COUNTING THE COSTS OF CLIMATE IMPACTS
The very real financial costs of continued dependence on fossil fuels are growing increasingly clear. Twenty years ago, for example, Chilean engineer Luis Cifuentes and colleagues calculated that, based on the health costs alone—its impacts on illness and death, lost work days, and more—fossil fuel use in many of the world’s largest cities was no longer cost-effective. So why are we still using them? Because those who are bearing the costs of dirty, outdated sources of energy are not those who are reaping the profits. This socialization of impacts is yet another irony, considering how often climate solutions are dismissed as “socialist.”
At the global scale, Morgan Stanley estimated that climate-related disasters alone cost the world $650 billion over a three-year period ending in 2018. North America shouldered the majority of those costs, $415 billion, or 0.66 percent of the continent’s combined gross domestic product. But present-day impacts are dwarfed by the future costs of not acting on climate. Future costs are difficult to estimate, as they must be done by sector, and most estimates are limited to a few sectors. Even these, however, are staggering. One estimate by Australian academics accounted for estimated agricultural losses, sea level rise, and impacts on human health and productivity, but did not include losses from increasingly severe extreme weather events such as hurricanes or wildfires. Still, it put the annual costs of a 2°C warming to the global economy at $5 trillion and a 4°C warming at $23 trillion.
As I’ve already discussed, the suffering global warming will cause to resources and economies is not going to be parceled out equally either between or within countries. In the U.S., national GDP would drop by 10 percent under a 4°C warming, but more southern states could see larger decreases, of up to 20 percent. Globally, poor countries are already and will continue to be affected the most. While countries like Canada, Japan, and New Zealand could lose 7 to 13 percent of their possible gross domestic product (GDP) under a 4°C warming, impacts on sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia are expected to be much greater.
To put these numbers in perspective, global economic losses due to the coronavirus pandemic are estimated to reach $22 trillion between 2020 and 2025. Imagine those same losses happening every other year due to a changing climate. Then imagine what would happen if the world actually met the targets of the Paris Agreement instead. According to the WHO, Cifuentes and his colleagues were right on track. “In the 15 countries that emit the most greenhouse gas emissions,” WHO says, “the health impacts of air pollution are estimated to cost more than 4% of their GDP [whereas] actions to meet the Paris goals [that would eliminate most air pollution from fossil fuels] would cost around 1% of global GDP.” That’s a substantial amount, but still far less than the cost of air pollution alone that would be incurred by inaction.
And these estimates don’t even include the damages due to disappearing ecosystems and entire species going extinct. They only include what economists are able to price. What they can’t price might end up costing us even more, in the long run, than what they can.
WHY IT’S TIME TO MOVE ON
The bottom line is this: Humans have been using fossil fuels for a very long time—all the way back to the coal we were burning in the Middle Ages. While coal, oil, and gas have brought us significant benefits, they have done so at the expense of accumulating a substantial climate debt that is now coming due. At some point, it just makes sense to move on.
This is the approach Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Fund, took when he announced its decision to divest from fossil fuels in 2014. He said, “John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, moved America out of whale oil and into petroleum, and we are quite convinced that if he were alive today, as an astute businessman looking out to the future, he would be moving out of fossil fuels and investing in clean, renewable energy.”
This is the challenge that lies before us, and it’s not a small one. In fact, it may well be the biggest fight our civilization has ever faced. In this fight for our future, though, we’re not alone. My hand is on the boulder, pushing it down the hill. So, too, are the hands of millions of others: countries, corporations, and organizations big and small. There are individuals, too. Some are leaders many people have heard of, like Jane Fonda or Michael Bloomberg. Others work behind the scenes, like communicator Susan Hassol, who’s been helping scientists explain climate change in plain English for over thirty years, or Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr, the mayor of Freetown, Sierra Leone, who’s on a mission to plant a million trees in her city by 2022. There’s Pastor Mitch and the Evangelical Environmental Network; Farmer Matt and his Iowa climate stewards; the sixth-grade Lubbock soil team; and all the grown-up engineers busy turning waste, garbage, and even excrement into products we can all use.
We just need to get that boulder rolling faster. And that’s where you come in.
SECTION 5: YOU CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE
18 WHY YOU MATTER
“Example, whether good or bad, has a powerful influence.”
GEORGE WASHINGTON
“I’ve crunched the numbers and it’s a financial no-brainer to get solar power.”
JOHN COOK’S SKEPTICAL FATHER
“So now I know why climate change matters, and what real solutions look like,” you may be thinking. “But what does it have to do with me? I’m not a government or a multinational corporation or a famous person, and I don’t have any hope of influencing one, either. What am I supposed to do?”
One of the biggest reasons our actions matter is that what we do changes us. And the other big reason is that what we do and say changes others, too.
