Climate Movement

What Covid Is Exposing About the Climate Movement

The “it’s not you” approach might be good politics, but the Covid epidemic is showing it’s also wrong.

By MICHAEL GRUNWALD

Fifty years ago, 20 million Americans took to the streets for the first Earth Day, voting with their feet against the degradation of the planet. Pogo cartoonist Walt Kelly captured the moment with his legendary anti-pollution poster: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

On Wednesday, environmentalists around the world will take to their keyboards for the 50th Earth Day, forced online by the coronavirus crisis but still dedicated to saving the planet from the slower-motion climate crisis. As the earth has begun to broil, though, the Earth Day movement has reshaped its narrative, arguing that the enemy isn’t really us.

In recent years, green activists have pivoted away from guilt-tripping us about our carbon footprints and embraced a more politically appealing message: Our personal choices don’t really matter, so we should stop worrying so much about what we eat or drive and whether we recycle or compost. The new environmentally correct message is that only large-scale political and institutional change can save the climate, so lecturing ordinary people about using plastic straws and other individual behaviors with relatively paltry climate impacts is a distraction from government policies and corporate abuses with catastrophic impacts.

In other words, if you care about the earth, you should focus on the damage being done to it by real enemies like President Donald Trump and ExxonMobil, not the damage being done to it by you.

“You Can’t Save the Climate by Going Vegan,” a leading climate scientist proclaimed in a USA Today op-ed. “I Work in the Environmental Movement. I Don’t Care If You Recycle,” a climate activist declared in Vox. A Daily Beast columnist explained “Why Your Carbon Footprint Is Meaningless,” while a Guardian writer claimed “Neoliberalism has conned us into fighting climate change as individuals.” The new thinking might have been best summed up by a recent headline in the eco-media site Grist: “This professor wants you to give up your climate guilt.”

For a movement trying to broaden its appeal, it’s an alluring message. Americans don’t want to feel guilty about driving, flying, eating beef, having kids, buying too much stuff, moving to bigger houses in outer-ring suburbs or other ordinary human activities that increase greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate activists don’t want to reinforce stereotypes of enviros as self-righteous anti-fun scolds. And it’s true that there’s no way to solve climate change without major systemic change.

But the idea that our individual actions don’t particularly matter is fundamentally bogus. And over the past several weeks, the coronavirus has been revealing that in unexpected ways.

The newly iconic photos of a crystal-clear Los Angeles skyline without its usual shroud of smog are unwanted but compelling evidence of what can happen when individuals stop driving vehicles that pollute the air. Nobody is happy about what’s causing a 95 percent drop in air travel, but nobody will ever again be able to claim that massive reductions in airline emissions are impossible. And the dramatic reductions in overall emissions during this time of individual confinement are a clear demonstration that most emissions are caused, directly or not, by individual activities—the fuel we burn, the electricity we consume, the factories and farms that make the stuff we buy and eat. It’s horrible that it took an economy-crushing public health disaster to illustrate this on a large scale, but when people do less, for awful, virus-related reasons or noble, climate-related reasons, they emit less.

One reason climate activists have stopped emphasizing individual behavior is that it’s extraordinarily difficult to persuade people to change, even under threat. Global warming has seemed less imminent than the viral threat, even in this new era of hellacious megadroughts, superstorms and wildfires, and the changes that individuals do make can seem pathetically inadequate to the task of transforming a fossil-fueled economy. The solar panels on my roof have prevented just 81 tons of carbon emissions in nearly three years, a period when U.S. emissions amounted to nearly 20 billion tons. My all-electric Chevrolet Bolt saved about 500 gallons of gasoline last year, while U.S. drivers burned 142 billion gallons.

So it’s understandable that climate activists have grown weary of the ubiquitous Fifty Ways to Save the Earth narratives suggesting that citizens can fix the climate by carpooling, reusing their grocery bags or unplugging their computers at night. It’s hard to blame them for getting irritated when a global petroleum company offers a toolkit for children to track their school’s carbon footprint. And it makes sense for them to focus on policies that could help slash emissions on a broader scale, like carbon taxes or clean-energy subsidies or pollution limits, and on the big targets that make ambitious climate goals unattainable, like fossil-fuel infrastructure, logging roads and political assaults on the environment.

