My impression has been that switching a flight for a drive to the same destination doesn't actually save carbon emissions - though it does depend on occupancy. (Planes are usually close to full, while cars usually have one or two people in them, so planes are usually a bit less CO2 emissions per passenger-mile - though four people sharing a car would be better than those four people buying tickets on the same flight.)
I don't know if the numbers I've seen here reflect the growing electrification of cars, so it's possible that driving is now better than flying in terms of emissions.
A big difference would be going by train instead of flying. Not many good options in north America, but if you can, it really is a great way to travel.
Yep, the reason flying is such a big contributor to planetary warming is the travel distances that it enables rather than it being a particularly high emission mode per unit distance.
Electrify everything and keep cleaning up the grid.
For the "what can I do" question, for most people, Saul Griffith recommends (besides voting) making the right 5(?) "kitchen table decisions", to replace your home's gas users with electric, using heat pumps, EVs etc..
I don't really disagree with the broad sentiment of AI energy inpact but to nitpick, I think the idea of small things adding up is more about the collective impact of many different small activities together. If an extremely wasteful person can rationalize wasteful energy use by breaking it into finer chunks of "little things" you see how it doesn't really make sense. If you spend every second of your day simultaneously doing thousands or millions of those "little things",with no regard for the systems they are a part of, then you lose sight of the real impact. I guess it depends whether the little thing you're talking about is one grain of sand in a beach or just one grain in a little pile.
Yup I agree, the issue is we need some generalizable rule we can give people. If people can chunk everything into a ton of tiny things, it makes more sense to say something like "keep your total CO2 emissions below x." We need some basic rule to follow that isn't just "randomly cut any small thing because small things add up."
The math is true for emissions but not removals. Removals are additive and cumulative, not merely relative. They scale.
For example, I was the first provably climate friendly maple syrup producer, proactively managing my maple sugerbush to sequester 10 metric tones of carbon more than I emit on an annual basis. Scaling that on a per tap basis to the number of maple taps in North America (by getting other maple syrup producers to behave similarly) produces a massive offset, equivalent to the emissions of a good sized city.
It scales because it not only reduces emissions, but also leverages nature to sequester carbon, moving from net carbon positive to net carbon negative annually.
> Bob goes vegan [...] This means that Kate had as much effect as 175,000 Bobs
Okay I wasn't going to say anything, but you're kinda forcing me into it :) Veganism is in the unfortunate position that it is really good for a lot of different causes, but very rarely #1 in any singular cause. This means that the typical EA analysis (where we do a linear regression on the impact of one intervention on one cause) doesn't fully capture its full benefits. One EA focused on climate change will find that veganism is really good, but keeping a nuclear plant open (or more realistically, something else since that's something almost nobody gets the opportunity to do) is better, so disrecommends it, then another person looks at ground water pollution and finds veganism is really good, but another more targeted intervention is even better, etc etc
I think veganism might escape this EA trap a bit more since it actually *is* really good for animal welfare, but similar dynamics are happening with other interventions. I'm particularly thinking of *politics*, which EA has, by and large, tried to stay out of, despite having the potential to impact a ton of things, even if they're not the number one intervention for any of the particular areas.
I notice that you put buying an electric car on that list (shouldn't that be an electric bike anyway?), but not political action. Surely Musk's cutting of USAID has shown EA how much they blundered by ignoring politics? (I mean I'd argued it's actually *worse* than just ignoring since, despite my warnings, they were *actively* buddy-buddy with Musk, putting him on the EA people page, writing defenses of him, inviting him to speak at a conference...).
By only focusing on the best intervention for any particular cause we potentially ignore excellent *cross-cause* interventions.
Oh I mean I put "Vote for politicians who will take significant positive actions on climate." as number 3 on the list and said there's a huge power gap between that and anything we can do with our personal lives! I agree that ignoring politics is really crazy, for my own part I was really trying to hype people up about each of the last elections and trying to say it was more important than anything else we could be doing. On veganism, I've been vegan for 10 years purely for animal welfare. The reason I don't recommend it as a climate intervention is that it seems very very very hard for the average person relative to most other interventions. For me it's been easy, but it has a massive drop off rate and the total rates of veganism haven't risen above ~1-2% in the last few decades despite a lot of effort. It's not that it's not the ideal EA intervention, I just don't think it's an especially promising thing to promote for climate at all, even by normal everyday ethics. And on the ebike thing I think most people just don't want to completely give up driving! Even if we got to Japan-level urbanism, like ~30% of people will still be driving to work every day.
