Setting aside my personal disbelief in global warming for the moment, let’s examine why any one given person can’t do a thing about global warming, even in America.
We all want to believe the little myth that people are spreading about global warming, that somehow a small band of intrepid environmentalists can bring down a planet-wide behemoth of a disaster by making small marginal choices like replacing perfectly good lightbulbs with headache lamps and maybe biking to work once a week.
It’s a good story and it’s probably even got some noble-lie elements (well, excepting the fluorescent lights of course, which are the manifestation of all that is wrong with our society) in encouraging people to do good things for the wrong reasons. But kids, and you may want to sit down for this, it’s bunk. You can’t make a difference.
Why? For one thing, you (and by you, I mean collectively, because this includes every single individual residential American) just don’t do enough polluting and wrecking the Earth to matter. As this graph illustrates, residential and commercial factors combine to make up about 10% of the total contributions to greenhouse warming. And the graph here says that residential sources use 21% of the power generated in the USA. That same graph says 17% of power is used by commercial sources, so we can apply the 21:17 ratio to the 10.3% in the first graph, making it almost exactly 4.5%. So we add that to 21% of the 21.3% from power stations and we get another 4.5%… 9% total.
There’s a little bit from driving too, though a vast percentage (can’t find a source, but it’s intuitively obvious) of this is either for commercial trucking or people driving to work, which itself is commercially driven and generally not something people feel they have a choice about. So, say we tack on an extra 3% total for driving factors.
What does this mean? If all individuals stopped driving except to get to work, never used electricity, and never polluted at all from their houses, we’d only have reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 12%. Say it’s 15% for extra fun. Do you think this is going to make a dent in the meteoric upwelling of emissions and corresponding heat?
And that’s if everyone cut their usage to zero. Not a few people replacing a few lightbulbs or turning off the TV an hour early or unplugging one vampire appliance. That’s every man, woman, and child in America throwing away their refrigerator because they don’t get power to their house. Changes of that caliber in everyone’s personal life and 85% of the deadly juggernaut is still coming for us.
I wish people understood this, that it’s the giant commercial-industrial complex of the market that’s really driving contributions to greenhouse warming. And while you can pretend that a little boycott or rally is going to do something about that, no amount of “consumer action” is going to change the way businesses do business substantially enough to dent that remaining 85% of emissions, any more than holding a couple Nader rallies is going to bring down the two-party monopoly in our pseudo-democracy. You can boycott a bigger polluter and buy from someone who pollutes 5% less (or is 25% better at not getting caught polluting), but this kind of incremental musical chairs is going to have zero ultimate impact on the general upward spiral.
You can’t make a difference on a problem this big. You just can’t. There’s no marginal impact that you are having. You can stop driving and stop flying and move into a hovel with no electricity, but unless you’re going to convince corporate America to do the same, it makes no difference whatsoever. You can stop eating beef and rice (the raising of cattle and farming of rice are huge biomass contributors to greenhouse gases), but you alone are not going to move the bar on a spiraling planetary epidemic. Not gonna happen.
By far the best thing for global warming would be an end to the American economy. We would then possibly have to shut down all the commercial and industrial operations that really contribute to pollution and even stop mining for natural resources and chopping down trees. We’d have plenty of houses extant in which to house everyone and would return to a sedentary agrarian system of being. That may be our only hope.
So maybe you can make a difference. Go out and short some stocks. Refuse to participate in the economy. Quit your job. Boycott America. Then there may be some hope of saving this planet after all.
If, you know, global warming exists in the first place.