But the new climate mantra is not just that individual behavior is less important than institutional change. It’s that individual behavior is basically irrelevant, and that harping on it makes institutional change less likely, alienating potential allies with victim-blaming and virtue-signaling, bamboozling the public into taking responsibility for problems caused by corporations and politicians instead of clamoring for corporate and political accountability. “It shifts the blame from the actual causes of climate change to fake ones … and shifts attention from meaningful actions to meaningless psychological ones,” wrote the Daily Beast’s Jay Michaelson.

Climate change is a wicked collective action problem, and no one seriously believes that 7.7 billion people can overcome the tragedy of the global commons by switching to reusable cups and biking to work. But while individual change alone can't fix the climate, the climate can't be fixed without it: When the scientists from the research coalition Project Drawdown ranked the top solutions for reducing global emissions, No. 3 and No. 4 were reducing food waste and embracing plant-rich diets, solutions that depend on people’s everyday life decisions.

Activists often cite a study arguing that just 100 companies are responsible for 71 percent of global emissions, but ExxonMobil isn’t forcing us to drive gas-guzzling SUV’s to the mall. Nobody would drill for oil or raise methane-burping cattle if individuals didn’t buy gasoline and beef. And while government policies can promote climate-friendly consumer choices like electric vehicles and plant-based meat alternatives, consumers still have to choose them for the policies to work.

The haze that is currently lifting around so much of the world—the Himalayas are suddenly visible from India—is literally opening new horizons, reshaping notions of what’s possible, showing that at least in an emergency, individuals can make sacrifices for a collective benefit. On Earth Day, activists will rally the people of the world to vote and lobby and protest and boycott for climate action, making the case that carbon emissions are an emergency, too.

It’s an odd organizing strategy to try to assure those people at the same time that their own emissions don’t matter. But it’s a tension in the movement as old as Earth Day itself.

On the second Earth Day in 1971, a group called Keep America Beautiful first aired the indelible “Crying Indian” ad, featuring a lone canoeist in Native American garb paddling from a pristine stream into a filthy bay. As he disembarked on a litter-strewn beach, a garbage bag chucked out of a passing car ruptured at his feet, and a tear trickled down his cheek.

“People start pollution,” the narrator intoned, “and people can stop it.”

Today, environmentalists often condemn that ad as a manipulative sham designed to shift responsibility for litter from corporations to individuals. The Crying Indian was actually an Italian-American actor with a feather in his hair. Keep America Beautiful was actually a front group for companies that wanted to avoid government regulation of wasteful packaging. In their USA Today op-ed about how going vegan can’t save the world, the eminent climatologist Michael Mann and co-author Jonathan Brockopp dismissed the 21st-century focus on individual climate responsibility as a modern Crying Indian campaign, tailored to avoid necessary government regulation of corporate carbon pollution: “This obsession with personal action, though promoted by many with the best of intentions, plays into the hands of the polluting interests by distracting us from the systemic changes that are needed.” For society, they wrote, the approach “could prove suicidal.”

Then again, the iconic “We Have Met the Enemy” poster also featured Pogo picking up litter, so it wasn’t just corporate astroturf groups pushing that approach. And in the early years of the Earth Day era, the U.S. government took unprecedented action to protect the planet, passing the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and other landmark laws. So the Crying Indian campaign didn’t turn out to be distracting or suicidal in that respect.

It also helped make littering extremely uncool. America still has serious problems with wasteful packaging, but Americans don’t chuck much garbage out their car windows anymore. Our roadsides and beaches are much tidier now. The Keep America Beautiful message that it’s irresponsible to dump trash on the world around us, as manipulative as it was, ultimately resonated with the public because it was clearly true. Littering isn’t the worst thing humanity does to nature, but we shouldn’t do it. And now that it’s stigmatized in the United States, most of us don’t.

