Moment Debate | Is Changing Our Personal Behavior Key To Saving The Planet?

INTERVIEW WITH SAUL ELBEIN

Is Changing Our Personal Behavior Key To Saving The Planet? | Yes

Is changing our personal behavior key to saving the planet?

Yes. Nearly every action we take burns things and warms the climate, leaving a more impoverished world to our children. People imagine that there’s an innovation we can do, some secret hack, “one weird trick” to save the planet, and there isn’t. We don’t need to “do something” to stop climate change—we need to stop doing climate change.

How big a role can one person play in climate change?

Exxon, China, the federal government—their actions will have far more impact than anything I can possibly do. But do you really want to say, “Wow, I live in the middle of a gigantic, tragic problem, and I sure hope someone else solves it”? Even in my progressive social circles, there’s gallows humor: I know I should be eating less beef, and I should probably put in solar, but by myself I won’t move the needle, so what’s the point? But the great social movements that change things aren’t directed from the top. I have friends with a one-year-old, and they’re doing without paper towels. If I do that too, it’ll ripple across my friend group.

We don’t need to ‘do something’ to stop climate change—we need to stop doing climate change.

Between now and about 2050, there’s a pretty narrow range of possible temperatures and their impact. But after that, the range is huge, and it totally depends on decisions we make now. That’s hard for a liberal democracy to deal with—all the costs fall on us now, all the benefits go to others in the future. And to make decisions with long-term impact, governments make estimates based on people’s short-term behavior. How do they predict whether we can reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050? They look at trends—at you and me and our choices.

Can we innovate our way out of a climate crisis?

I hear that claim a lot from my Silicon Valley friends, and it’s kind of unfalsifiable. Innovation matters. A lot of specific engineering problems need to be solved—better transmission grids, more resilient agriculture—and there’s a lot of money to be made. The government is pouring money in. But innovation won’t change the core thermodynamics of the problem: We’re burning an unsustainable amount of stuff. Once you burn something and carbon goes into the atmosphere, it takes more energy to get it out.

Should we deprive ourselves of comforts when politicians and activists fly around in jets?

It’s a solid rhetorical point. A Texas official had a mean tweet about UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently, saying, if you care so much, why are you jetting around the world? He’s a leader with worldwide responsibilities, so the carbon budget can probably stretch to his jetting to meetings. But people’s conduct is part of the message they send. If you’re looking for a reason not to change your behavior, fine. But from an ethical standpoint, does someone else acting improperly give you license to join them? Compared with corporate actions, yours won’t make much of a dent, but is that how we frame most of our moral decisions? Besides, the corporations are looking to you, too. Republicans are irate about “woke capitalism” because companies follow the culture.

Are we seeing signs of progress?

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) is a big, systemic reason for hope. It’s hard to overstate how big. Anyone who applies to build a wind or solar farm or even certain kinds of nuclear power will get a 30 percent tax credit. That’s huge. It’s also a marker of a new political and economic reality where people can make a lot of money off the energy transition. In the short term, because of the IRA, more Americans will drive electric cars, and the electric grid will be cleaner.

It’s hard to say what long-term progress will look like. Numbers are important, but they’re just political instruments. Maybe we’ll get to a place where we’re not skating on the ragged edge of existential risks like the Amazon becoming a savannah.

Does anything in Jewish ethics speak to our personal environmental choices?

I grew up Modern Orthodox in the South, so maybe I have a cockeyed view about the importance of doing things that have meaning because the whole community does them. Take the stories of “righteous gentiles” during the Holocaust. Any one of those Polish farmers could have said, “Can’t save them all!” and not saved even one. That theme runs all through Jewish ethics, as in the line from Pirkei Avot: “I am not required to complete the task, nor am I entitled to desist from it.”

There’s a story in the Talmud where Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai sees an old man planting a carob tree, which takes 70 years to bloom, and asks, “Why are you bothering?” He replies, “I came into a world with carob trees in it.” So that’s the question: What world are we planting? What fruit will our grandkids eat?

