resources, in 1998 Swiss sustainability expert Mathis Wackernagel and Canadian urban planning researcher William Rees developed a measure called the ecological footprint. It can be calculated for countries or individuals. The footprint defines the resources needed to support one person, measured in “global hectares.” These are units of equivalent global biocapacity, roughly the amount of average-quality land each person needs to provide all the food, energy, and other materials that they use.
People in Canada and the U.S., for example, have an average ecological footprint of around 8 global hectares. The average Australian is a 7, the average Brit is a 4. I’m pretty frugal for a North American but even mine is a 5, according to the Global Footprint Network’s calculator. In China, they average 3.7; in India, 1.2; and people in countries like Pakistan, Mozambique, and Malawi, less than 1. If everyone in the world lived like the average North American, we would need five planet Earths to support them. As it is, we are already running at a global deficit of 1.1 global hectares per person, using up resources faster than they can be replaced. That’s the very definition of “unsustainable.”
When we look at carbon emissions, the discrepancy is even more stark. The average American emits about 16 metric tons of carbon dioxide into the Earth’s atmosphere annually. Australians produce even more, 17 tons per year, while Canadians produce about the same, 16 tons per year. This represents about four times the global average. It’s the amount of carbon dioxide that would be emitted by driving a midsized car one and a half times around the circumference of the planet (60,000 km or nearly 37,000 miles, for reference) once each calendar year. It’s the same amount that would be generated by three people living in the U.K., where per capita emissions average 5.5 tons per year, or by twenty-four people in Zimbabwe, and more than forty people living in Yemen today. All told, according to Oxfam, the richest 10 percent of people in the world are responsible for over 50 percent of global emissions. The richest 1 percent produce twice as much carbon as the poorest 50 percent. And while this analysis puts the focus on individuals, in practice the biggest polluters, proportionally, are the big oil and gas corporations, who have a vested interest in encouraging people to continue to burn fossil fuels. And the biggest single institutional consumer of fossil fuels in the world? It’s the U.S. military.
LET THEM (STOP) EATING CAKE
In the last chapter I talked about how just one hundred corporations have been responsible for 70 percent of heat-trapping gas emissions since 1988. I also mentioned how, rather than planning for a carbon-free future, some decided to invest in muddying the waters and discrediting the science instead. So you probably won’t be surprised to hear that it didn’t take long—seven years to be precise—before one of these companies recognized the potential of the ecological footprint concept to shift the blame.
In 2005, the individual carbon part of the footprint was extracted and popularized by a British Petroleum (BP) advertising campaign. It included a tool you could use to measure your (not their) carbon footprint, and what a success it was! This concept is now so endemic that I use it myself, to better align how I live with what I believe. But as important as individual choices are, they aren’t going to solve this problem. Being a scientist, I’ve calculated this.
Individual choices control at most 40 percent of emissions in wealthy countries. If you assume that the 28 percent of people in the U.S. who are Alarmed about climate change are willing—and financially able—to cut their carbon footprint in half, that would mean no more than a 6 percent drop in U.S. emissions. Add in everyone who’s Concerned, and you can get to 10 percent, maybe. So it’s hard to see BP’s move as anything but cold-blooded in the extreme: inducing guilt in the public so we’ll be too busy blaming ourselves and one another to notice while the richest companies in the world continue to grow their bottom line at the planet’s expense.
Thankfully, perspectives are starting to shift. A few years ago, I was checking into my flight at London Heathrow Airport on my way home from one of my bundled trips. I couldn’t help overhearing the conversation of the woman checking in beside me. She was explaining to the agent that she worked for BP and had been in London for meetings.
“What’s BP?” the woman at the desk asked.
“Well, it used to stand for British Petroleum,” the traveler explained, “but they’ve changed the name because we don’t just do petroleum anymore.”
