I’m an earth scientist, and these arguments about Gore (or any environmentalist’s) personal consumption habits frustrate me. Why reporters always turn to the environmentalist and ask what they are doing in their own lives to reduce their footprint is missing the point. This notion that the speaker must live up to some martyr-like quality of life in a hut somewhere is silly and misguided, and turns the conversation into a judgement of the hypocrisy of the speaker, rather than a practical assessment of the steps society (not individuals) must take to correct global warming.
Folks, this is about global biogeochemical cycles. That’s what they’re called, the word Gore almost says a million times in his movie, the word I can’t get our webmaster to put on our institution’s website because it’s unfamiliar to the public (even though probably more than a quarter of the institution works on these cycles). Biogeochemistry, the study of elements moving through the whole planet’s ecosystems and geological components. When you have 6 billion humans jumping up and down and racing around in cars burning fossil fuels, you are in effect moving a lot of carbon around (and many other elements) in ways that the earth has never seen before (more). What one human in Tennessee’s house does is completely missing the point. That one human has been leading a battle for decades to try to create top-down solutions to climate change. Picking apart that individual’s actions is counter productive. We need a top-down complete reassessment of our society’s energy use and efficiency. If Gore (one human) needs to fly around in a plane to convince 6 billion people this is necessary, or 300 million people in our country, that is the best investment of fossil carbon I can possibly imagine.
C’mon Gore, we need you in ’08. Humanity needs you. Stay humble, stay focused on the goal, and people will believe in you.
Mak,
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Here on BMG, people have described how Cheney dodged the draft, Bush did his little “air corps” thing to dodge the draft, and not only are they hawks, but they totally denigrated Kerry’s service, and are quick to order “someone else’s kids” into combat. Would 2 more guys in Vietnam have mattered? Of course not (in fact, Cheney might have shot a few of our guys in the butt). Their personal actions are relevant.
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There’s a difference between “relevant” and “dispositive.” Should Cheney be able to advocate a hawkish view? Sure. Should it be diminished a little because of his personal actions of draft-dodging? I think so.
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I’m sympathetic to your point. (Although you stretch it — you say “martyr-like quality of life in a hut” when critics say “Don’t be in the top 1/10th of 1% in the world in consuming fuel while preaching conservation.”)
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Let’s stipulate that he’s now the guy who needs to travel since he’s the face of the environmental movement. But what about before?
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What’s your take on this?
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I don’t disagree with your point.
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However, it’s a game that Gore can’t win. Even if he had done that, somebody could (easily) find something else. They’d point to the 2 stroke engine on his fishing boat, or that he eats beef (which requires more oil per calorie), or that he owns more than 10 neck ties. There’s always something.
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Personally, I don’t think it’s fair to blame the ramifications of “the entourage” on Gore, since the security detail is designed not just to protect the VP, but more importantly to protect tUSA from the VP being assassinated. So, since it’s protocol essential to protect the stability of our nation, I don’t think you hold that against Gore.
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His personal travel? Fine. He owns that. Even if (and I have no idea) traveling back was part of his vacation, visiting constituents, or any other actions that involved being in Tennessee in the first place. After all, the office is in DC but that doesn’t make the officials DCians.
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So, is it fair to spend some resources to make more resources in the big picture? Sure. That could mean IRS audits, investment in infrastructure, or Gore spending some CO_2 in the process of helping reduce CO_2 by orders of magnitude more.
I was thinking of something simpler:
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The environmental movement has an inherent preachy moralism about it. Previously, this preachy moralism was directed at evil manufacturers who exploited us all by irresponsibly dumping toxics in to the ground, water, and air. Now, the preachy moralism is directed spefically at Time Magazine’s Man of the Year, “You.”
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You must give up your evil ways and improved living standard in order to reduce your carbon footprint. You must destroy your car and walk; you must move to a tiny apartment that takes less energy to heat than your house and then not heat it anyway; you must use expensive recycled unbleached No. 7 grit paper for your personal hygiene, etc.
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You are required to make intense, personal, immediate and painful sacrafices to your mobility and accustomed standard of living.
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The problemis that respond well to moralistic preaching when it comes with a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do qualifier. Not from televangelists, or the Catholic Church, and not from politicians. Sanctimony is a political buzzkill. The argument of the above diarist, that Al Gore is, in essence, more important than You will not improve that situation.
I was modestly irritated by the dismissive tone of those who suggested replacing incandescent chandelier bulbs with a fluorescent fixture that resembles some kind of proctological instrument. There is indeed a kind of gleefully perverse penitence in some environmentalists’ writings, whereby your suffering proves their virtue.