Oh okay, glad to hear it. I was thinking a lot more broadly than just voting since that happens only rarely, but voting is already good. On veganism, okay fair it's hard --I guess I should've said plant-based-diet or something-- but it's getting easier, mostly *because* more people are doing it. This is, I think, another blindspot of EA and its over-reliance of simple economic models to the detriment of the other social sciences, since --as sociologists have predicted-- things become easier once more people are doing it, making the effect not linear (or marginal or whatever) but curved (at least in the second order effects). Which I agree is still not enough for *just* climate change, but if we take this cross-cause view *and* the second order effects, suddenly becomes a very interesting intervention.
[EDIT: bike response was edited in, so I'm replying to that]: I know it's harder in the US since the infrastructure is not as good (though I think an electric *cargo* bike, might help here), but I think here we have also have similar dynamic with second order effects and *why* the infrastructure doesn't exist. But I'm less confident about electric cargo bikes than I am about veganism/plant-based-diets.
I made similar points a few months ago. It's simply inescapable that an individual's efforts will not make the slightest dent in climate change. In that respect, it's very different from attempting to help the poor. I can easily make a big difference to the lives of a poor family; nothing I ever do will make even the slightest impact on climate change. That raises the question of the ethics of it.
Climate change is a collective action problem, and it's not just one that individuals cannot solve through individual actions. Nations also cannot solve it. It's going to take global action, meaning at the level of the United Nations. And the solution will have to be simple.
My only problem with all this is the way I see that it leads people to a leap to a view that is not justified, but seems like a common piece of fallacious reasoning from such observations. Which is if individual sacrifice can't coordinate a large scale change then large scale change won't require any individual sacrifice or even reduction in emissions.
In fact if we engineer a 99% reduction in global CO2 emissions that will actually require that almost every person experience a 99%-100% reduction in CO2 emissions. There might be some people who experience no reduction (and who are not already at zero emissions etc.), but precious few (a minority). It's not that if you engage in this strategy you won't individually reduce emissions, it's how you come to reduce emissions that changes.
You say "Your individual emissions will, on their own, literally never matter for the climate." The "on their own" is the key phrase here. It means that when you say "literally never matter" you mean "in no case except for all the cases I've ruled out by having the phrase on their own in tis sentence". I have to wonder if this sort of mixing of nuance proviso and absolutes encourages the confusion I'm worried about.
Is Kates 70000 tons conditional on the committee succeeding in keeping the nuclear plant running for 10 years more? Or have you taken the risk of the committee simply failing into account? That seem like a very important factor to consider.
Thanks for writing this, Andy. Sorry for being rather late to this article! Coming from Effective Environmentalism’s Substack :)
Perhaps we could consider having more conversations that hinge on individual’s intrinsic motivations rather than convincing them of things or having set rules. Many people (myself included) would benefit from a clear set of rules that help make the best decisions for the environment. But my intuition tells me that even more people will scoff at these rules because they don’t want to be told what to do. I wonder if any research is being done on how effectively communicating the same environmental/climate message in different ways to different people.
I also wanted to pose the question: If we convert all of our energy supply to “clean” energy, if we continue to consume and grow as we are (or more), will it matter? Surely not, right? Because no form of energy is “clean” and sustainable at the rates at which the developed world is using it.
Summary: We can use the time from now until Oct 18th to organize No Kings participants to only buy essentials. To stop buying extras and wither GDP. To hold out until our demands to achieve equity and restore democracy and livable Earth are met.
What has much of the same effect as a general strike;
without all the coordination, logistical problems/arrangements and unions not wanting to be involved;
that even retired people can take part in?
Only buying essentials.
Not buying what we don’t need.
A general boycott of unnecessary stuff that advertising, our own acquisitiveness and habits have addicted us to buying.
The “life cycle” of this excess ruins ecosystems via extraction of limited resources. It pollutes during manufacturing and transportation. It depletes buyers’ financial resources and overflows landfills. We work to earn money to buy stuff we don’t need, increasingly can’t afford and end up discarding.
When we stop being mindless consumers we upset the unfair systems that are ruining livable Earth. We stop funding the corporations and 1% who are dismantling our country and selling it for parts*.
Once we curtail buying, warehouses will overflow with needless stuff. Ships won’t be able to offload it or trucks and trains haul it. Plutocrats and politicians will notice. We’ll tell them what’s going on. And what our demands are.
