Category: Climate change

“If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.” Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Is it conceivable that we could exchange our dreams for ones that are sustainable?  Is it possible to take the question seriously without being distracted or offended?

Communication today: distraction and outrage

Throughout history, keeping a person’s attention has always been difficult.  I suspect even Cicero, the great Roman orator, had trouble preventing some people from drifting off in the middle of one of his speeches.  Maybe he was tempted to deliver them standing on his head, a tactic once threatened (but sadly never executed) by a former university lecturer of mine frustrated by the inability of us not-especially-bright students to understand what he was saying.

But in the age of electronic media, the task has become a lot harder.  Many of us spend our waking hours going from one interruption or distraction to the next, in the lulls between them waiting to be interrupted.  It is a pattern of consciousness familiar to those with office jobs trying to cope with their e-mail, news addicts, and anyone on Facebook.  With so much to occupy our thoughts and desires, it is not so easy to concentrate all the way to the end of a sentence, let alone the end of an entire article, e-mail, conversation or report.

Cicero made enemies, Mark Antony being the most obvious example, through the reliable but relatively laborious strategy of writing and delivering in public a series of disrespectful speeches.  Today, he could achieve the same effect with a quick tweet.  Electronic communication has made it amazingly easy to give offence, and to lose a receptive audience in the process.  As Americans say, it ‘reads cold’ in the absence of a human voice or visual expression; and if the topic is related to something moral or ethical, the reader is quick to sniff out an odour of superiority emanating from the writer.  And if readers feel criticized, in addition to having numerous other calls on their attention, the writer has an even more difficult job to maintain their focus.

By being quick to reject a message if it seems moralistic, we make ourselves impervious to any insight it might otherwise, albeit painfully, provide.  For example, whatever one’s views on organized religion, the following sentence offers food for thought in spite of the clumsiness of its metaphor: “It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.”  No doubt, each quotation of this ilk halves the readership of a blog post in an instant, as it triggers psychological defense mechanisms against moralizing, misogeny, hypocrisy, do-good-ism, kill-joy-ism, …

Can’t buy me love

And yet – if we can manage to put these emotional triggers to one side – it is an interesting comment about what does, or does not, make us happy.  Back in the 1960s, Paul McCartney penned a simpler version: “money can’t buy me love”.  But money is only one of the ways by which a person can become rich.  Without necessarily owning a large house or boasting a large bank balance, we can travel the world, try lots of novel experiences, read lots of interesting books and learn all sorts of stuff, see great films and shows, eat amazing foods, meet lots of wonderful people, …

The previous sentence probably articulates the ‘purpose of life’ for many of us.  It is what our education system and media jointly endorse.

Stimulation and response

There is though a problem: the yawning gap between what we experience and what we assimilate.  It is possible for the onslaught of data (factual or otherwise), and visual imagery, to impair creativity and sensitivity, judgement and reason.  In one of his books (does it matter which one?), Alain de Botton comments that most ‘well-educated’ Westerners today are better read, in the sense of having read much more, than ancient philosophers like Cicero.  We are not necessarily wiser than them as a result.  Many science graduates know more physics than Einstein with arguably less to show for it.  Einstein could not be bothered to remember anything that was easy to look up in a textbook, but today our values are different and we measure ‘intelligence’ in terms of a person’s ability to answer factual questions quickly.  Television programmes like University Challenge, Eggheads, Pointless, Mastermind, QI and so on might seem to be just fun and not serious, but they reveal what we think it means to have a ‘good brain’.  It seems to mean a smattering of knowledge on a very wide range of subjects, combined with rapid recall.  The zeitgeist refuses to countenance the possibility of being ‘over-educated’ like Wilde’s character Algernon, or Dickens’ M’Choakumchild in Hard Times.

In a similar vein, we assume it is impossible to be too well travelled, to know too many people, or to have had too many experiences.  And yet our energy, devotion and capacity to make sense of the world are not without limit or invulnerable to fatigue.  Just as soil can become depleted from over-use, so we can become depleted and depressed from over-stimulation.  Maybe this varies from one person to the next; and we should be taught to recognize our individual limits.

Otherwise, we start to miss the value within.  We become a bit like Lady Dedlock in Bleak House: bored and irritable at spending time in the country away from the glitz and glamour of London high society.  Boredom is telling, because it often (usually?) manifests a dulled sensitivity, a temporary failure to be enthused by the qualities of the person/place/experience that we perceive to be dull.  The problem may lie with the observer, not the observed.

Environment

So what does any of this have to do with the environment?  I think that our high octane way of life contributes to a low boredom threshold and depression if we are not ‘on the go’.  So we seek happiness through a combination of buying stuff, homes, travel, rich food, and big parties.  All of this requires a lot of energy, land and resources; and leads to a high level of pollution and destruction.

Is our education system helping?  In many ways, it encourages the dream.  In addition to loading us with plenty of information about the external world, maybe it would do well to teach us how to be kind to ourselves and see the value in the seemingly ordinary.  That life is ‘in here’ and not just ‘out there’.  That the ordinary person next to us, and the one inside us, is not only as important but as intrinsically interesting as a politician, sportsman or celebrity in the news.

Maybe it is as important to learn about ourselves as it is to learn about numbers bond and spellig.  Why are we so restless?  Is a lot of it about fear – fear of death, immigrants, sexual predators, financial loss?  Is some of it personal dissatisfaction, because we are exposed to celebrities, fashion models and sports stars, and it is hard not to compare ourselves unfavourably against them; and because our education system tells us the world is our oyster, so we are failing if we do not make the most of it?

This is speculative, because I do not know what I’m talking about.  But nor through history have some of our best novelists, artists and poets, who have relied more on thoughts and feelings than encyclopaedic knowledge.  Perhaps the latter is better suited to computers than people.

