Individual action on climate is big deal again

Individual action on climate is big deal again

Fresh Bad Takes on Nikki Haley and the relative threat of wokeness and pandemics.

If you’d asked me five or 10 years ago, I would have said that the media was a little too hung up on individual action to mitigate climate change. There were all kinds of articles about, like, assessing the carbon footprint of your dog’s chew toys or how to find low-emissions socks. And this extended to quasi-personal local policy interventions like the move to get coffee shops to stop giving out plastic straws with iced coffee. All these personal choices did matter in some sense, but actually figuring out the carbon math on all these individual consumption choices was borderline impossible and the relevant scales were just way too tiny.

Smart people united, I think, to push a clear message that what we needed instead was collective social pressure for big-picture policy change.

Their efforts succeeded, scoring some small-scale wins from the Biden administration and then a large win with the Inflation Reduction Act. And what I now think needs to happen is a swinging of the pendulum. When a big policy change is made, the marginal returns on further political advocacy for big national policy change are smaller. And of course the purpose of large-scale policy change is, in fact, to alter your daily life. The IRA creates lots of subsidies and financial incentives, but the extent to which these policies succeed and at what pace really does hinge on individual actions.

Some of that comes down to basic consumption choices: do you actually go out and buy the new climate-friendly stuff that IRA is subsidizing? But some of it comes down to bigger-picture life choices. The world needs people to spend their time not on climate activism, but on actually doing the direct climate work — building the wind turbines and installing the heat pumps.

I’m still pretty confident that we’re not going to straw-ban our way to utopia, but small-scale political change makes a big difference in the wake of large-scale political change. Now more than ever there’s a broad range of levels on which individual action — consumption choices, career choices, hassling local officials — can meaningfully contribute to decarbonization.

It’s time for climate-conscious consumption

A big piece of this, as Shannon Osaka wrote recently, is that about a third of the Inflation Reduction Act climate funding goes to subsidizing consumer purchases of climate-friendly stuff. That’s great.

But Joe Biden isn’t going to personally come to your house, steal your car, and leave a Nissan Leaf in your garage. Analysts and modelers can (and have) tried to guess how much behavioral change will result from the new tax incentives, but the reality is that the answer hinges on millions and millions of individualized consumer choices. Depending on where you live and what you drive, the biggest impact you can have on emissions right now probably comes from either replacing your home heating setup with an electric heat pump or (especially for the typical American who drives a lot) replacing your current car with an electric vehicle.

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What’s nice about these things is that while they are individualized consumption choices, acting responsibly does not involve becoming neurotic and engaging in endless rounds of hand-wringing.

These are two large, rarely-made purchases that have a large impact on emissions. And having committed to make the switch, it doesn’t matter very much ecologically how much you sweat the details. It is true that the very largest EVs may have a larger environmental impact than the very smallest and most efficient gas-burning cars, but the vast majority of EVs are cleaner than almost all gas-fired cars. More to the point, almost no one is actually trading in their Prius C for an F-150 Lightning. If you’re currently driving a small sedan, then replacing it with a small EV will reduce emissions. If your needs are currently better met by a huge truck or SUV, then switching to an electric truck or SUV will reduce emissions. If the next time you buy a vehicle, you buy the kind that you are in the market for but make it electric, that’s a win.

Heat pumps are even easier because the same range of personal choices isn’t in play.

The biggest barrier to heat pump adoption is that a lot of people have heard that electric heat pumps don’t work when the weather gets very cold. That’s been a roadblock to decarbonization both because it deters people from getting them and more important because it means you can’t electrify home heating in the places where the gains would be largest. The news people need to hear is that the technology has improved and modern, well-installed heat pumps work well even in the coldest areas. So getting one becomes a double win — you reduce your carbon footprint and you get to tell your friends about what you’re doing and answer their questions.

If you’ve already made those big changes but still want to do more, or if it’s just not the right time in your appliance life cycle to replace those things, there is also the world of induction stoves

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and home energy efficiency. There are all kinds of home weatherization tax credits available thanks to the IRA, but for that to lead to emissions reduction, individual people still have to pick up the phone and have the renovations done.

Decarbonization could be your life

But all this stuff isn’t only — or even primarily — a consumer-side issue.