Carbon emissions are atmospheric litter. Every gram of carbon makes global warming a bit worse. But carbon litter is invisible, while normal litter is ugly, which helps explain why carbon litter, though much harder to remove than normal litter, is not yet uncool.

Carbon litter is also everywhere, which makes it harder to fight and makes the emissions each of us create when we charge our iPhones, drive our Dakotas and stuff our faces with Big Macs feel like insignificant drops in a planetary bucket. There are a billion cattle on earth, and your Meatless Mondays wouldn’t make a noticeable dent in their emissions if you lived to be a million years old.

Still, those tiny individual drops can eventually fill the bucket, while shrinking the drops can buy humanity time before the bucket overflows. In fact, U.S. per capita beef consumption has declined by one-third since the 1970s, as chicken has become America’s meat of choice; one group calculated that the emissions reduction from that consumer shift over just one decade was like taking 39 million cars off the road. The average American still eats three burgers a week, but if we all replaced one of them with a plant-based Beyond Burger, we’d save a land area the size of Massachusetts from deforestation every year. That would definitely make a noticeable dent.

Government policies and other institutional changes definitely matter … But behavioral norms matter, too.

Sometimes, even tiny drops can have a ripple effect. For example, my solar rooftop panels can’t solve global warming, but they’re helping to screw up my local utility’s business model. The utility makes money by selling power, and it’s counting on sales at peak hours to increase nearly 2 percent a year to keep its stockholders happy. But its sales to me at peak hours have decreased 100 percent—and my next-door neighbor went solar, too, so to hit its targets for our neighborhood our utility needs to boost sales to the other 100 or so homes by about 4 percent, which isn’t realistic. If more of our neighbors follow our lead, it might have to start lobbying for a new way to get paid that doesn’t rely on selling more power, a business model that’s led to much more rooftop solar in states like California.

Government policies and other institutional changes definitely matter: I only went solar after federal initiatives and technological innovations made it financially advantageous. But behavioral norms matter, too. As solar goes mainstream, fossil electricity could become as uncool as littering; as electric cars get cheaper, the same thing could happen to internal combustion engines. The Crying Indian illustrated how an individual ethic can be as contagious as a virus, inspiring people to do things because they just seem like the thing to do.

When I recently mentioned to Cathy Zoi, who runs the electric-car-charging company EVGO, that one electric car won’t make much of a difference to global emissions, she pointed out that one vote won’t make a difference in most elections. Most Americans vote anyway, and while government policies can make voting easier or harder, most voters believe it’s a civic responsibility.

“Nobody has to vote, and if we accepted this notion that nobody has any individual responsibility, nobody would,” Zoi said. “The thing is, we do vote, and our votes add up.”

Emissions add up, too, contributing to hotter temperatures, higher seas, more intense storms, more climate refugees and all kinds of terrible outcomes that are damaging nature and hurting people. Most of us don’t want to hurt people, even people we don’t know. We don’t shoot random strangers, and while our individual emissions aren’t quite that destructive, we don’t slap or poke or give noogies to strangers, either. If we did, we’d feel guilty about it.

So yes, we should feel guilty about littering the atmosphere. My family’s other car is an SUV, and I feel guilty about that. I fly much too often, another source of shame. I pay to offset my carbon emissions at Cool Effect, but that doesn’t assuage all my guilt. I’ve cut down on red meat, but I still eat too much, because red meat is delicious.

Does that make me a hypocrite? I’m afraid it does. Most human beings who aren’t Greta Thunberg seem to be hypocrites to some degree, and I’m not as bad as the climate celebrities who fly private jets or the activist who justified his carbon footprint by telling the writer Jason Mark that “my whole life is a carbon offset.” But hypocrisy is still bad.

