This is the final installment of my debate with Colin Beaven, the New York City writer who goes by the moniker "No Impact Man"and is massively cutting back on his energy consumption. This episode begins with Colin criticizing my pro-growth position. I give him the last word, so let me just say I wish him the best and hope he changes his avatar to "Impact Man" and finds a logo and theme song that communicates all the ways in which human power is good, not evil.
Colin: God bless you if you're optimistic enough to think industry will change fast enough. God bless you too if you think we can recycle enough materials to put three TVs in every Indian and Chinese household and a car in every garage. God bless you if you think that will make people happy. God bless you, too, if you think just one approach will do the trick.
What would make America great again is introspection. Enough introspection to see that since World War II it has headed down a path that has made its people richer but far from happier. Anything that keeps them working so hard and so disconnected from community is not going to make them happier.
And there are ways we could be much happier and at least slow our growth in resource use while at the same time looking for the technological solutions you talk about.
Let me tell you about my approach--and by the way, it isn't to convince people to live the way I have been. True, I offer it as an option, if people are interested.
But more importantly I share my experiences living with lower resource consumption, to show that using less doesn't have to feel like deprivation, and to illustrate that, often, living a lifestyle that is better for the planet is often better for the person or the culture, too. (On a cultural level, think of the correlation between reduced car use and reduced obesity. On an individual level, think of the increase of family time and strengthening of relationships if we rely less on consumer items like video games and TV).
Also, my approach, as a writer and communicator, is to take a storyline that engages people—the No Impact project—and to use it as an opportunity to expose them to the things that policy analysts like you talk about.
The difference between my approach and your approach, to be pointed, as you put it, is that your approach is to circulate your ideas, for the most part, amongst a bunch of other people who are already thinking about our habitat and climate change problems. You are not taking, in other words, a popular approach to the distribution of your ideas.
Nor are you taking an approach that everyone can get involved in. Your environmental strategy itself—calling for huge investment in renewable technologies—is something that most folks feel they have any power over. And if they can't take an action on it, how can they really take it to heart? I agree with your approach whole heartedly but it is not enough.
The time has passed for just having policy wonks involved in the discussion. We need the entire country to take an interest. And my hope is that the approaches of people like me, who find ways to popularize the discussion, will reach a wider audience. People like you can make use of people like me, by using us to help disperse your ideas, which is part of my mission.
My approach helps me to convince people that they can make a difference. And if people believe they can make a difference with their lives, maybe they will believe that their vote makes a difference.
As for answering your observations about my privileged background being the only way I can claim no impact (are you always so literal, by the way?), I hope you don't mind if I don't.
Michael: Well, I agree and disagree.
I agree that introspection is important. I agree that taking responsibility is crucial to human survival and thrival. And I agree that community is crucial, which is why we wrote chapter 8 on belonging and fulfillment in affluent if somewhat lonely societies like ours.
I agree that asceticism can be creative and vital (as Nietzsche points out in the third section of the Genealogy of Morals -- which might make for an interesting reflection in your book). I agree that we should reduce our individual carbon footprints. I even agree that radicals like you, in the tradition of Thoreau, are pioneering things that might be useful to the rest of us.
And I even agree it will all make for an interesting blog and book (and an interesting trend story for reporters, along with those no-shopping people in Minnesota or Wisconsin, I can't remember which). If it's a way to get folks focused on what it will take to get to sustainability, that's great. Of course I support it.
My concern is that the message people will hear is that they have to sacrifice and suffer if we are to do something about global warming, and I don't believe sacrifice and suffering will motivate people to support the kind of transformative policies that you and I both support (investments in clean energy, regulations, efficiency, conservation, etc.). Moreover, from a strictly technical perspective, I don't believe sacrifice and suffering can get us to 80 percent emissions reductions in the U.S. by 2050.
If all of this makes me a "wonk" that's fine by me -- it's where I end up when thinking about things like global warming.