And, sure enough, the walls around the airport’s security checkpoint were plastered with giant advertisements from BP heralding our solar- and algae-based future, featuring images of children running through green fields under sunny blue skies. In 2020, they became the first major oil and gas company to announce a carbon-neutral goal by 2050. It’s a significant sea change, publicly committing to alter their entire business model. I recognize them for it, and I am grateful for all who applied pressure both from the inside and the outside to make it happen. How and even if they’ll get there is still anyone’s guess, though—and meanwhile, other oil and gas companies continue to employ the blame-and-shame-the-consumer approach today.
In 2019, for example, the CEO of Shell—number three on the richest companies list and number six on the carbon emitters list—told a group of CEOs in London that eating strawberries when they are out of season and buying so many clothes is the problem. “I have three daughters, they are all quite fashion conscious,” he said. “I like to point out to them, having something new for every season four times a year is creating quite a significant ecological footprint, have you realised that? Because they are all about climate change.”
It’s true that the fast fashion and food industries could do with a hard look at their ecological and carbon footprints. But strawberries and clothing? That’s what the CEO of the company that has produced over 8,000 million tons of carbon emissions, emissions that it would take 200 billion trees to remove from the atmosphere, says we need to do, to address climate change? And even if he said Shell was going to plant those trees, which he didn’t, we’d need more than five times the abandoned agricultural land in the world just to offset his company’s emissions.
Solving climate change and resource scarcity is not as simple as the analogy of the global commons might make it out to be. Even if the human population were somehow able to be cut in half, say by supervillain Thanos in the Marvel movie Avengers: Infinity War, but everyone remaining still lived like the average North American, we’d still need two and a half planets to supply all our needs. If human population were somehow, heaven forbid, reduced to only 10 percent of its current level, but those were the 10 percent richest in the world (as Hardin’s “lifeboat ethics” would argue) and the fossil fuel industry continued on their current trajectory, we wouldn’t even cut carbon emissions in half. As appealing as “population control” and personal responsibility can be to some, the math just doesn’t add up. It’s the system we all live in that must change.
I. Their proposed solutions included to “limit breeding” and practice “lifeboat ethics” that prioritized space in the lifeboat for the rich over the poor. Hardin also opposed nonwhite immigration and multiculturalism, and expressed eugenic views.
II. In fact, recent polls indi
cate that Americans’ distrust in government continues at historic highs, and that many trust businesses more than they trust the government. But with their short-term perspective on quarterly returns, many businesses aren’t best equipped to manage the global commons.
14 THE CLIMATE POTLUCK
“Walking out is not an option. We don’t get to give up. This planet is the only home we’ll ever have.”
MARY ANNAÏSE HEGLAR, ALL WE CAN SAVE
“I don’t think the U.S. should be part of the Paris Agreement—it’s unfair.”
AMERICAN MAN TO KATHARINE, SPEAKING OF CHINA
At the Paris climate conference in 2015, it struck me that a climate agreement is like an international potluck dinner. Just as each guest’s culture, history, and resources are expressed through the food they bring to share, in the same way each country comes to the negotiating process with its own set of values, goals, resources, and expectations. No one person brings a complete meal, but once all the food is assembled, there is supposed to be enough for everyone.
Growing up, I loved church potlucks. Toronto is one of the most international cities in the world, and our congregation reflected that. Instead of the usual Hayhoe Sunday dinner of well-done beef and roasted vegetables, there would be Egyptian baklava, Jamaican beef patties with turmeric and suet crusts, whole-grain German bread, genuine Italian lasagne, and Caribbean rum cake so alcoholic we had to steal bites when my mom wasn’t looking.
In a similar way, in 2015 each country brought their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to Paris. Before setting their INDCs, they reviewed their emissions and reduction options to determine how much action they could agree to, and of what type. For example, India planned to replace all incandescent lamps with LEDs and accelerate its renewable energy growth; the EU had already capped carbon emissions from heavy industry; and Bhutan was preserving its forests. In addition to calculating carbon sinks and storage, many rich nations also estimated the amount they could contribute to poorer nations suffering the impacts of climate change.
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