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What this has to do with Al Gore, I cannot guess.
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Indeed, much of his message has been: It’s not the consumption, it’s the footprint; not the sacrifice, but the CO2.
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Is this board so behind the news cycle that people still do not know that he buys his energy from green sources, at something like twice the price?
I wish we as a society were at the point where the only ways to reduce CO_2 output were to do the things you suggest — sacrifice an improved living standard, destroying your car, not heating your home, or wiping your butt with sandpaper.
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We’re not at that point. There are oodles of things we can do now with zero (or negative!) cost to our lifestyle. This rhetoric where folks claim that Al Gore is asking you to move into a mud hut is just ridiculous.
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Turn off the lights when you’re not in the room. Put on a sweater and turn down the heat a degree or two. Ride a bike to the store on a nice day. Take it easy on the gas and the brake when you drive, and try to keep your tire air pressure on spec. Change the air filters in your HVAC system every three months. Install CF bulbs where you can. Make sure your wood-frame windows are really closing, and install a $1.29 Stanley window latch to make sure they stay closed. Make sure your doors are sealing well, and if not repair the sweep. Plant trees in your yard that will shade your home in summer and cut wind down in winter.
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These are all things which are either free (and save you money) or have very short payback periods, after which you save money. These are all things that are not “intense, personal, immediate, and painful sacrifices” but are things which really would make a significant difference if employed widespread.
on dKos a few weeks ago wailing about the difficulty of wringing real energy savings out of the American lifestyle. Lots of interesting drawings of roof joists, if I recall right, to illustrate the impossibility of retrofitting and conserving our way into any real progress.
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Well, bull. The first time you try to cut waste in any system, you can find plenty of low-hanging fruit that’s never been picked, because no one has ever tried. It’s true for a company hunting for cost savings, and it’s true for a homeowner seeking an NStar bill lower than his mortgage payment. As a nation, we made huge progress in energy efficiency during the oil crisis of the ’70s, because it was the first time we needed to. Today, we’re fat and spoiled from the cheap energy prices of the ’90s, but we can certainly do it again.
For starters, consider this:
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US per capita CO2 emissions per year were about 20 tons per head in 2004 (The same as in 1981).
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Japan has emissions that are half that. France, one-third.
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Sure, the size of the US puts us at a bit of a disadvantage, but even after factoring in that, it is clear that we are way behind other rich nations. One obvious conclusion is that we could be doing a lot better.
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I lived in France and Germany last summer. In general, hotels have a slot right by the door; you stick your key in, and the lights go on. When you leave, you take your key (the slot also helps me from losing my keys), and voila, the lights (and AC) go out. The A/C units are properly sized to the rooms- you can get cool, but are hard-pressed to get freezing, US-style. A small concession.
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Also, people actually ride their bikes places. In business suits. While smoking. They ride to train stations. I saw more bikes at bike stations in Germany than I have ever seen anywhere, including college campuses. But this requires that infrastructure actually be bike-friendly, which would be slow to develop in the US.
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I’m rambling now, but here’s the low-hanging fruit I’ve picked off in my house:
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Replaced crawl-space insulation; insulated around the top edge of my basement walls.
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I know my electricity consumption is low (esp. per capita, thanks to 3+ kids). Not sure about the emissions associated with heating, but I’m working on it. More to do- more stuff in the basement, and I need to figure out a plan for the walls (the existing, flimsy 1950’s rock wool makes blow-in tough).
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Brian
I know you said you don’t always just look for the technological war effort alternative energy solution, but this is the first time I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
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But it’s funny that it only comes in a thread about how these little improvements to one household here and there aren’t really going to make a big difference. Remember, you were suggesting that people already conserve about as much as they can, with the incentive to save some money on their heating bills. So you are still refusing to consider real cultural changes for conservation.
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We need to get half of the cars off our roads by encouraging single income married families, get half of our lawyers and ad execs to take the rest of the century off, and stop giving free plane tickets to people who don’t need to go anywhere, paid for by poor people’s late fees. Marriage encourages people to stay home and play checkers instead of working so hard to seem interesting with wasteful arts. We should tax buying advertising at 250% to make it unprofitable. Close down newspapers by freeing all their stories to the internet. The economy should not be this beast that compels us to support it with neon leisure activities and psychotic consumption.
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The BRA’s proposal to electrify more of the city with flashy lights is a good example of what we don’t need to do.