In her Vox essay about how she doesn’t care about whether you recycle, activist Mary Annaïse Heglar warns that carbon-shaming “turns environmentalism into an individual choice defined by sin or virtue, convicting those who don’t or can’t uphold those ethics.” That’s a fair point about those who can’t; some people can’t afford some green behaviors, and the onus should be on public policy to drive down the costs to encourage more widespread adoption. But those who don’t, well, if they care about the climate, they should try, and they should atone. Emitting carbon isn’t the worst sin, and all of us carbon-based life forms do it. Still, less would be better.

In any case, it’s weird for activists to pretend that hypocrisy doesn’t matter, that our climate sins aren’t sinful. Personal emissions matter because all emissions matter—and if climate activists won’t say that, who will?

Earth Day was born amid the tumult of the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, the protest against the Vietnam War. Its founders wanted to change mindsets, not just reduce particulate matter and nutrient concentrations.

“Our goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty,” Gaylord Nelson, the father of Earth Day, said at the first rally in Denver. “The objective is an environment of decency, quality and mutual respect for all human beings and all other living creatures.”

Nelson was a United States senator with a political mission, but he understood the connection between the political and the personal. He knew that long-term environmental protection would require a true environmental ethic, a visceral and widespread belief that it was wrong to desecrate our common home, just as long-term progress on civil rights would depend on convincing hearts and minds that racism was wrong. Today, that environmental ethic is so pervasive that even Trump pays lip service to the importance of clean air and water.

The climate does not yet have an ethic like that in America. That may just be an inevitable result of the nation’s partisan divide. As Washington pumps trillions of dollars into the pandemic-shattered economy, Trump and other Republicans have thundered with outrage that they won’t let Democrats exploit the crisis by steering even one penny to anything green, as if the climate were just another special interest rather than a different kind of existential threat to humanity.

But it will be hard for the climate movement to develop that kind of ethic, to mobilize and organize ordinary people to fight the most important crisis our species has ever faced, while simultaneously assuring them that their personal contributions to the crisis aren’t really important.

It’s tempting to pretend that climate change is something that happens to us, that we’re all just victims of malevolent forces beyond our control. But everyone’s emissions make the crisis worse. The movement is doing a pretty good job at inspiring righteous anger at obstacles to progress, but it will also need to inspire solidarity, the feeling that we’re all in this together as a species.

The coronavirus is doing that right now. The noisy protesters raging against the tyranny of social distancing are getting a lot of press, but most people seem to be listening to the experts and doing their part to protect their communities. The virus is a vicious reminder that our actions have consequences beyond ourselves, and most of us are trying to avoid doing inadvertent harm to others. After so much climate commentary about the futility of trying to persuade individuals to change behavior for the common good, the virus is making it happen.

Climate change is a more insidious threat than the coronavirus. It’s slower-moving and less immediate; it’s also going to be with us for the rest of our lives. It’s often portrayed as a pass-fail test, where awful things will happen unless we cut emissions by a certain amount by a certain date, but it’s more accurate to see it as a cumulative disaster. Awful things are already happening, from the Bahamas to Australia, and more awful things are going to happen.

The good news, or at least the empowering news, is that the fewer greenhouse gases we emit, the fewer awful things will happen. And the more people adopt a personal ethic of climate responsibility, the more pressure our leaders will feel to embrace that ethic. While the virus has momentarily flattened the emissions curve, bending it permanently will require individual and systemic change.

The clean skies over Los Angeles are a reminder that pollution, like social distancing, is a choice, and that individuals can make it better or worse. The virus has taught us that in an emergency, we can change our behaviors in ways we never imagined possible—not just by telecommuting and forgoing business travel (new climate-friendly habits that will hopefully continue after the pandemic) but by uprooting our lives to save others.

But when we’re told it doesn’t matter whether we change our behavior, why should we believe climate is an emergency? So far, the people of the world have mostly managed, with notable exceptions and glitches, to come together to fight the common enemy of the coronavirus. It’s much more complicated to fight the enemy when the enemy is us.

Still, the enduring lesson of Earth Day is that while governments and corporations rise and fall, we will always have just one planetary home. And nobody else will clean it up for us.