Chinese television interviewed me this week about Biden’s climate summit. They wanted to know how important individual actions are when it comes to combatting climate change. Not much I said. Such actions are about as feel good a project as you can come up with – the kind of thing that breeds smugness while making (almost) no difference. I say that for two reasons.
First, to make such changes you have to have slack in your life – excess capacity to cut back. And to do that you have to be rich. Giving up two cars for one, or downsizing to a smaller car are all easy if you can afford a car in the first place. But it is easy to forget that that majority of people in the world don’t have a car in the first place. The global population is 7.6 billion and there are 1.4 billion cars on the road. As with cars, so with housing, you have to have a large house to be able to downsize to a smaller more fuel efficient smaller house. That is easy for Australians where the average size of a house is 2,500 square feet. But hard if you live in China where the average size is 500 square feet.
Second, setting aside wealth, to make changes in your life to combat climate change, options need to be available to you. And that is not something open to your control in most areas where you can really make a difference. Take transportation. Giving up your car and relying on public transportation is easy if you live in Paris or London. But try doing it in New Delhi or even Los Angeles. Switching to solar power is easy if you have a large enough roof to accommodate all the solar panels you will need. But that is going to be hard if you have already switched to a smaller house let alone if you live in an apartment.
The big changes we need to make to avoid extreme climate change are far beyond the reach of individuals. They involve wholesale transformation of the infrastructure of our lives. Exhortations to individuals to make changes seem like a distraction at best. In fact, there is a risk that individual action may actually diminish people’s willingness to support what really needs to be done – which will hurt a lot if only because it will cost a lot.
But all of this misses an important point when it comes to thinking about the role of individuals. The real challenge of climate change is not just managing the expectations of the haves of the world but also managing the expectations of the have-nots.
The Chinese TV interviewer was pushing the government line that we should differentiate between what (he called) the differential responsibilities of the developed world and the developing world (including China). Considerations of justice, so he suggested, mean that it is the citizens of the developing world that need to be ready to make the sacrifices necessary to prevent climate change. But this is a naïve view – there are not enough people in the “developed world” when compared to the “developing world”. The ratio is about 1:5. The 1 in 5 can cut back as much as you like but that the real challenge is the prospective demand of the rest of the world. They have legitimate expectations to live as the 1 do – expectations fueled by the image of a life of plentitude proffered by Hollywood. But even if you deflate those expectations to something more modest – a small house, a washing machine, a television and energy efficient transportation, what would that mean for our global energy budget?
Suppose we said, let everyone live on an equal energy budget from now on. What would that budget be?
According to the World Bank, current energy consumption in the United States is roughly 7,000 kg of oil equivalents (kgoe) of per person per annum. Global, per person, average energy consumption is roughly 1,900 (kgoe). If we are all to live in the same kind of world, then our energy consumption will be the same. So we will have to give up about 71% of our current consumption. So the question is, what kind of world can you live in on a diet of 1,900 kgoe? You can get a feel for that by looking at per capita energy consumption for different parts of the world. Denmark is sometimes held up as a model of good living on a thrifty energy budget, but at 3,107 kgoe, it is 50% higher than our desired goal. And it is telling that even China, today, is 15% above the limit at 2,226 kgoe. But coming in at 1,895 kgoe, Argentina is the country closest to where we could all be if we shared current energy equally. And you might think, that is not so bad. They seem to eat well, have cars, and look to be, well, pretty modern.
But before you get too complacent there are two complicating issues to take into account. First, the figure of 1,900 kgoe assumes a population of close to 8 billion. But population is growing. By the end of the century it is estimated to be about 10 billion according to projections by the United Nations. (And that assumes declines from current rates of fertility.) Nearly all of the gain will be in the poorest parts of the world. In a world of 10 billion, at current levels of energy production, the per capita allocation goes down to 1,500 kgoe, more like the energy consumption of Mexico not Argentina. But even that would be inadequate. Our current energy output is increasing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. If we were to roll back energy output to mid-20th century levels to limit carbon output, the per capita allocation falls by another 4/5ths! And so we each get to live on 290 kgoe – the consumption level of the citizens of the Congo.