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I’d link to it, but I think I’ll just post the whole article in a new post for the sake of the planet.
And we need to stop wasting so much energy on pharmacuetical research and genetic engineering. Billions of dollars spent fiddling with the genome translates directly to billions of pounds of carbon in the atmosphere. One IVF treatment takes millions of watts of electricity and thousands of gallons of gas. One abortion takes thousands of gallons of gas. Each month of taking the pill contributes exactly 65 pounds of carbon to the atmosphere, when you include all the researchers and executives and FDA tests and the manufacturing and the people driving to the pill factory. Yes, these numbers are from a reliable source. Can anyone deny that feminism has an enormous environmental footprint? Is it really worth it, considering it doesn’t really lead to greater happiness? It’s just been a ploy by industrialists to get more of us on the treadmill and consuming more oil.
…you are actually suggesting that Jane Addams, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Sojourner Truth, Bella Abzub, Mary Ware Dennett, Margaret Sanger, et al were industrialists exploiting the women’s movement to sell oil.
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I have no interest in starting a discussion over what has the larger carbon footprint – paternalism or feminism because that would be as ridiculous as your assertions.
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no doubt approved. Everything large scale social trend that has happened in the last few centuries has been approved by the industrialists and capitalists. Rockefeller funded the invention of the pill, the IUD and owns the rights to the abortion drug RU-486.
No one can introduce a non sequitor as neatly as you.
What I have introduced is a contradiction, specifically the contradiction between some progressive causes and other supposed progressive causes. Marriage and natural conception are green technologies. Feminism, individualism, ART and contraception, and genetic engineering are very dirty.
It would seem obvious that anything that slows down population growth would be environmentally beneficial. One less person around is one less person to consume limited resources and to pollute.
If those extra people had the same lifestyle as the rest of us, yes, they’d be another individualist consumer driving all over the place. But if we changed policies to support a marriage-based lifestyle rather than an industrial/feminist lifestyle then those extra babies wouldn’t drive as much, wouldn’t consume as much, etc. I think the lifestyle changes would outpace the effect of more births.
To keep the average lifespan the same, we would have to focus on hunger and poverty and basic medicine, and reducing auto accidents and violence. I think that’s a greener and more ethical way to improve lifespan.
and the solutions are political, not personal.
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Not to knock saints, or people who are moved to curb their consumption or spend extra money to be early adopters of green technologies. But our climate-change trajectory isn’t going to get better based on altruism.
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We need to put the environmental costs of things back into the markets where decisions get made, or else just ban or ration some things outright.
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Dick Cheney famously said that energy efficiency was nothing more than “a sign of personal virtue.” As a normative description that is indefensible but as a positive one it is dead on, and until that changes appeals to personal virtue are attempts to push back the rising sea level with spoons.
There are many interesting comments here. Many of them people misunderstanding each other as well. I’ve always felt uncomfortable with the pretense of the environmental movement. And I say that as a prius driving scientist no less (and environmental studies major in college too).
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My main point in this post is that if the US society needs to decrease its CO2 emissions by a significant amount, what good does it do to interrogate the leading politician and advocate of this change? “Gasp, he’s not wearing hemp pajamas?? Then I don’t believe in climate change anymore.”(?) And strangely, these questions come from the left as often, or more often, than they do from the right. (as observed in the cited blog). What is it about our society’s mentality that brings on these questions? We need a psychologist. Insecurity (my girlfriend just said self-loathing), or a need to be better than thou (or Gore)?
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And the problem is that where does the line get drawn? In green circles there’s always some greater sacrifice that could be made on an individual level (just like there’s always someone politically to the left or right). I agree that the analogy with Cheney and Bush draft dodging is the same logic. But the degree is different: they didn’t want to sacrifice their lives, but will ask others to do so under dubious premises. Gore doesn’t have some idealized environmentally perfect life, which arguably isn’t possible (SUVs from the secret service, yes its true, but do they make bullet proof hybrids yet? No, they didn’t even make hybrids at the time, plus they’re not American…). When do the criticisms just become the left devouring itself, and hurting/distracting from the cause? And the cause in this case is ultimately our survival.
