Four Tools For Thinking About Climate Change Jeff Wagner
Groundwork’s Bite-Sized Books Vol. 4 First printing, December 2020 Copyright ©2020 by Jeff Wagner All rights reserved Published by Groundwork layinggroundwork.org Bibliography available online at layinggroundwork.org/bibliography-4 Cover by Jordan Kump zoundsdesigns.com
Introduction Climate change denial in the United States does more than stall climate action. It has narrowed debate on climate action toward an argument between believers and deniers. Public conversations on climate solutions mirror that trend, becoming oversimplified and divisive. We’ve become stuck in an all-or-nothing mentality. Many people blame fossil fuel companies for climate change. They say the only solution is to topple big corporations. Others put the emphasis on individual actions, like recycling and flying less. With a little reflection, we all know that both of those things are true and interconnected. Consumerist culture demands fossil fuel production. Fossil fuel companies respond by providing cheap oil, gas, and coal. They feed each other. 2
Climate change is intricately woven into daily life in the United States. Our culture depends entirely on industrial systems. We could not exist without fossil fuel companies, and they could not exist without us. In the face of a scary problem like climate change, people seem to want a scapegoat, somewhere to direct negative emotions like anger and despair. The less satisfying truth is that climate change is too complex to blame on any single entity. To find effective solutions, we need to understand more deeply how a culture based on industry causes climate change. This booklet offers four tools to encourage nuanced thinking and to help generate dialogue on climate change that is more constructive and less divisive. Tool 1: Embodied Energy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 4 Tool 2: Visualizing Energy Density . . . . . . . . . p. 11 Tool 3: Why Why Why? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . p. 15 Tool 4: Ecological Footprints of Belief and Culture p. 20
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Tool 1: Embodied Energy
How do we consume so much? In the United States, the average person consumes about five times as much energy and resources as the global average. As just 4% of the world’s population, we consume about 25% of the world’s resources and energy.1 Most people don’t understand how we manage to consume so much in the first place. Before we can really think deeply about climate change, we need to ask: Where does our huge ecological footprint come from?
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Looking deeply to understand embodied energy Looking deeply into this paper booklet, we can see that it was once a forest. Over many years, the trees grew upward toward the sun, absorbing carbon dioxide from the air and transforming it into wood. This booklet is made of more than just wood. It was made from the petroleum burned by chainsaws, logging trucks, and trains. It contains water pumped through paper mills, and the contamination coming out the other side. It embodies the labor of recycling plant workers removing contaminants from good, recyclable paper. The path from tree to booklet is complicated, and the booklet is an embodiment of every step of that process. The toner used to print these words is made of thermoplastic polymers derived from oil. It’s an embodiment of everything related to oil extraction, from geopolitical conict to toxic chemicals.
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This booklet embodies resources and energy from many different parts of the world. While it’s near impossible to know the exact ecological impact this booklet has on the world, with some dedication, we can at least investigate a few layers deeper. In Mahayana Buddhist philosophy, this idea is known as śūnyatā, which can be translated as “interbeing.” Interbeing is the acknowledgement that any object or person is made up of a web of connections with everything else in the world. Wisdom, in that tradition, is said to come from the understanding of interbeing. Wise action on climate change can also be inspired by the idea of interbeing.2 Interbeing can help us undersatnd the totality of energy needed to create an item like this booklet. In environmental thinking, we call this “embodied energy”: the amount of energy needed to transform raw material into a finished product and transport it to a new location.
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Embodied resource use In addition to thinking about embodied energy, we can think about other kinds of consumption that are embodied in the objects we use. For an object, we might ask: • How much water does it take to produce this? • How much energy was used to move that water? • Does this object require industrial processes that pollute air or water? Who feels those consequences? • Does it contain petroleum-derived chemicals? • Does this object’s production cause deforestation or land degradation? • Does an industry involved in producing this object disrupt traditional or sustainable economies in other parts of the world? • Whose labor created this object? • Was that labor compensated fairly? Who is profiting from the existence of this object? 7
Which processes have high embodied energy? Fossil fuels let us create a modern world full of processes and objects with extremely high embodied energy. Most people never see or think about it, though. When high embodied energy becomes normalized and invisible, it becomes harder to imagine climate solutions. Processes with the highest embodied energy include: • Moving fast. As vehicles move faster, air resistance and energy consumption both grow exponentially.3 • Acceleration and deceleration. This is why city driving consumes more fuel than highway driving.4 • Moving heavy objects. Most notably, this includes transporting food and pumping water. • Heating and cooling. • Complex food chains. When you add a level to a food chain (like eating animals instead of eating plants), you still consume the same quantity of food, but you need to a lot more plants to feed those animals. A diet of purely meat would require about ten times the amount of plants as a diet of purely plants.5 8
Embodied energy is a way of seeing Imagine living in a time before trains. Moving objects long distances would have required boats or animal power, so heavy and perishable objects like food never traveled very far. It simply wasn’t worth the effort to move a bag of wheat or a box of pumpkins more than a few kilometers. The best way to transport food was to bring seeds and grow them in a new location. Buying local wasn’t a choice, but a necessity.6 At a market, you would have instantly known the embodied energy of objects you saw. Silk and tea traveled for months from China to global markets. Spices and coffee sailed from tropical places. We have forgotten the wonders of consuming things from far away. The embodied energy of our everyday objects is huge, but we lost the ability to perceive it. When we practice seeing the energy embodied in our lives, we can be in touch with the processes that we rely on and understand our full impact on the world. 9