John Cook has a PhD in cognitive science. He’s a scientist at Monash University’s Climate Change Communication Research Hub in Melbourne, Australia. He has studied and written extensively on all the issues I talked about earlier: cognitive bias, motivated reasoning, and the backfire effect. He’s also created a phone app, a book, and a series of videos called Cranky Uncle Vs. Climate Change: How to Respond to Climate Science Deniers. Suffice to say that when it comes to science denial, he is the expert.
But John’s also a human, just like the rest of us, and he has a dad.
“My dad is a retired small business owner who’s always been quite conservative in his politics,” he told me. “I think he leaned towards climate skepticism because that’s what he would hear from the politicians he agrees with.” As a result, conversations with his father have been difficult. In fact, the zombie arguments his dad kept bringing up, all the ones I talked about in Chapter 4, were what motivated John to create Skeptical Science. It’s the educational website that enumerates and thoroughly debunks common climate change myths that I sent to my uncle back in Chapter 1. Did this massive avalanche of scientific data convince John’s dad? By now, you can probably guess: no, it did not.
John’s father lives in Gympie, in rural Queensland, Australia. In 2009, the government wanted to encourage people to install solar panels on their roofs by offering incentives. You would get paid twice what you were paying for electricity for any power that you sent back to the grid. “I had solar installed at my house,” John said, “and when I mentioned this program to my dad, he was initially resistant, probably because I was the one saying it and it seemed like a green-y thing to do.”
Then one day he came to John and said, “I’ve crunched the numbers and it’s a financial no-brainer to get solar power.” His dad is a thrifty man, a fiscal conservative. Saving money is one of his core values, so he had sixteen panels installed on his roof, a three-kilowatt system. Every time he received a check from the electricity company, he would call John to tell him about it. “He estimated that every year the panels saved him twelve hundred dollars. He never paid another electricity bill in that house,” John said. Having solar panels wasn’t just consistent with his values—they were turning him into an even better version of himself, thriftier and even more conservative (in the true sense of the word). They enhanced rather than challenged his identi
ty.
A few years later over dinner, John’s dad told him, unprompted, in the course of their conversation, “Of course humans are causing global warming.” John nearly fell out of his chair. It was the last thing he’d expected, having gotten nowhere on this subject with his father for years. When John asked, dumbfounded, “What changed your mind?” he was even more surprised by his dad’s response: “What are you talking about? I’ve always thought this.”
As a cognitive psychologist, John felt like he was living in a surreal version of one of his own studies. His dad had denied the science for years, and now he was denying that he’d ever denied it.
Given the importance of solution aversion in driving denial, John suspects that when his dad shifted his behavior to be more climate friendly—even though he did it for financial reasons—it precipitated a change in attitude. His dad’s perception of who he was had been altered, and at such a fundamental level that he literally couldn’t recall that he’d changed.
Our actions reinforce, deepen, and can even irrevocably alter our sense of who we are. Not only that, but what we do changes others, too. And the contagion of seeing others act, says behavioral economist Robert Frank, can spread “more like outbreaks of measles or chicken pox than a process of rational choice.” The difference is that, unlike coronavirus, behavioral contagion can be a good thing.
TRACKING SOLAR CONTAGION
In 2015, two geographers noticed solar panels popping up on houses in their small U.S. state of Connecticut. Curious, they set out to see if they could figure out what predicted who had them. Would they be on richer homes? Or in areas with higher population density?
Early adopters of solar panels tend to be people who are interested in innovative technology, who find an installer they trust, and who think having solar panels will benefit them. But once an early adopter made their choice, the geographers found, a cluster would spring up around them. Having solar panels on a house near you, where you could see them and talk to a real live person who had them, it turned out, was the biggest predictor of whether you’d get them yourself. Why? Because it brought down the “cost” of information. You didn’t have to go somewhere or find a new person to talk to; they were right there beside you and, like John’s dad, ready and eager to bend your ear with all the information you needed to make the same choice they had. Soon the Connecticut study was being replicated—in Sweden, in China, and in Germany, where they actually put a number on it: rooftop solar installations were most influential, they found, on neighbors who lived within one kilometer. A Swiss study went one step further and recommended that such hot spots be deliberately created to spur adoption.
By 2020, 21 percent of homes in Australia had rooftop solar. Government mandates in the state of California and the city of South Miami mean that most new homes there must have rooftop solar, too. In 2021, the global rooftop solar industry was valued at nearly $40 billion worldwide and expected to pass $80 billion by 2027.
From where I live in West Texas, all the way across to southern California, we receive the most solar energy of anywhere in the U.S. Rainy days are as rare here as a sunny winter day in Vancouver or London. We get so much sun that, using presently available technology, I’ve calculated you’d need to cover little more than a square area one hundred miles per side with solar photo-voltaics—which would fit easily right between Lubbock and Amarillo—to supply the entire U.S. with electricity. That’s similar to the area currently being used nationwide for maple syrup production, golf courses, and airports combined.I
Five years ago, Texas wasn’t even in the top ten of commercial solar energy producing states. Fast-forward to 2020 and every few weeks, it seemed, there was a new update on solar in Texas. In November, a $1.6 billion Invenergy project near Dallas was announced to supply A&T and Google. With seven thousand megawatts of installed solar (and an estimated fifteen thousand more on the way in the next five years), Texas is now the second largest solar producing state in the U.S.
