In the winter of 2019 I got the flu. It was a combination of the flu and, even worse, the man flu. And with all that time stuck at home, I decided to really try to look at the issue of climate change and more generally about the ways that humans are changing the environment (destruction of bio-diversity, soil degradation and such). Well, I went out of that flu being a vegetarian and really worried about climate change. Here are some not-original-at-all thoughts about all of this.
Climate change is a really big problem. There is a 5C temperature difference between the pre-industrial era and what was there in the peak of the last ice age (20000 years ago), when both the Midlands in the UK and Nashville in the US were under the ice sheet. Maybe it is me, but common sense kind of suggests that if 5C colder made such a difference, 2/3/4C hotter will also make a huge difference. And now, if we go ballistic on the problem, we have a chance to stop it at 2C by the time that kids the age of my daughter (she is 8) reaches the current expected life span. Note that “if we go ballistic” means that most likely we won't.
One has to inform oneself. There is a lot of noise, and most articles one reads in newspapers and such are pretty empty and shallow, and either non-existing or really alarmist sounding. The best thing I found so far is Jean-Marc Jancovici's course in L'Ecole des Mines in Paris. It is long, 20 hours, but that is about 1/4 of the duration of “Vikings” or “Game of Thrones”, so there... Then, it is in French... I don't know of anything comparably good in English/German/Spanish. And yes, Jancovici is as French as they get (he keeps mentioning all the great achievement of French scientists over history, basically just stopping short of claiming that the wheel was a French invention...), but he gives data and talks science. And although I am sure that some of the data can be counterbalanced by other data, and that the science is as always just an approximation to reality, it is clear to me that it is hard to find anything as good as Jancovici's course.
It is evident that, as a society, we are not doing anywhere close to enough, that we are dreaming that some technology is going to come to our rescue so that we can keep going. One hears talk about things like hydrogen planes, fusion, carbon capture, etc... these technologies don't really exist, or they exist at a minimal scale. We speak about nuclear, renewables, electric cars, heat pumps and biodiesel. All of this exists, and thank all the gods for that because we will need it all, but if you do that math, then it is kind of clear that enormous efforts would be needed to deploy them at the needed scale... if it were possible at all. I mean, to phase out oil/gas/carbon from just the electricity production (electricity is the cause of 25% of worldwide emissions) we would need to roughly increase nuclear production worldwide by 700%... and, at the current level of use, there are uranium reserves for 90 years... that means that if all those nuclear power stations could be built, they would have fuel for 11 years... And yes, I have no idea how much solar and wind one can really get, but among all sorts of logistic problems like the dunkelflaute one has to consider that wind turbines have a life span of 20 years... We should use technology, but to say that without doing the math is akin to not doing anything.
Another usual idea/reaction is that it is up to politicians/billionaires/the United Nations/industry to do something because there is nothing oneself can do... and Taylor Swift flies a lot, so it does not matter if I fly... Well, I strongly agree that until politicians do something, nothing real will be done. But politicians will only do something when it is clear to them that the population is ready to not chop their heads if they do. I mean, where do we expect the money for all those investments to come from? If politicians do things to stop people from flying or driving or using fast fashion or eating as much meat, they (or society, if you so wish) have to make it possible: build public transportation, put taxes on fast fashion, a painful carbon tax, allow for much higher food prices, etc... Politicians will only do these things if they think that enough people demand it. So, it matters what each one does.
What do I do? Well, some people get organized and engaged with associations... Some people leave their careers to do permaculture... I don't. I am not one of those people. I am too much of a parasite. What I try to do is what I can do as my own scale. I stopped eating meat. I never drove a car, and thus it is no sacrifice to go everywhere by bike/foot/public transport. I put some money into improving the isolation of my house. I limit very, very much how much I fly. I try to consume less, but too often can't resist. I write this text and annoy people on Facebook with my preaching. When I buy something I try to keep in mind not only price, size, color, and such, but also whether it makes ecological sense. I am definitively no saint and buy far too many things that are at best wasteful and, although I flight very rarely, still probably more than the average European. And I don't think that everybody should do what I do. But what I think is that everybody, mostly people who like me have already done a lot of damage, should aim to think of the ecological effects of their acts. I wish that, before shopping, before planning the next holiday somewhere warm and nice and far away, before agreeing to another conference to which one goes because it is in a nice place but to which one would not really go if it happened in Wolverhampton, people like me were to stop for a moment and think whether what they want to do right now is worth the ecological effects. At the end of the day, it is not only me who has a daughter.
One has to take care of one's mental health. Evidently, I would not listen to myself when it comes to this, but keeping myself busy with math helps me.
Thank you for reading this.