Like you I'm also interested in the research on the decline of self-reported well-being (happiness) in market economies since WWII. We mentioned it briefly in the book, but I'm not sure what to take from it. What we know is that people ranked their relative happiness higher on surveys in 1946 than they do today. But do we really think that things were better off in 1946? Of course not. Jim Crow. Shorter lives. Worse medical care. Fewer choices for women.
It's hard to tease out causation from correlation here. The relevant question is: does that fact that self-reported rates of happiness in the U.S. were higher in the 1950s mean that we'll be happier when we have less stuff? I'm not so sure. We know that when people take an unchosen reduction in their standard of living they report lower, not higher levels of happiness (see Schor's book on this). They tend to get meaner, more conservative, and even reactionary (e.g., Hutus before the genocide, Germans before the Holocaust, and Americans after 1975, etc.).
Not that it matters: we live in a democracy and Americans (and all other human animals, from the Chinese to Brazil's indigenous tribes) will consistently choose greater material wealth over material poverty. Alas, that is history, both Rousseauean and Hobbesian versions.
Don't misunderstand my acknowledgement of your wealth. I point out your (and my) privilege not because I'm trying to catch you in a contradiction, or accuse you of hypocrisy (that would be silly given that I acknowledge consuming more than you and remain concerned with climate change) but rather because it tells us something about the Chinese, and thus about climate change. There are 500 million of them who would love what you have, even at your reduced consumption, and they're not asking us for our permission to have it (or three TVs, either, for that matter). I say this not as some guilt trip but rather because I believe we need a politics focused less on reducing our carbon footprints than on breaking the connection between energy consumption and emissions.
I'm grateful for our wealth and privilege (yours and mine both). I'm grateful we can send our kids to relatively good schools, that they are safe, and that we will (as wealthy and assertive dads) find ways to get them the best available medical care, damn the emissions, when they need it.
These feelings of gratitude put me in a good mood, a mood that wants high levels of wealth and health for all humans. It's also a mood that convinces me -- perhaps irrationally -- that we humans are ingenious enough to creative relatively high standards of living for all humans without over-heating the earth.
Will "industry change fast enough"? Not if we don't do anything to help it change. That's the argument we make in the book. Private energy companies won't and can't do it alone (no industry ever has affected a tech revolution without government help). It is for that reason that we make the argument for major investments in clean energy (and other newer cleaner industries).
This is the agenda that most serious energy experts acknowledge, but it has never been pushed politically. Why? In a word, the paradigm of limits. It imagines we can reduce our way out of this crisis. I don't think you believe this, but I worry that your lifestyle may lead people to believe this is what you're saying. Of course, you have a book and blog where you can introspect and reflect on what it will take to really deal with the crisis. I applaud that, and congratulate you on your success speaking to a wider audience than, say, me.
Do we have anything to talk about? Sounds like we do.
Colin: The funny thing is, Michael, the point of my project has never been to be ascetic. The point was to use fewer non-renewable resources, but what we found was that our culture doesn't provide much that is renewable with which to replace the non-renewable! That meant we had to resort to less stuff, and the fact is that many of the gifts that we've received from our No Impact lifestyle experiment were related to the space left behind when we had less.
We learned, as a family, for example, that we were much happier without our attention and time being sucked up by all the screens--TV, computer, video games. We saw that these things have the tendency to make us all spend more time alone, when in fact, what makes people happier is spending more time together.
From our experience, I began to wonder about American cultural emphasis on gross domestic product (GDP), and the almost unquestioned idea that we should do what it takes to make sure we should all have more of what we want--namely, more TVs, computers, and video games. Economic growth. As you know, many of the politicians have stood in the way of our joining the rest of the world in concrete carbon emissions reductions targets for fear that it would stifle economic growth, the idea being that this would mean fewer TVs, computers and video games (I'm being simplistic, I know) and therefore less happiness.