And perhaps, with an increased emphasis on caring and psychological and physical health, our education system could help us to develop more of a sense of security and belonging, and dreams that are commensurate with sustained life on our planet.

“All the necessary technologies and all the necessary policies to reach zero carbon are proven and waiting to go.” Paul Allen, Can Britain Become Zero Carbon?, Centre for Alternative Technology, 2018

“Consumerism – ever restless, never sated – threatens us with climate breakdown, helps catalyse a sixth great extinction, imperils global water supplies, and reduces the many wonders of the living world to the same grey waste.” George Monbiot, Out of the Wreckage, 2018

I guess that most people would buy into the idea that it’s good to have a positive outlook.  That we need to be positive for our own mental health.  And that only when we are positive can we summon the energy to go out and make the world a better place, at least for those close to us who would otherwise have to contend with our miserable demeanour.

A difficulty in our culture seems to be that positivity means avoiding inconvenient truths.  As a result, when inconvenient truths are spelt out, by someone like George Monbiot for instance, the speaker comes across as unhelpfully negative.

In 2006, prime minister Tony Blair declared in respect of climate change: “unless we act now, not some time distant but now, these consequences, disastrous as they are, will be irreversible … there is nothing more serious, more urgent or more demanding of leadership”.  Two months later, his response was “a bit impractical actually” when it was suggested to him that he might show leadership by not flying his family to Barbados for holidays.  Pressed further, he remarked: “in the new frames for the aircraft, they are far more energy efficient”.  On which note, Emily Armistead of Greenpeace commented: “hoping for the best is not a policy, it is a delusion”.

Blair’s enthusiasm for new and improved aircraft was undoubtedly positive, yet it was little more than wishful thinking.  As subsequently noted by David Mackay, the government chief scientist and author of Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, planes have largely been optimized in response to commercial incentives; and there is no prospect of their energy consumption being halved in future.  A plane that is flying optimally, so as to minimize its fuel consumption and carbon emissions, uses around half of its energy combating gravity and the other half combating air resistance.  Given that we are not going to take up less space in future (so planes will still need to push as much air out of the way when they fly), this means that even if we managed to slash the weight of planes, we would only be able to halve their fuel consumption if they flew more slowly.  Doing anything more slowly hardly fits with our modern lifestyle and values.

Tony Blair’s response, and subsequent government policy, provide an example of how optimism and positivity can get in the way of considered thought.  In the twelve years since he made his remark, there has been little public debate about the need to fly less.  Instead we now fly much more – in Britain, about ten times the global average on a per capita basis – and the carbon footprint of flying has grown inexorably.  (Indeed we need to fly more still, for the good of our economy, according to the government’s logic for a third runway at Heathrow.)  If the rest of the world catches up with us, flying could become the largest contributor to global warming of any human activity.

Ah but, says the optimist, we will have electric planes in the future.  They will run on batteries, which will be charged up using clean renewable electricity generated by wind and solar power.  This is the latter-day equivalent of Tony Blair’s remark in 2006.  In both cases, positive thinking seems to mean wishful thinking.

Not even optimists in the aviation world are talking about electric planes flying over oceans.  The Californian firm Wright Electric forecast in 2017 that electric flights will travel between London and Amsterdam by 2027, and European developers think hybrid planes (which use a battery in combination with normal jet kerosene, so are not fully electric) might be able to fly 1000 km by 2035.  That is less than 20% of the way from London to New York.  It is not clear whether it is even physically possible, let alone technologically possible, to develop an electric plane that can cross the Atlantic.

And so it will remain the case that each return flight from London to New York will emit into the atmosphere a tonne of CO2 per passenger for at least the next couple of decades and probably throughout our lifetime.  Or two tonnes, or more, if you include the extra (bad) effects of releasing CO2 at high altitude.  Two tonnes per person is still the climate scientists’ view of the average annual emissions of greenhouse gases allowed per person in the long run if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change.

So it is difficult to escape the logic that if climate scientists are right, we will simply have to fly much less.  And yet, such is the cultural bias towards positive thinking, one cannot reason thus without being accused of being negative and scare-mongering, like the author of Out of the Wreckage.

Optimism is an unhelpful attitude if it leads us to assume we can carry on as we are without a radical overhaul of our way of life.  Paul Allen is simply mistaken, unfortunately.  In the world of aviation, at least, the necessary technologies are not only not in place, but not obviously possible even in theory.

What about biofuels?  In a previous blog post, I have shown how a fairly simple calculation can demonstrate that Britain would have to devote at least a fifth of its entire land area to tree planting solely for the purpose of offsetting the carbon emissions from flying using biofuels.  Or alternatively borrow someone else’s country for the purpose.

Flying is not the worst

The writer C.S. Lewis was fond of observing the following quirk of the human psyche: things that are either good or bad are easily displaced from our attention by the best or the worst.  It is what allows bad news to be buried.  In the days before the end of apartheid in South Africa, Barclays bank came in for extensive criticism for its dealings with the regime, even though other banks like NatWest were (nearly) as bad.  Today, the airline industry is rather like NatWest: it flies under the radar, so to speak, with respect to climate change because other sectors – the food industry, energy sector, road transport – are bigger contributors to global warming and other environmental decay.

Without re-hashing the statistics and arguments from other posts, suffice it to say that in Britain in 2018 the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions is the aviation sector.  And if the rest of the world copies us …

We need to change our way of life, a necessity exemplified by no other predilection as well as that for foreign travel.  For this change to have any chance of happening, we need a new story of human happiness.  As George Monbiot writes: “holiday and airline companies have worked hard to persuade us that living the dream means travelling the world, seeking novel experiences; but I suspect that what many people want above all else is a strong sense of home”.

How can we convey that “sense of home” with a gentler way of life?