“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure” Marianne Williamson, 1992
“And I may not know Your plan But I’m safe here in Your hands
Cause I know that You believe, in little old me, little old me” Jamie Grace, Little Ol’ Me, 2014
“Avoiding dangerous climate change is impossible – dangerous climate change is already here. The question is, can we avoid catastrophic climate change?” David King, 2007
I work in an environment where many people have prestigious degrees and many have PhDs. As we are an energy consultancy, people are generally knowledgeable about energy and our consumption of it. It is not a big step from this knowledge to work out the associated carbon dioxide emissions.
Like many modern offices, our premises has numerous meeting rooms, each with its own thermostat for air conditioning or heating. These are in constant use, and at any moment the fans are whirring away to keep each room at the temperature most recently set on the dial by a work colleague. Different rooms are set to different temperatures. The fans do not switch themselves off; and the first person into the office, after a weekend or a company offsite event, is witness to the discreet hum of numerous fans working to maintain the random patchwork of temperature differentials that has been, albeit unintentionally, determined by the last users of the meeting rooms and the ground staff responsible for the main open-plan working areas.
This is highly wasteful – and unnecessary. Heating and air conditioning are the biggest users of energy in the building. The fan in each meeting room can be switched off (and back on as required) at the press of a button. One might think that a group of highly aware energy consultants would make sure that happened. Far from it. Not only do the consultants appear not to think of it, but limp efforts by a few of us to encourage more responsible behaviour (“please turn the fan off”) have failed to have any effect.
Why is that? It is not as though colleagues are lazy – ours is a hard-working environment – nor uncaring, judging by the general enthusiasm for ‘corporate social responsibility’ activities. The truth is that I do not know the answer to the question, but I wonder whether Marianne Williamson does.
Little Ol’ Me
In 2007, the UK Chief Scientist at the time, David King, warned that human activity had already brought about dangerous climate change. The question, in his view, was whether it was still possible to avoid catastrophic climate change.
In the near-decade since King made his remark, the carbon footprint of the average person living in the UK has increased. We travel more and we buy more stuff, effects that outweigh an increase in the use of renewable electricity over the same timeframe. The Committee on Climate Change points out that UK production of CO2 is falling – but coyly admits that that only holds true because we are increasingly outsourcing our emissions to other countries in the form of imported goods!
In dire straits, the desire to feel safe is paramount. We feel safe by believing in powerful forces well beyond our puny influence: the forces of science for some, government for others, God for others still. Though adherents may differ in their choice of saviour, they have in common a faith in salvation, that ultimately we will be extricated from this climate mess and protected from its worst consequences – at least in our lifetime. Future generations may have to adapt, painfully perhaps, but at least we who are alive now will be OK.
Allied to faith in powerful and benevolent forces is a liberating belief in our individual insignificance: liberating because it frees us from a sense of responsibility. If little ol’ me is of no importance in the global scheme of things, then it does not matter what I do; it makes no difference whether I take a foreign holiday or not, eat meat or not, or even flick a switch to turn off the air conditioning … or not. So I might as well not worry and enjoy myself!
Conversely, were I to think that turning off the air conditioning made any difference, there would be a nagging sense of being culpable. I would start to think that what I did in my personal life actually mattered – and then where would it end? I would feel guilty for my past behaviour and constrained in my future activity. That seems unpleasant on both counts, a mindset to be avoided. Disavowal of responsibility joins forces with a desire to feel safe in the formation of my pyschological response: together, they persuade me to be free of conscience and sanguine of outlook.
How to keep carbon offsetting under control
Back in the office, the CSR team has persuaded the company to make a donation to Climate Care, a carbon offsetting company. Offsetting – paying other people to clean up their act on our behalf, in a developing country where it is much cheaper and easier to do so than in the UK – is a short-term fix. It does not address the issue of what we do when the developing world catches up with the ‘western’ way of life. But it is better than nothing, and Climate Care has won a ‘B Corp Best for the World’ award for its work in 2016.
To make it more real, the CSR team has suggested a new idea: whenever staff claim travel expenses that involve flights, they enter the (approximate) distance flown on the expenses form. Then, at the end of the year, someone calculates the total distance flown on business in the company, and uses that to calculate an offsetting payment to Climate Care.
Recently, we thought it would be worth sending out a reminder to staff to enter the distance flown. As with flicking a switch in a meeting room, it is a relatively simple thing to do, especially with Google on hand to tell us the distance between two airports. But, as with flicking the switch, it’s not easy to get people to do it.
This suggestion of a reminder, however, has been stalled by top management until we’ve checked on the actual entries by staff thus far. There is nervousness that this could get out of hand – if the total distance is large, the associated payment could wipe out the CSR budget!
So, we are checking – and early signs are that the take-up, in terms of people entering distances on expense forms, is miniscule. These are still early days and we need to persevere. But, to paraphrase Ms Williamson, there is a great and ever-present risk our deepest fear – that we are powerful beyond measure – may throttle our potential to such an extent that our actual response to the global danger we create is de facto inadequate.