But if my little family found that we were happier without, for example, the TV, that we had rid ourselves of one obstacle to thriving family and community relationships, then maybe an emphasis on economic growth and getting more is not synonymous with happiness anymore (though I agree that it was 100 years ago in the US and still is in many parts of the developing world). In fact, over the course of our No Impact year, we spent about half of the money we spent the previous year (negative growth). Yet, we spent more time with friends, spent a lot more time with our little girl, ate much more healthily by avoiding packaged and far-away foods, and got a lot more exercise and time outdoors riding our bikes. We were happier.
This is a long way from asceticism, assuming that what you mean by asceticism is deprivation. Because I would argue that, in fact, our culture is already deprived.
Most of us work so hard that we don't get to spend enough time with the people we love, so we feel isolated. We don't really believe in our work, so we feel prostituted. The boss has no need of our most creative talents, so we feel unfulfilled. We have too little connection with something bigger, so we have no sense of meaning.
To top it all off, not only are so many of us discovering that we've been working our years away to maintain a way of life that we don't really like, but we are waking up to the fact—hopefully—that this same way of life is killing our habitat.
So while I agree with you that we need to find technological solutions in order to make consumption less harmful to human health, security and happiness, I disagree that we should be working only to find systems that can maintain the social status quo. I think we could do better. I think we can innovate not just technologically but socially to save energy. I think that we can work towards a society where people don't lust after the consolation prizes because they don't need to be consoled.
Much of what brings people together is also better for the environment. Doing things one at a time, as isolated people, is energy inefficient. Living together, traveling together, being entertained together, on the other hand, is more efficient and makes us happier.
Let's build villages instead of suburbs. Places where you can walk to the store or the post office and stop at your neighbor's for a chat along the way. That would mean less driving for the environment, more community for the people, and more exercise for the tummies! Meanwhile, as an example, studies show that the unhappiest of commuters are drivers while the happiest are bikers. Let's make it safe to bike--a virtually free innovation--and build excellent public transportation systems where people can talk to each other instead of honk at each other.
Let's also work less and make our work more meaningful. Because of the throw-away-product based economy, so much of what we make is designed to be trashed within months. We have to make things and buy things over and over again unnecessarily. Yes, recyclable materials would be great but what about durable products?
Not only would that help the eco-systems but think of the labor it would save. What if we turned that same labor to doing something more meaningful? What if we turned that same labor to figuring out how to provide water access to the billion that don't have it? That's called improving human happiness while saving the environment.
You've said that reducing our carbon footprint isn't enough to do the trick, and I agree that--alone--it is not. You've suggested that reducing our carbon footprint veers towards deprivation, but I believe that that reducing resource use, if it includes system change, can actually increase abundance--if what you mean by that is human happiness as opposed to economic growth. Therefore, it should be part of the equation.
As for people always choosing greater material wealth, I don't believe you (unless you juxtapose it with poverty). Take your own example. With your incredible smarts, you could work for anyone doing anything. You could make a lot more money working on the other side for Exxon. You don't. Why? Because once we reach a certain level of comfort, we want meaning. You write about this yourself. What's necessary is to provide a social structure where meaning is actually achievable.
What you say about breaking the link between energy use and emissions is absolutely true. It is also absolutely true that there will be and should be increasing energy use in the developing world. The wealth in standard of living must and should be spread. But here in the United States there is just so much waste that doesn't make us happier and often makes us less so. So while we need huge investment in renewable energy solutions, we should also be looking to cut the waste here in the United States (and the rest of the developed world).
So look, it's not really that I disagree with you at all. I first contacted you because I agree with so much of what you say. And I think it takes all kinds. What I'm adding to the agenda is that, here in the developed world, we can actually tighten our belts and end up less deprived, because some of the systems we've developed, that suck up so much energy, don't make us happier. And part of the way I came to this conclusion was by trying to live within these systems without sucking up as much energy, in other words, by living as No Impact Man.