Drawing Down with the Joneses

Okay, so anthropogenic (man-made) climate change is real. What can I do about that? If you’re like most people, this is where you stop thinking much more about it, because it’s too big a problem for you to deal with in between all of the other issues that are taking up your time: job (or lack thereof), spouse/partner, kids, bills, political polarization, civil unrest, pandemic…..it’s a lot.

And incredibly, the world leaders, industrialists, lawmakers and even perennial climate conference attendees et al haven’t gotten much farther than you have making progress on this issue. The writing has been on the wall for over three decades and now the real-time observations that I’ve previously written about (1, 2) are too obvious to ignore for all but the most delusional of climate skeptics.

What’s the explanation for the global inaction on this existential crisis? It’s simultaneously complex and deceptively simple: the drivers of our Global civilization (economics, consumption, energy policy, large-scale agriculture, resource extraction, etc.) have created the very drivers of our catastrophic climate change (massive increases in carbon/GHG emissions leading to land/oceanic warming leading to extreme weather events, ocean acidification, biosphere degradation, etc.) Therefore, in order to actually solve our problem, we have to reset the way we do almost everything. But, LOL, this unpalatable concept is when most people’s heads just explode, though fortunately there are climate advocates (Peter Kalmus, Naomi Klein and Greta Thunberg, to name a few) who are bold enough to voice this incredibly inconvenient truth that most people conveniently ignore.

So if this is such a macro, big picture issue, again, “where do I come in?” Well, there are myriad ways, but one of the most obvious is that you need to change what you have likely been taught to “aspire to” in life. You need to reject the old mantra “keeping up with the Joneses”(or even “with the Kardashians”) — a mindset that perfectly encapsulates the previous century’s excesses of conspicuous consumption and debt-fueled economic growth — and replace it with something like “drawing down with the Joneses.” Project Drawdown was co-founded by longtime climate advocate Paul Hawken to identify all the ways that we can reduce (“drawdown”) carbon emissions from the atmosphere, but I use it here to encompass all the activities that an individual might do in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change and biosphere degradation.

Once you have adopted this new mindset, you can frame every decision that you make through its prism. It’s not just that you are going to recycle for example, because that activity is much less effective than the hyper-consumptive public is led to believe, but that you will employ the other two “r’s” that used to be part of the recycling lingo — reduce and re-use. Reduce is the most important in terms of impact — don’t buy it in the first place! Less is more. Reduce your consumption (non-essential things), reduce your energy use (particularly energy from fossil fuels, including natural gas), reduce the amount of meat in your diet (you don’t have to go full vegan to make an impact), reduce your waste creation, reduce the size of house you think you need (water and energy use), reduce your travelling (gas and jet fuel) and the number of cars you own….reduce, reduce, reduce! And I’m not talking 10%, I’m talking 30%, 40%, 50%.

But if you really need to have something that you can’t reduce, then employ the second best alternative and re-use. This not only means buying used items instead of new ones (hello Craigslist!), but also finding creative ways to re-purpose items that you own for other things. If you’re having trouble figuring out the desired outcome here, remember the planet Earth that the titular robot hero of WALL-E was left to clean up and think that this is what we are trying to avoid — and don’t forget that image doesn’t even include the warming impact from landfill methane or the emissions used to create all those discarded items in the first place!

While employing the new mindset of “less is more” and “reduce and re-use” at your own household level, it’s very helpful for you to understand the relative impact that some of your new choices will have, especially if you are doing some as a trade-off to avoid doing others. For example, if you are like me, you probably aren’t aware that hanging a single load of laundry out to dry instead of using your dryer saves you the equivalent of burning an “energy efficient” LED bulb for 300 hours! In your newly competitive “drawing down with the Joneses” mindset, check out this link in the NY Times for some help in gauging carbon savings. At this point in the reading and if you’re paying attention, then you understand the impacts these changes of reduced consumer behavior will have on our Consumer Industrial Complex and on the economics of debt-fueled growth — they are simply incompatible, full stop. Which is why the entrenched governments (enabled and funded by the largest corporate interests) have not accomplished any meaningful change yet.

So how does this change?

Vote. Sounds simple I know, but I don’t only mean to vote in the traditional meaning of the word — for political candidates that will pass laws and enact policies to mitigate the damage that we have done and are continuing to do to the climate and biosphere, as well as for those that recognize that poor people of color among our global citizenry will suffer the earliest and the worst from the impacts of climate change (climate justice). As importantly or perhaps even more so, you also need to “vote” with your dollars and your feet. Part of this you are already doing by your new implementation of the “r’s,” but it also is about where you invest your money (if you are fortunate enough to have investments) and to whom you give your “reduced” business. Don’t invest in fossil fuel companies or related industries. Period. And if you are going to purchase something new, especially a big purchase that will function for years, make sure that it is either constructed from renewables, runs on renewables or is made to be sustainable and ideally, made locally. I’m talking electric cars, solar panels/heat pumps and sheep wool insulation instead of SUVs, natural gas or rock wool.

Oh, and protest. Don’t groan out loud just yet! I understand that not everyone feels comfortable hitting the streets, but like the word “vote,” “protest” can take many forms, including on-line petitions, brand boycotts or even “protesting” letting certain friends and family members continue to be ignorant of the issues. (this last one can really test you, but if not now, then when? Once your house has flooded twice? Or climate migrants are dying en masse trying to reach your shores?). When you “protest” and “vote,” you become part of the macro equation: the limited effect of your individual action becomes a Paris Agreement-level effect through multiplication of your competition with the many “Joneses.” If the “Joneses” vote not only for new policies, but with their money and actions to change the global demand and supply chains, then it will have an effect at the highest government and corporate levels, as there would be no alternative choice to continue “business as usual.” FYI, this “BAU” warming scenario projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and implicitly endorsed by the world’s largest industrial polluters, would be catastrophic for the continuation of life on this planet — no joke.

So you don’t have to buy into the oil and gas company propaganda that mitigating climate change is all on individual shoulders to understand the benefits of reprograming your embedded consumer behavior. It’s going to take everything and the kitchen sink (ceramic, locally forged!) to give us half a chance to avoid the worst effects of climate change that are barreling down the pipeline towards us, so it’s no good being naïve about the challenges ahead — there is no more “normal,” that’s gone. And changes in our collective behavior are unavoidable if we are to have any version of an inhabitable Planet for humans in the decades to come.

Oh, and compost….I bet the Joneses forget to do that one!