INTERVIEW WITH MONA CHAREN

Is Changing Our Personal Behavior Key To Saving The Planet? | No

Is changing our personal behavior key to saving the planet?

No. A lot of people think if they recycle and compost and buy an electric car, these things will meaningfully affect the health of the planet. I do all those things—I even compost—but they don’t make much difference. The United States and Europe have already reduced their carbon emissions quite a bit, but the vast majority of the planet’s future carbon output will come from China, India, Brazil and other countries that are still fairly low-tech and poor and want to get rich. So even if we and Europe reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2030—I’m relying here on the book Climate Future by MIT’s Robert Pindyck—it would not reduce the rate of climate change in the next few decades. Not that we shouldn’t do it—we should, eventually—but we also shouldn’t panic.

The doom scenario has been oversold, and at least one prominent climate scientist, Michael Mann, has said that doomerism is more of a threat than denialism, because people think civilization is going to end and they figure, “What’s the point of doing anything?” Nobody reputable in climate science thinks this is going to be an extinction-level event.

How big a role can one person play in climate change?

There are things we can do, but reducing your carbon footprint, while good, is not what will make the biggest difference. That would be to make people aware of the safety and importance of nuclear power. There’s so much false information, fear and irrational hostility to it, when actually it’s a bridge technology that will tide us over until either nuclear fusion becomes feasible or battery technology lets us use renewables for all our needs. The reasons we’re not investing heavily in it are not technical, they’re political. We could export cheap, reliable nuclear energy to countries such as Indonesia and India that really need it—safe, modular nuclear reactors, almost plug-and-play units, which already exist.

Can we innovate our way out of a climate crisis?

We can’t get “out” of this. The planet is warming; we have to cope. But we can cope in smart or stupid ways. Innovators are really important. We should fund them aggressively. One possibility is geoengineering—seeding the atmosphere to create more clouds and reflect back more of the sun’s radiation—and there are other large-scale ideas. Countries, governments and nonprofits can do things individuals can’t—developing new hybrid crops that can withstand moisture, or adopting policies to discourage people from building along the seacoast. I used to vacation on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where there were cheap one-level shacks on the beach. Then federal flood insurance subsidies came into effect, and now people build big, beautiful beach houses, and the damage from hurricanes is much more expensive. That’s a political problem, not a scientific one.

There are things we can do, but reducing your carbon footprint, while good, is not what will make the biggest difference.

Then there’s adaptation. For centuries, the Netherlands has been successfully using dikes and seawalls to live and thrive in a country that’s mostly below sea level. That kind of thing may be necessary in low-lying areas around the world.

Should we deprive ourselves of comforts when politicians and activists fly around in jets?

Look, everybody has to answer to their own conscience. If people are really just virtue signaling and not being serious, shame on them. But modify your personal behavior in ways that make sense, and don’t overestimate how much it will help the planet. Be a good global citizen and steward of the environment, but don’t get caught up in terror and hysteria. It’s ridiculous to think you should, for example, forgo having children because you think it won’t be possible to raise a family in the coming catastrophe. Even the worst predictions suggest that in 50 years, more people will be better off overall than today.

Are we seeing signs of progress?

We’ve already reduced CO2 emissions in the United States because of fracking—a new technology that let us get more natural gas than we thought was available. It made a dramatic difference in our national carbon footprint. There are more battery-operated cars—we should feel good about that. If more young people focus on being innovative and realistic about the future—“Let’s solve this and cope,” rather than doomsaying—that will be progress.

Does anything in Jewish ethics speak to our personal environmental choices?

There are aspects of Jewish practice, like Sukkot, whose purpose is to remind us that we are not above nature, we’re part of nature. When you eat in a sukkah you have to be able to see stars through the ceiling and know you don’t have dominion over the earth—it belongs to God. That lesson is very consonant with being a good steward of our environment.

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