For lots of people to replace their gas-fired home furnaces or outdated electric baseboard heaters with modern heat pumps, lots of individual human beings need to sell and install those systems. Induction stoves are a proven technology, but the startup Impulse has the cool new idea of pairing an induction stove with a battery to improve performance while also improving grid resiliency.

This is just to say that if climate is a really big deal to you and you want to contribute to change beyond personal consumption, the answer to “climate despair” isn’t to go to weird doomer rallies, it’s to dedicate your life to doing some of this work.

Things like HVAC installations and home weatherization require incredible amounts of blue-collar labor. You’d need to train to be able to do that work, but the good news is those fields are less likely to be replaced by AI systems in the near future. If you’re looking for something more white-collar, these companies also need people to do accounting and marketing and to work on basic business models. I’m trying to tell people the good news about modern heat pumps, but I think that speaks to the available opportunities for advertising and marketing work. Go become a star HVAC influencer.

I don’t think there’s any point in giving people a hard time about flying on airplanes since at the moment there’s no good alternative. But once the structural conditions change, they need to be followed by individual behavior. Only individual people can do the work of building a lower-carbon economy. There’s this catastrophically stupid meme about how 100 corporations are responsible for over 70% of emissions, as if fossil fuel companies duped people into driving cars, using electricity, and eating food grown with the help of fertilizer. Even in areas where good low-carbon technology now exists, the logistics of actually deploying it are complicated and decentralized and involve individual people doing specific things.

The point is that individual action and political action aren’t strict all-or-nothing propositions — politics creates structural conditions in which individual choices take place.

Meanwhile, even in the political space, we’re now in an era where the actions needed are something other than the kind of “we need a big climate bill” push that dominated the years of pre-IRA organizing.

The need to act locally

A key fact about utility-scale renewable electricity is that it requires more space than fossil fuel plants.

Steve Clemmer, the Director of Energy Research & Analysis at the Union of Concerned Scientists, recently wrote a blog post purporting to debunk this idea.

His argument is not that convincing, insisting for example that we should consider only the space taken up by wind turbines themselves rather than the space between the turbines. But I think that stems in part from his misunderstanding of why this point is relevant. Clemmer says that “critics of wind and solar routinely raise concerns about how much land would be required to decarbonize the US power sector.” And I’m sure they do. But let’s assume you’re not a critic of wind and solar power. You are, instead, a person who wants to know what the proximate barriers to decarbonizing the American electricity grid are.

Is that because climate activists have gained an unusually large amount of political power in the Texas state legislature? No. It is in fact very easy to name states where climate activists have more legislative clout than Texas. The difference is that the regulatory environment in Texas makes it relatively easy to acquire land and build things in general. It’s not critics but fans of renewables who need to acknowledge that utility-scale wind and solar projects are large physical objects that benefit from an all-around favorable regulatory environment for building large physical objects.

This is a structural policy issue. But it’s not a super partisan or ideological one, and it doesn’t correlate clearly with elected officials’ stated level of concern about climate change. I used to believe “think globally, act locally” was a dumb cringey slogan, but when it comes to electricity deployment, it’s right on. If you want to see more action on climate change, one of the highest-leverage things you can do is lobby your local elected officials to make it easier to change the built environment. In California, they have California Environmental Quality Act lawsuits against solar farms. This is something people who worry about climate change can fix without eliminating Fox News or the power of the fossil fuel industry.

Time for a change

The long and short of it is that we’re at what ought to be an exciting, motivating, mood-lifting inflection point for people who care a lot about climate change.

Organizing for large-scale national political change is a thankless job, and the reality is that your odds of success are extremely low thanks to the many veto points in the American political system and the fact that other items are competing for attention on the policy agenda. Just ask the groups who were hoping to achieve major change on health care or child care in 2021-2022. Or for that matter, ask the groups who fought the good fight for climate legislation in 2009-2010. National legislation is important, but victories are rare. Going about it in a sober-minded way is a somewhat depressing, downer undertaking.

We’re now in a much more exciting time with a much more open possibility space. You could work for bipartisan reforms to advance geothermal or nuclear power. You could work in state or local politics on permitting issues. And you can do tons of individual things in your personal life — from making household consumption decisions to pivoting your career — to actually do the blocking and tackling of decarbonizing transportation and home energy consumption. But it does require revisiting some dogmas adopted over the past 15 years and breaking the addiction to doomerism and activism for activism’s sake.