Similarly, five years ago I didn’t know of more than one or two homes in our city of over a quarter million people that had rooftop panels. In Texas we didn’t have enough early adopters, it turned out, for clusters to form. Then, just before Christmas two years ago, I got a notice saying that my credit record had been pulled. (This may seem like a non sequitur but stay with me here.) I knew I hadn’t applied for anything, so it could only mean one thing: I’d had my identity stolen. I frantically called my husband—since we share our credit cards—but before I could freeze them, he said, “Don’t. It’s okay.”
“What do you mean, okay?” I asked.
“I can’t tell you; it would ruin the surprise.”
“What surprise?”
It took a few days before he relented and told me: being a tech-savvy person who likes saving money, which fits the profile of an early adopter, he’d crunched the numbers, completed the negotiations, and bought us solar panels for Christmas. He had the added advantage of knowing how happy I’d be, and I was. I literally teared up with joy when he told me of the surprise gift he’d planned, even when he confessed that the electrician had accidentally put his leg through our bedroom ceiling while installing the panels. And here’s the best part: he’d purchased them from a local company that uses panels manufactured by a company called Mission Solar in San Antonio. The last time oil prices tanked and many of the people working the rigs in West Texas lost their jobs, this company took in oil workers and retrained them to manufacture solar panels. Mission Solar is part of the just transition movement—and because we bought from them, we are, too.
Having the panels, and knowing who we got them from, gives me something to talk about that I love. Now three other people we know have them, and within six months, there was another set of solar panels on an unknown neighbor’s house, one block over from us. Today, I know a local business and a church that are considering them, too.
Yes, solar panels cut my carbon emissions, but they also make me feel empowered, as if what I do matters. They gave me a sense of efficacy.
BUILDING EFFICACY
Stanford psychologist Albert Bandura has been studying human behavior since before I was born. In 1977, he proposed—and proved—that people change their behavior if they feel self efficacy, which he defined as “the belief in one’s capabilities to organize and execute a course of action.” “Feel” is not really the right word, as efficacy is not technically an emotion. Rather, psychologists refer to it as a cognitive process. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that if you think you can do something, like hiring your neighbor’s installer to put some panels on your roof, you’re more likely to. And if you think what you do will make a difference (for example, you’ll save money and feel good about yourself), that’s even better.
Surveys of people in different countries show that people’s sense of efficacy when it comes to climate change is not high. Even those of us who are concerned about climate change often feel as though we aren’t able to make much of a difference. In the U.S., one survey showed that over 50 percent of Americans feel helpless when they think about climate change. Another survey found that more than 50 percent “don’t know where to start” when it came to climate action.
Some barriers arise because we simply don’t know enough. We go to the home improvement store and stand in the lightbulb aisle, staring at unfamiliar-looking bulbs. What type of LED should I use to replace the old 60-watt incandescent in my favorite reading lamp? The last one I tried made me feel like I was in an interrogation room.
In other cases, we might not even be able to access the information we need to make the best decision. Eating locally grown food typically has a lower carbon footprint, so you might download an app that tracks “food miles”—how far your food has to travel from farm to fork. But there are exceptions: food produced nearby but transported by truck may have a larger footprint than food produced far away but transported by rail. How do you sort out which is which when you’re at the grocery store?
And th
en you find out that what you eat is far more important than how it gets to you, so you cut out meat from your diet. But then you learn that other animal products, like yogurt and eggs, are nearly as bad. You cut those out, too—and then you realize that your dog is eating even more meat than you ever did. In fact, the food consumed by your average-sized dog, not a particularly large dog, just an average one, has an average annual carbon footprint almost a quarter that of a typical passenger car’s. What!?
Other barriers arise because we have different priorities. We may live in a big city with access to public transit. We still prefer to drive to work because it makes it easier to drop our child off at school, or maybe we just like to spend our time alone. We’ve read articles about people who can fit their annual nonrecyclable waste into a single jar (a jar?), but the time required to eliminate all that waste from our lives feels prohibitive and overwhelming.
Still other barriers are logistical or financial. We may dream of having an electric car, but we simply can’t afford it. Or we’d like to stop flying—or fly only in biofuel-powered planes—but our job requires at least some in-person travel or we live across the continent, or even across the world, from our families.
But by a mile, the biggest barriers are emotional and ideological. We may be concerned, worried, or alarmed about climate change, but we don’t have a sense of efficacy. As clinical psychologist Rubin Khoddam points out, we humans constantly fall victim to the motivation trap, waiting until we feel like it until we act. In fact, he says, “valued action,” meaning action that is consistent with your values, “comes first,” and motivation follows.
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