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The voting in Tennessee issue is a good starting point. If Gore hadn’t gone home, he might have had an even harder time winning over his home state in 00′ (I know he didn’t anyway, but face time matters for politicians, look at how Romney was skewered for not being around). And of course he was more important than you (capital Y?) and I. He was the Vice President. The real solution: if Clinton and Gore had been able to pass their proposed carbon/energy tax in the early 90’s (which there was not enough political support for in Congress at the time, the premise he didn’t do enough when he was VP is bogus), then gas would have been more expensive and fewer journalists would have made the trip, resulting in a smaller entourage, and more local reporters and photographers being used. But far more importantly, the whole society would also have been more efficient at the same time, and our carbon emissions would have been lower. Economic incentives, not morality based ones.
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The issue is does Gore lose credibility when he isn’t green “enough”? So much of environmentalism is a collection of fads. Light bulbs, hybrids, hemp, recycling. All important in a small way. But if we’re going to decrease energy consumption and carbon emmissions by a significant amount, 10% of the population wearing organic hemp isn’t going to cut it (ok, I’ll admit it, I’m not a fan of the hemp fad). We need broad based incentives the whole population will be influenced by. Individual heroism isn’t the solution, just like the Bush’s voluntary emission reductions aren’t either.
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Friedman and Krugman both pointed this out a few weeks ago. California has quietly made had a big top-down effect, while the rest of the country has increased in emissions:
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My overall point is that we need to think of the aggregate biogeochemical effect: 300 million Americans with the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world by far. To get the carbon inventory in the atmosphere under control from its current high of ~381ppm we need solutions from the top-down (it was 280ppm last in the 1800’s, it will get to ~500ppm in ths century). Bottom up fads and morality based arguments aren’t working to change the whole population’s behavior.
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And for a little perspective, scientists are now studying ways to pump carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The problem is large enough that conservation will simply not be enough to reduce the damage already done. If that’s not sobering I don’t know what is. And to think Bush just admitted there is a problem this year.
Sorry to split this hair, but “bottom up” has a particular meaning to me, describing a kind of collective action.
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The thousand-points-of-priuses thing is individual action, a different thing all together and one that doesn’t cut it, as you’ve noted.
hmmm, I’m using science terminology I think. Bottom up control (productivity) ecosystem control vs top down control (grazers). I’m not sure I agree though. Good incentives from the top (government) can cause individual and personal action, like less energy use in CA or more efficient vehicles purchased. Aggregated, they are significant. Maybe the word I left out: control, is important. Top down control sounds very 1984 in this context, unfortunately.
…one by Colbert and one by Olberman.
You have to realize, the Right took a big hit with the wide-spread acceptance of global warming and still has to figure out a way to wake up and look at itself in the mirror. Now that global warming denial ranks up there with believing in a flat earth, freepers need a way to save face and prove that even though they were wrong, “liberals” are still wronger. Liberals may have understood the problem of global warming, but they’re even in doing so, they missed the point in their own lives. Gore preached, but failed to practice, what was in his sermons.
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This is a variation what Albert Hirschman called the perversity thesis, the idea that all progress backfires. The French Revolution, according to Edmund Burke, looked like progress, but really made things worse than when they started.
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American’s stupidest intellectual George Will denied global warming up to the point that it was undeniable and then he changed the subject to another reactionary thesis: futility. We can acknowledge the problem, but because of China and India, we can’t do anything about it.
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The attack on Gore’s house is reactionary.
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The Left is idealistic and fails to live up to its ideals, that’s the narrative that keeps on going. Listen to Rush or Mike Weiner or Howie. The Right, I think, considers itself more “realistic.” The world is tough and people actually have their own self-interests at heart. Everyone who doesn’t realize that is a sucker or a fool.
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Mark
Al Gore “offsets” his emission to make himself carbon-neutral: He plunks down money to have captured CO2 from other places equal to the amount of his own emissions. Aparently he even offset the emissions from the film. (link). The offsets fund the capture of carbon at places like landfills, cattle farms, and power plants (link).
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Offsets work because if this money was not plunked down, those emissions would end up in the atmosphere. The more Gore’s lifestyle emits, the more he spends on offsets. The atmosphere doesn’t know the difference.
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Couldn’t he just live in a smaller house and still spend all that money on offsets, so his direct actions (not counting activism) would actually reduce atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration, which apparently would make him both “carbon positive” and “carbon negative”, as both words seem to mean the same thing. (link).
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Yes, he could. (Unless his VIP status really does require it. Don’t ask me about that one.) Should he? I don’t know. From my perspective, it all depends on what the most cost-effective way of helping others is. See Carbon Offsets, Investing, & Poverty from Felicifia for how I’d answer that question.
that carbon offsets can work, in principle.
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Or they can be boondoggles. Devil, details, etc.