Voting Conservative triples your carbon footprint
Vote Conservative, triple your carbon footprint; raging against Earth Day; time for a hot date with Planet Earth
Welcome!
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On to the facts, feelings, and action!
Facts: Vote Conservative, triple your carbon footprint
Climate has been on the ballot in many recent elections, like the US in 2016 and 2020, Brazil in 2018, and Canada and the UK in 2019, due to big differences in climate policies between major parties. But what’s the climate impact of voting?
Activists claim that voting is a highly effective climate action; so do Members of Parliament. But still, many citizens don’t feel that their vote makes a difference for the climate.
A new study has quantified how much an individual voter can influence climate pollution, and it’s HUGE.
For example, if you voted in the 2019 Canadian election for Justin Trudeau’s winning Liberal party, the researchers calculated your vote saved 34.2 tons of climate pollution per year. That’s like taking 14 typical gas cars off the road.
Conversely, if instead the Conservative party of Canada had won, their voters would have effectively tripled their carbon footprints overnight.
Please consider: these huge emissions reductions per voter are for climate policies that are still pretty weak sauce, and FAR short of what’s needed. The emissions reductions from the Liberal party’s policies in Canada were modeled at about 1.2% per year; we need about 8% reductions per year globally, and up to 10% per year in rich countries like the UK, to meet the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C. Imagine what we could do with big-time climate policy!!
This striking research was led by the brilliant Seth Wynes (my former student and We Can Fix It reader- hi Seth!).
Another important insight from the study: if you have money to spend on climate action, don’t buy offsets. Donate it to politicians running on a strong climate platform, especially supporting scrappy challengers against incumbents with a bad climate voting record early in the election cycle in close races.
A good option for non-wonks who don’t follow every race is “giving to organizations who aim to elect climate-concerned legislators and relying on their expertise to allocate funding.” (In the US, SwingLeft lets you donate to close races in your area of interest, like Environment). Wherever you give, openly discussing your contributions is important, because research shows this type of giving is contagious.
How do you measure the climate impact of voting??
There are well-established methods from life-cycle analysis to count the emissions from driving a car or buying a pair of jeans. But Seth and colleagues had to get creative to develop a method for counting the carbon impact from voting.
They come up with several possible methods. They call my favorite one “emissions responsibility,” specifically the “winning voters” flavor. This approach calculates the difference in climate pollution that would result between the climate policies of the major candidates during the time they’re in power. The increase or decrease in emissions resulting from the winning party’s policies are divided over each winning voter who supported them. Here’s how it worked in the example of the 2019 election in Canada:
Please vote for climate!
Another key finding: registering to vote (and actually voting) is super important for the climate!! I was struck by the figure showing that only about 2/3 of the population is registered to vote, and only half of the population actually votes, in the 10 large democracies the authors consider. They write, “If we calculate emissions per voter instead of emissions per capita, each voter takes on roughly twice the responsibility, since the emissions that we previously attributed to adolescents or the disenfranchised are now assigned to those with political agency.” Check out the figure below. And get thee (and others) registered and to your ballot when there’s an election!
So does this mean a Liberal voter in Canada can go out and buy 14 cars with a clean conscience?? I asked Seth how citizens should think about their climate emissions from lifestyles vs. voting. He said, “I would think of your lifestyle emissions as your carbon footprint and your political actions as a carbon handprint. If you volunteer at a soup kitchen you wouldn’t use that as an excuse to not cook a meal for your family but they are both good things to do.” So high emitters aren’t off the hook for reducing our overconsumption, but everybody eligible should vote.
Feelings: Fed Up with Greenwashing
In case you managed to avoid the Internet last Thursday (if so- I salute you!! What is your secret??), you know that it was Earth Day.
I love the Earth, but I hate Earth Day.
I wrote an essay partly excerpted from my new book Under the Sky We Make (have you ordered your copy yet??) about my frustration with Earth Day, and what I want us to do to be able to give the Earth the celebration she deserves. Here’s a peek; the full piece is online here.
I’m an environmental scientist, and I hate Earth Day.
I roll my eyes at the sudden scramble for 24 hours’ worth of eco-content and scoff at the light green veneer painted over business as usual.
But most of all, I am furious that, every year, April 22 comes and goes while we continue to dig ourselves deeper towards climate and ecological debt and disaster.
Since the first Earth Day in 1970, humans have used up almost 70% of the carbon budget available for all of time, for all of humanity, pushing us towards the brink of climate catastrophe. No one born after 1985 has lived through a normal year on planet Earth; every year of their lives has been warmer than the twentieth- century average.
Wild vertebrate populations have declined 68 percent since Earth Day began. It will take millions of years for evolution to recover the biodiversity that has already been lost. Life on Earth is on life support: Humans are now driving species to extinction at a rate one thousand times faster than natural. Human exploitation of nature, primarily from land use and agriculture, is unraveling the web of life, which ultimately includes us.
I am heartbroken by the worries weighing on young people two generations after Earth Day began. At a climate protest in 2014, I listened to an eight-year-old girl deliver a powerful speech: “I dream of studying the ocean, but I’m afraid the ocean may be dead when I grow up.”
As a scientist, I’m terrified that she may be right. Half of live coral cover on coral reefs, which buffer storms and are nurseries to much of the life in the oceans, has already died.
