The Greenest Thing You Can Do: Stop Going Green?
Want to know the “greenest” thing you could do this holiday season? According to Mike Tidwell of the Chesapeaker Climate Action Network, it’s to “Stop Going Green.”
In his recent editorial in the Washington Post, Tidwell argues that if we want effective and lasting solutions to environmental problems in general and global warming in particular, we need to refocus our energy away from personal lifestyle changes and towards political action.
Tidwell sees two problems with our current focus on personal greening efforts. The first is that personal greening efforts haven’t gotten us very far. The second problem is that our personal greening efforts have distracted us from the more pressing task of political action and perhaps even aided and abetted the status quo. We run our CFL fundraisers and bring our own bags to the grocery store and buy each other “eco-friendly” gifts while we continue to drill and log and mine and pave our way into oblivion.
Unfortunately I think that Tidwell is on to something here. Like Tidwell, I can “almost imagine the big energy companies secretly applauding each time we distract ourselves from the big picture with a hectoring list of “5 Easy Ways to Green Your Office.” And yes I do think that the media has inflated the importance of personal gestures like washing clothes in cold water, and canceling our junk mail. And yes we have deluded ourselves into believing that we can change the world simply by changing our light bulbs.
Simply put: we can’t solve the climate crisis by changing our lifestyle choices. Rather, we need to change the universe of possible lifestyle choices and the framework within which we make our choices. We need sound public policy that takes certain choices off of the table (like buying gas guzzlers), that makes others more accessible and compelling to more people (like living in urban environments), and that transforms others into taken-for-granted facts of life (like living in energy efficient homes).
But I do not think that we should stop going green. Unlike Tidwell I think that green lifestyle choices can support and be supported by political advocacy. As I wrote in an earlier post, I believe that there can be a synergistic relationship between individual actions and social change, especially when individual actions include both advocacy and efforts to live according to the principles for which one advocates. Instead of halting our greening efforts, let’s put them in perspective (ultimately I think this is Tidwell’s message as well).
Yes we need to make different choices. But, more importantly, we need to join our individual voices to others in advocating for political change. Put differently: we need to “choose” advocacy as the first and most important step in our efforts to “go green.” We need to make sure our elected officials step to the plate and address the environmental problems we face. And there is no problem more pressing right now than global warming.
There are lots of ways to get involved with advocacy but for climate change there is no better place to start that 1Sky, founded in 2007, not as a new organization but as “collaborative campaign” of environmental organizations, religious groups, scientists, economist, business leaders, etc. who want our leaders to tackle global warming. 1sky has developed a policy platform and spearheaded wide-reaching and effective community organizing to promote this platform. Visit 1sky to get learn more about how you can help right now, including calling President Obama to let him know that you want the US to lead the way towards a comprehensive global climate treaty at Copenhagen.
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Hi Rachel,
Good debate! But it remains just so essential to “act locally” (as in your own local household, your own car, and so on) even as you write your congressman and President Obama, etc to have the US lead in places like Copenhagen, and Mexico next year. By adopting, modeling, and advocating personal energy-efficiency actions we have an answer to those people who criticize the idea of carbon taxes (or cap and trade) as bound to inflict harm on our economy, and especially on low income households. I can honestly tell my students that in my house I use about 1/3rd the electricity of what the federal energy information agency tells me is used by a typical New England household. And no, I am not making my family sit in the dark, and actually the TV is on a fair amount especially during baseball season. So, I tell my students, I just don’t worry to much about a doubling in the price of electricity, since I have found that its not that hard to use only 1/3rd of the normal amount. Other households can do as we do too, and the price per kWh could double but their quality of life would change little.
What about low-income households, that might not be able to afford the high efficiency refrigerator and new lighting, etc? Here we can go a step further: whether we use cap and trade with auction (government gains fees during the auction of the permits) or carbon taxes (govt gets new revenues from taxation of a public bad, the polluting types of fuels) we can direct a good portion of those fees or tax revenues to making low-income households more energy efficient. The New England cap and trade system (the RGGI) has already been used in this way, with some $4 million spent on making low-income homes more energy efficient. At least one observer has dubbed this the “cap and share” approach, and I like that term a lot. Energy taxes (and cap and trade will be like a tax in its effect on electricity costs) are inherently regressive, so some kind of cap and share system is needed. There may need to be more sharing of the wealth in this respect, since the price of goods like food may also rise (a supermarket’s electric bill must be startling…on the other hand, as the new supermarket in Chestnut Hill has shown, LED lighting and high efficiency refrigeration can reduce costs in a big store too!)
So what do we advocate for, when we contact the government? More renewable power, of course. But we will also need some kind of carbon taxes eventually, because if we just reduce demand for energy, the price of carbon-rich fuels will fall, making it tempting to continue to use them to meet new demand somewhere else. And if US homes and stores, etc., continue to power its newly installed LED light bulbs with coal fired electricity (the source of about half of the nation’s electricity), we’ll just keep adding to the mess in the atmosphere, only a bit more slowly. So by sharply reducing demand per household (lighting being just the easiest piece to tackle), we make all those actions that government intervention is needed for that much easier to afford and advocate for.
So the personal and the public complement each other in many ways, but it is particularly important for educators and activists to practice both, with real zeal.
Cheers,
Eric Olson
Comment by Eric Olson — December 14, 2009 @ 7:40 pm