We’ll need to hold out indefinitely. Workers will be laid off/fired. So we’ll need to help support workers who support our cause. By giving them the money we would have spent unnecessarily anyway. Cross training workers into equitable jobs in sustainable businesses and industries will be one among many of our key demands.
How many people need to join this effort? 1 of every 7 Biden or Harris voters. They total 11 million people in the US. They are the 3.5 % of the population that Chenoweth et al have found will often have their demands met when they nonviolently take action.
We can do this. Motivate now the many thousands of people who will mobilize at No Kings demonstrations on Oct 18th. No Kings alone may make a temporary impression. But all those people not buying stuff, indefinitely, will make a huge difference. That will be the leverage we need to save democracy and livable Earth.
A general strike would make the politicians capitulate even faster. If organizers can use the momentum of the general boycott to make the strike happen.
Why do you all have such a hard-on for nuclear? I was with you until that point, and then I just presumed you are another asset-management focused essayist.
? I think keeping old nuclear plants open is pretty important. I don't think it's a silver bullet and shouldn't crowd out renewables, but I don't think we should just jump ship on it either. My nuclear example could've also applied to a large solar or wind farm, but the difference is those aren't being closed as quickly. It's ridiculous to dismiss climate writing over a disagreement over whether old nuclear plants are going to limit emissions.
I don’t disagree, but it is a limiting view and a bit self referential. AI is the most notable factor in nuclear development, suggesting some form of analogous impact (if we got rid of AI we would be perforce preserving existing nuclear)
To achieve the impact you are suggesting, we need big moves, and if they are interchangeable, we are left asking what big moves are really available.
Sorry how is it limiting to say "We should really, really not be closing nuclear plants right now"? Everywhere I know of where nuclear plants have been closed, they've been replaced by fossil fuels.
You gotta think that fossil fuel companies (et al) love love love people obsessing over minor things and judging each other.
caring about the little things makes a lot more sense if you think about them as sins. which i think a lot of us do, without realizing it.
My impression has been that switching a flight for a drive to the same destination doesn't actually save carbon emissions - though it does depend on occupancy. (Planes are usually close to full, while cars usually have one or two people in them, so planes are usually a bit less CO2 emissions per passenger-mile - though four people sharing a car would be better than those four people buying tickets on the same flight.)
I don't know if the numbers I've seen here reflect the growing electrification of cars, so it's possible that driving is now better than flying in terms of emissions.
Good point, haven’t actually read about this for a while
A big difference would be going by train instead of flying. Not many good options in north America, but if you can, it really is a great way to travel.
A key metric here is “per passenger mile” car vacations are generally significantly closer to home.
Yep, the reason flying is such a big contributor to planetary warming is the travel distances that it enables rather than it being a particularly high emission mode per unit distance.
Electrify everything and keep cleaning up the grid.
For the "what can I do" question, for most people, Saul Griffith recommends (besides voting) making the right 5(?) "kitchen table decisions", to replace your home's gas users with electric, using heat pumps, EVs etc..
(here I am sloganeering, but for messaging about priorities that is good.)
I think about this every time I stand at the sink rinsing out a yoghurt pot for the recycling.
I don't really disagree with the broad sentiment of AI energy inpact but to nitpick, I think the idea of small things adding up is more about the collective impact of many different small activities together. If an extremely wasteful person can rationalize wasteful energy use by breaking it into finer chunks of "little things" you see how it doesn't really make sense. If you spend every second of your day simultaneously doing thousands or millions of those "little things",with no regard for the systems they are a part of, then you lose sight of the real impact. I guess it depends whether the little thing you're talking about is one grain of sand in a beach or just one grain in a little pile.
Yup I agree, the issue is we need some generalizable rule we can give people. If people can chunk everything into a ton of tiny things, it makes more sense to say something like "keep your total CO2 emissions below x." We need some basic rule to follow that isn't just "randomly cut any small thing because small things add up."
I agree that individual actions are rounding errors. I would also like to add the following points to your framework
Financial: Deep retrofits often don't pencil out for suburban households. The payback period can exceed component lifespan. LEDs work; solar varies.
Cultural: Regulatory and social barriers can trump carbon math (NIMBY HOAs)
Organizational: Your 500-person committee only succeeds if institutional trust is already aligned. This varies.
I believe the challenge is figuring out how to create the coordination infrastructure that makes your top-3 interventions implementable at scale.
The math is true for emissions but not removals. Removals are additive and cumulative, not merely relative. They scale.