And I’m furious at the impotence of data and knowledge, because we’ve known since before I was born what the problem is, and what we have to do.
Five years before the first Earth Day, the president of the American Petroleum Institute warned of the “catastrophic consequences of pollution” and looming “marked changes in climate… caused by … the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas.”
That was in 1965. Before we put a man on the freaking moon.
For my entire career, and for more than my entire life, far too many business, government, media, and cultural leaders have either ignored or actively denied climate reality, and either marginalized or threatened the scientists who gave it voice. Meanwhile, amid these decades of deliberately manufactured doubt and delay, fossil fuel emissions have tripled since the industry’s own 1965 warning of catastrophic consequences.
We can do better than these last decades, and turn things around. I have a plan for how we should celebrate Earth Day for reals; read it here.
Action: Hot Date with Planet Earth
Your action this month is to make a date with the planet for you and your loved ones. Catch up on quality time in your community garden or your local park or beach.
The average American child spends seven hours a day on a screen, and seven minutes or less playing outside. :(
Humans need a personal, physical connection to natural places to feel our most alive and grounded. Studies show that direct, repeated experiences with local nature over time is how people, especially children, build a relationship with nature and a sense of place and feel a connection and responsibility as well as agency to protect nature.
Some Actions to get you out enjoying and taking care of your local patch:
Sit quietly in nature for 5 or 10 minutes and simply observe your surroundings. What can you see, hear, smell, and feel? This doesn’t have to be somewhere exotic; it can be right outside your front door. More than 30 years later, I still vividly remember watching an ant crawl up a sunlit blade of grass on the front lawn of my school for a fourth-grade science assignment.
Get in the habit of leaving nature better than you found it. I try to carry a trash bag with me to pick up litter when I’m out for a walk. For mega inspiration, check out the #EarthCleanUp by Edgar McGregor. With daily effort and a bucket over a year and a half, he completely cleaned up one of the most popular hiking trails in Los Angeles. This 90 second video is an inspiring watch. Another inspiration is 12-year-old Lilly of Lilly’s Plastic Pickup; here’s her story. (Btw, I learned a lot about litter psychology, gentrification, and community from this Eve Andrews piece, “How do I get my neighbors to stop littering?”)
Get to know the nature in your own backyard. The author and naturalist Stephen Moss saw nearly 100 bird species within a mile of his home over the first year of the pandemic. The Low-Carbon Birding initiative promotes enjoying your feathered friends in your local patch. My friend Hakim leads free birding walks for beginners around Malmö, Sweden every Saturday with Birding Therapy.
Learn more about your local nature. Check out books like Anna Wilson’s sweet nature almanac for kids, the great Collins Garden Birdwatcher’s Bible (European birds), and the amazing, free Cornell Labs app Merlin Bird ID. To get help with ID and contribute your observations of plants, animals, and fungi to researchers, the crowdsourced app iNaturalist is wonderful.
Support your local parks and natural areas. Simon and I are members in the Friends of the Lund Botanical Garden where we take a lunchtime walk most days. Your local, state, or regional parks are mostly run by volunteers who would love your time and financial support.
Support organizations who protect, restore, and promote responsible enjoyment of nature. Among other groups, I support the conservation groups Sonoma Ecology Center and the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (they also offer local hikes and activities), and the Swedish Tourist Association who run an amazing set of huts and hostels from which to enjoy the outdoors.
Parting Thoughts & Tidbits
Kim on the Internet: Talking about babies and climate
I had the chance to talk with the very smart Sigal Samuel for Vox’s Future Perfect podcast. The ostensible topics was the ethics of kids and climate change: the climate impact of creating a new person, and concerns about the life that new person might have on our warming planet. But we went way beyond that; this was one of the most wide-ranging, in-depth, and thoughtful interviews I’ve done. Have a listen (or read the highlights).
Recently Enjoyed:
Read: Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson. I think this is my new favorite climate fiction. Parts are DARK (the first chapter is traumatic) but also gave me the feeling that hey, we just might make this work. I finished it three weeks before my clifi bookclub and was dying to talk about it!
Eat: It’s April, we’ve had some beautiful days, but right now it’s grey and rainy. Perfect weather for this smoky vegan chili from Kenji in NYT. Cornbread on the side if you’re ambitious (here’s an easy one from Nerdy Mamma with ingredients you already have).
Listen: My friend & We Can Fix It reader Meg recommended this 10-day meditation on eco-anxiety. It’s got some good tips on handling overwhelm & building support.
Drink: I love that New Belgium Brewing’s Fat Tire launched a terrible-tasting “Scorched Earth Ale,” made from weeds, tainted water, and other ingredients from in the world we’re trying to avoid. Let me know if you try it!
P.S. I’m excited to see all of you subscribers who signed up for the special discussion of Under the Sky We Make with me and my friends Lucy Kalanithi and Colty Tipton-Johnson this coming Sunday, May 2 at 11am California, 2pm NYC, 7pm London and 8pm here in Sweden! I’ll be sending out the Zoom link shortly.
P.P.S. If you missed the signup for the We Can Fix It version, you can still host your own bookclub, and invite me to join you for a Q&A or a book seminar!