“theories, beliefs and practices die one generation at a time.  But the conversation and battle must start somewhere” Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker, 2017

“people would prefer to live in a world … in which we do not squander either our own lives or the natural gifts on which our children and the rest of the living world depend.  But a small handful, using lies and distractions and confusion, stifle this latent desire for change” Out of the Wreckage, George Monbiot, 2018

There are plenty of campaigns.

In 2017, an old man named David galvanized public attention to the plight of ocean life being destroyed by plastic waste.  In 2018, a young woman named Stacey has created a stir with her documentaries on the harm caused by throwaway clothes.  A similar documentary that looks into our individual energy consumption would be good, but the associated pollution is invisible and therein less likely to shock us.

That said, it can be unhelpful to take aim at a single issue, however shocking it may be in itself, without considering the overall situation.  When it comes to the environment, we can easily undo the benefit of any specific action we take, if we do not have a holistic appreciation of our impact across all forms of consumption.

In June of this year, a comprehensive study of diet and its planetary consequences was published by Oxford University.  Its lead author, Joseph Poore, was quoted in the press as saying that “the vegan diet is the biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth … far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car”.  Poore was making the point that our diet has other effects, apart from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including acidification, destruction of forests and loss of bioversity.  But the comment – or at least the way it was reported – was distinctly unhelpful.  And also untrue.  Whilst humanity’s biggest impact is via diet, that is because most of us eat every day, whereas something like flying is done relatively infrequently and by only a small percentage of the world’s ‘richest’ people.

But if I make a trans-oceanic return flight, it is easy physics to establish that my pro rata CO2 emissions into the atmosphere amount to a small number of tonnes … which is comparable in terms of GHG with a year’s worth of a meat-eating diet.  The latter is more complex to establish, but all of the studies done to date, including Poore’s, support the finding that one person’s annual food consumption equates to a few tonnes of CO2 (or less if you are vegan).  So in simple order-of-magnitude terms, that return flight is a year’s scoff, at least when it comes to GHG.  Maybe no trees were chopped down, no biodiversity obviously lost, at least not immediately – but giving the impression that it’s ok to fly and drive because you have become vegan is certainly not doing the planet any favours.

The impact budget

It would help if we could think in terms of an overall impact budget, an amount that each of us can ‘spend’ if we want to live sustainably, so that if we splash out here, so to speak, by making a long journey say, we need to cut back there, by changing our diet or halving the number of shopping trips.  Ideally, we would have an intuitive understanding of our relationship with nature; but this is hard to achieve in today’s world.  Instead, we could be taught – approximately is fine – how our various actions in life affect the planet.  This could start in schools.

For instance, many schools encourage international charity trips, to Africa or South America say.  They are justified on the basis of broadening pupils’ awareness of conditions suffered by people in developing countries, and the need to encourage a sense of global interconnectedness and mutual responsbility in the next generation.  (And there is a sense of adventure, which perhaps is an unacknowledged motive.)

Leaving aside such difficult questions as whether or not the practical benefits for the visited communities outweigh the organisational effort, or whether a sense of global empathy requires global travel, it is perfectly reasonable to state the following: an endeavour which is justified on ethical grounds should consider all of the ethics.  Schools, in this travel example, should explain the enviromental side-effects and their potential consequences for vulnerable communities – even a high-level treatment is better than none at all – and invite discussion about the trade-offs.  I made this point in a school talk once; I have not been invited back.

It would not be difficult for schools to give pupils an overarching appreciation, in roughly quantified terms, of our typical impact on nature.  By way of example, here is a graphical summary of our GHG emissions, calculated on the basis of a typical four-person household in Great Britain:

How-do-WE-affect-the-planet

The fact that such analysis is relatively straightforward – at least in summary form that is approximately but not precisely correct – begs the question why it doesn’t seem to be produced in places of general learning as a matter of routine?  Why are people unaware of the effects of their lifestyle – their new cotton jeans or home heating, Christmas shopping or summer holiday?  Is it because of a focus in school curricula on ‘essentials’ like sums and spelling, which don’t leave enough time for topics like how we could live in a way that can be sustained?  Is it misguided disdain for the imprecise?  Or is it a reticence to delve into areas that appear to be complex and controversial?

Energy vs electricity

Or is it the result of a tendency to focus on narrow bottom-up analysis rather than broad top-down awareness?  Based on my own experience at work, top-down approaches are currently held in low esteem.  In the world of Big Data and powerful laptops, a common assumption is that an analysis which is heavy on detail, even if much of it is irrelevant or spurious, is considered more professional than one which is light.  This encourages ever more segmentation and specialization.

It is easy then to mistake a narrow vista for the panorama.  One illustration from my working life is the common confusion between ‘electricity’ and ‘energy’.  In Europe, we are making progress in replacing fossil fuels with renewable sources – hydro, wind and solar – which now account for about one quarter of the total electricity generation in Europe.  Several countries have targets to generate most of their electricity from renewable sources in the coming decades.

However, this is often described as ‘energy’, which is a source of confusion.  We use energy in three main ways: for heating (and cooling), transport and electricity.  The largest sector in terms of CO2 emissions in Britain (and also the U.S.) is now transport, even excluding international aviation.  Energy is also embodied in the goods we buy, most of which are imported into GB: the CO2 footprint of these is also greater than from domestic electricity generation.  So if we fully decarbonize our electricity sector, that is good … but we will still be producing around 80% of our current emissions, other things being equal.  Other things are not equal unfortunately – aviation is growing strongly for instance.

There is considerable enthusiasm for electric vehicles, and – in the fullness of time – electric heating in the form of heat pumps.  That is also good, but it will very substantially increase demand for electricity.  The targets for decarbonizing electricity are based on current ‘traditional’ use, i.e. not accounting for the tripling of demand that will occur if we use electricity for our ground transport and all our heating.  It is not impossible to meet the EU’s targets of overall decarbonization by 80-95% from 1990 levels by 2050, but it would require an enormous economic transformation, one that most forecasters are not yet assuming.

Seeing the panorama

In focussing on the vista of electricity consumption, it is easy to miss the panorama of overall energy use.  Or, indeed, focussing on the vista of energy use, it is easy to miss the panorama of overall environmental impact.

If we could nurture and foster this overall awareness, we could make better headway towards a sustainable future.  If George Monbiot is right, we have amazing capacity for altruism and empathy with the natural world, and just need to free ourselves from our selfish mores and economic structure: revolution can happen quickly given the right catalysts and organisation.  Even if it takes longer – if, to adapt Walker’s quotation, consumption habits die one generation at a time – we might, just about, have that much time left.