For example, I was the first provably climate friendly maple syrup producer, proactively managing my maple sugerbush to sequester 10 metric tones of carbon more than I emit on an annual basis. Scaling that on a per tap basis to the number of maple taps in North America (by getting other maple syrup producers to behave similarly) produces a massive offset, equivalent to the emissions of a good sized city.
It scales because it not only reduces emissions, but also leverages nature to sequester carbon, moving from net carbon positive to net carbon negative annually.
> Bob goes vegan [...] This means that Kate had as much effect as 175,000 Bobs
Okay I wasn't going to say anything, but you're kinda forcing me into it :) Veganism is in the unfortunate position that it is really good for a lot of different causes, but very rarely #1 in any singular cause. This means that the typical EA analysis (where we do a linear regression on the impact of one intervention on one cause) doesn't fully capture its full benefits. One EA focused on climate change will find that veganism is really good, but keeping a nuclear plant open (or more realistically, something else since that's something almost nobody gets the opportunity to do) is better, so disrecommends it, then another person looks at ground water pollution and finds veganism is really good, but another more targeted intervention is even better, etc etc
I think veganism might escape this EA trap a bit more since it actually *is* really good for animal welfare, but similar dynamics are happening with other interventions. I'm particularly thinking of *politics*, which EA has, by and large, tried to stay out of, despite having the potential to impact a ton of things, even if they're not the number one intervention for any of the particular areas.
I notice that you put buying an electric car on that list (shouldn't that be an electric bike anyway?), but not political action. Surely Musk's cutting of USAID has shown EA how much they blundered by ignoring politics? (I mean I'd argued it's actually *worse* than just ignoring since, despite my warnings, they were *actively* buddy-buddy with Musk, putting him on the EA people page, writing defenses of him, inviting him to speak at a conference...).
By only focusing on the best intervention for any particular cause we potentially ignore excellent *cross-cause* interventions.
Oh I mean I put "Vote for politicians who will take significant positive actions on climate." as number 3 on the list and said there's a huge power gap between that and anything we can do with our personal lives! I agree that ignoring politics is really crazy, for my own part I was really trying to hype people up about each of the last elections and trying to say it was more important than anything else we could be doing. On veganism, I've been vegan for 10 years purely for animal welfare. The reason I don't recommend it as a climate intervention is that it seems very very very hard for the average person relative to most other interventions. For me it's been easy, but it has a massive drop off rate and the total rates of veganism haven't risen above ~1-2% in the last few decades despite a lot of effort. It's not that it's not the ideal EA intervention, I just don't think it's an especially promising thing to promote for climate at all, even by normal everyday ethics. And on the ebike thing I think most people just don't want to completely give up driving! Even if we got to Japan-level urbanism, like ~30% of people will still be driving to work every day.
Oh okay, glad to hear it. I was thinking a lot more broadly than just voting since that happens only rarely, but voting is already good. On veganism, okay fair it's hard --I guess I should've said plant-based-diet or something-- but it's getting easier, mostly *because* more people are doing it. This is, I think, another blindspot of EA and its over-reliance of simple economic models to the detriment of the other social sciences, since --as sociologists have predicted-- things become easier once more people are doing it, making the effect not linear (or marginal or whatever) but curved (at least in the second order effects). Which I agree is still not enough for *just* climate change, but if we take this cross-cause view *and* the second order effects, suddenly becomes a very interesting intervention.
[EDIT: bike response was edited in, so I'm replying to that]: I know it's harder in the US since the infrastructure is not as good (though I think an electric *cargo* bike, might help here), but I think here we have also have similar dynamic with second order effects and *why* the infrastructure doesn't exist. But I'm less confident about electric cargo bikes than I am about veganism/plant-based-diets.
I made similar points a few months ago. It's simply inescapable that an individual's efforts will not make the slightest dent in climate change. In that respect, it's very different from attempting to help the poor. I can easily make a big difference to the lives of a poor family; nothing I ever do will make even the slightest impact on climate change. That raises the question of the ethics of it.
https://bryanfrances.substack.com/p/ethics-and-your-fruitless-actions
Climate change is a collective action problem, and it's not just one that individuals cannot solve through individual actions. Nations also cannot solve it. It's going to take global action, meaning at the level of the United Nations. And the solution will have to be simple.
#GlobalCarbonFeeAndDividendPetition
My only problem with all this is the way I see that it leads people to a leap to a view that is not justified, but seems like a common piece of fallacious reasoning from such observations. Which is if individual sacrifice can't coordinate a large scale change then large scale change won't require any individual sacrifice or even reduction in emissions.
In fact if we engineer a 99% reduction in global CO2 emissions that will actually require that almost every person experience a 99%-100% reduction in CO2 emissions. There might be some people who experience no reduction (and who are not already at zero emissions etc.), but precious few (a minority). It's not that if you engage in this strategy you won't individually reduce emissions, it's how you come to reduce emissions that changes.
You say "Your individual emissions will, on their own, literally never matter for the climate." The "on their own" is the key phrase here. It means that when you say "literally never matter" you mean "in no case except for all the cases I've ruled out by having the phrase on their own in tis sentence". I have to wonder if this sort of mixing of nuance proviso and absolutes encourages the confusion I'm worried about.
Is Kates 70000 tons conditional on the committee succeeding in keeping the nuclear plant running for 10 years more? Or have you taken the risk of the committee simply failing into account? That seem like a very important factor to consider.
Thanks for writing this, Andy. Sorry for being rather late to this article! Coming from Effective Environmentalism’s Substack :)
Perhaps we could consider having more conversations that hinge on individual’s intrinsic motivations rather than convincing them of things or having set rules. Many people (myself included) would benefit from a clear set of rules that help make the best decisions for the environment. But my intuition tells me that even more people will scoff at these rules because they don’t want to be told what to do. I wonder if any research is being done on how effectively communicating the same environmental/climate message in different ways to different people.
I also wanted to pose the question: If we convert all of our energy supply to “clean” energy, if we continue to consume and grow as we are (or more), will it matter? Surely not, right? Because no form of energy is “clean” and sustainable at the rates at which the developed world is using it.
Thanks for reading my comment!
Summary: We can use the time from now until Oct 18th to organize No Kings participants to only buy essentials. To stop buying extras and wither GDP. To hold out until our demands to achieve equity and restore democracy and livable Earth are met.
What has much of the same effect as a general strike;
without all the coordination, logistical problems/arrangements and unions not wanting to be involved;
that even retired people can take part in?
Only buying essentials.
Not buying what we don’t need.
A general boycott of unnecessary stuff that advertising, our own acquisitiveness and habits have addicted us to buying.
The “life cycle” of this excess ruins ecosystems via extraction of limited resources. It pollutes during manufacturing and transportation. It depletes buyers’ financial resources and overflows landfills. We work to earn money to buy stuff we don’t need, increasingly can’t afford and end up discarding.
When we stop being mindless consumers we upset the unfair systems that are ruining livable Earth. We stop funding the corporations and 1% who are dismantling our country and selling it for parts*.
Once we curtail buying, warehouses will overflow with needless stuff. Ships won’t be able to offload it or trucks and trains haul it. Plutocrats and politicians will notice. We’ll tell them what’s going on. And what our demands are.
We’ll need to hold out indefinitely. Workers will be laid off/fired. So we’ll need to help support workers who support our cause. By giving them the money we would have spent unnecessarily anyway. Cross training workers into equitable jobs in sustainable businesses and industries will be one among many of our key demands.
How many people need to join this effort? 1 of every 7 Biden or Harris voters. They total 11 million people in the US. They are the 3.5 % of the population that Chenoweth et al have found will often have their demands met when they nonviolently take action.
We can do this. Motivate now the many thousands of people who will mobilize at No Kings demonstrations on Oct 18th. No Kings alone may make a temporary impression. But all those people not buying stuff, indefinitely, will make a huge difference. That will be the leverage we need to save democracy and livable Earth.
A general strike would make the politicians capitulate even faster. If organizers can use the momentum of the general boycott to make the strike happen.
*See Sarah Kendzior.
Why do you all have such a hard-on for nuclear? I was with you until that point, and then I just presumed you are another asset-management focused essayist.
? I think keeping old nuclear plants open is pretty important. I don't think it's a silver bullet and shouldn't crowd out renewables, but I don't think we should just jump ship on it either. My nuclear example could've also applied to a large solar or wind farm, but the difference is those aren't being closed as quickly. It's ridiculous to dismiss climate writing over a disagreement over whether old nuclear plants are going to limit emissions.
I don’t disagree, but it is a limiting view and a bit self referential. AI is the most notable factor in nuclear development, suggesting some form of analogous impact (if we got rid of AI we would be perforce preserving existing nuclear)
To achieve the impact you are suggesting, we need big moves, and if they are interchangeable, we are left asking what big moves are really available.
Sorry how is it limiting to say "We should really, really not be closing nuclear plants right now"? Everywhere I know of where nuclear plants have been closed, they've been replaced by fossil fuels.