Which embodied energies are hidden? Let’s look at an example. When we see trucks transporting goods, it’s easy to equate embodied energy with fuel consumption. But it’s not just about the truck. Transporting goods on trucks requires complex systems and infrastructure, creating a kind of society where most objects carry a high embodied energy. Some of those hidden embodied energies include… • • • • • • • • • • •
Manufacturing and maintaining trucks. Building and maintaining roads and parking lots. Maintaining rest stops and weigh stations. Clearing snow from roads. Extracting, refining, and transporting petroleum. Disposing of used engine oil, tires, and parts. Maintaining a system of DMVs and drivers’ licenses. Patrolling roads with an active traffic police force. Helicopter medivacs to treat injuries from accidents. Higher air conditioning use in urban heat bubbles. Operating traffic signals. 10
Tool 2: Visualizing Energy Density
How much energy do fossil fuels contain? To have a meaningful conversation about transitioning away from fossil fuels, it’s important to understand just how energy-dense and cheap fossil fuels are. Burning one half cup (120mL) of petroleum could… drive a car 0.8 miles (1.28 kilometers).7 run a clothes dryer about one full cycle.8 produce one aluminum can.9 power a household LED light bulb for 6 days.10 pump 550 gallons of water through the average municipal water system.11 • fly a Boeing 747 airliner 33 feet (10 meters).12 • • • • •
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Imagine riding a bicycle attached to an electric generator. The average person would generate about 100 watts of power.13 To compete with that tiny amount of oil, our bicyclist would need to pedal for 12 hours and 38 minutes. Even at the highest oil price in history (around 150 dollars per barrel), a half cup of oil would cost about twelve cents.14 If riding that bike was your full-time job for 40 hours per week, it would take you more than eight years to reach the output of a single barrel of oil (42 gallons, or about two pickup-truck gas tanks).
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Precious petroleum Petroleum is precious, like a savings account we could use to establish sustainable infrastructure for the future. But we don’t treat it that way. We treat oil as a bonanza—an insatiable energy binge so large that in one year, the United States consumes more energy than entire civilizations would have consumed across a century. To replace our annual petroleum consumption with human-powered bicycle generators, each person in the United States would require a team of 178 bicyclists. To power the entire U.S. would require a workforce of 58 billion bicyclists—about 7.5 times the entire global population.15 And that’s just to replace petroleum— these numbers exclude the energy consumed from coal, natural gas, nuclear, or renewable sources. How would we have designed our society if all of our machines needed to be powered by humans, wind, or water? 13
Replacing fossil fuels When we talk about replacing fossil fuels, we mostly talk about trying to engineer another way to capture, store, and consume a quantity of energy so massive that our ancestors could barely have imagined it. As the last few pages have shown, we ourselves can barely comprehend how much energy we consume. There are more conversations we need to have when we talk about replacing fossil fuels: • Is it more expensive to re-work our energy infrastructure or to reimagine the ways we consume energy? • As we pursue an energy-intensive society, are we choosing a vision that the whole world can reach? If competition for resources like lithium rises, will the the majority of the world keep burning fossil fuels? • Technologies that were never seen as essential to a f u l fi l l e d l i f e i n t h e p a s t a re n ow s e e n a s indispensable. What is our vision for the future? 14
Tool 3: Why Why Why?
Finding deeper causes “Why Why Why?” is a simple game that children play to annoy adults, but it’s also a wonderful tool for investigating complex problems more deeply. You begin asking the question “why?” in different ways: • Why do we do things this way? • Why did this come to be? • Why didn’t it happen differently? When you have your first answer, you ask why again. Rather than producing a single cause, the game shows that the deeper causes are like a plant’s root structure, branching out to encompass many small roots. 15
Why is our climate changing? We know that our climate is changing because of an increased concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere: carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and fluorinated gases. Why do these gases exist? We produce them primarily through burning fossil fuels. Some come from industrial practices or the way we manage land. With climate change, we usually stop asking why after just two rounds, concluding that the cause of climate change is fossil fuel combustion, industrial practices, and deforestation. As a result, our solutions tend to focus on technologies that replace fossil fuel combustion or improve energy efficiency on a local level. Would we come up with different answers if we continued to ask “why”?
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The branching root structure of climate change Climate change is connected to many tiny roots. For example, why does the United States burn so much fossil fuel? A few answers might include: • U.S. conceptions of personal space evolved to encourage large climate-controlled houses.16 • After forcibly removing native people, EuroAmericans settled in square grids of dispersed homesteads rather than in villages. Today, that means more driving and less community.17 • Car companies convinced the federal government to pay for roads, but railroad companies always built their own tracks. That made driving cars seem cheaper, because taxes paid for the infrastructure.18 • A belief emerged post-World War II that what was good for our economy was good for the world.19 • Advertising and propaganda in the 19th century worked to remove a core American value: thrift.20 • Due to increased car ownership, G.I. Bill loans, and “white flight,” people moved to suburbs, far from farms, markets, workplaces, family, and friends.21 17
Where do the roots end? Examining the roots of climate change, we dig down through many layers: policy, history, economics, technology. Deeper down, we reach roots that are less tangible: values, beliefs, assumptions about the world. Climate change is rooted in the physical landscapes we have designed for ourselves, and the lifestyles that stem from that design. It’s also rooted in the mindsets and non-physical landscapes that we have designed for ourselves. In the six examples on the previous page, you can see that the deepest level, each of those roots contains an element of greed. The roots of climate change reach down into the deepest parts of our society.  
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Can a different tree grow from the same roots? A more sustainable future cannot grow from the same roots that caused climate change. That's why we have yet to see effective policy-based solutions. The roots are pushing us in the wrong direction. Greed, consumerism, lifestyles that demand long commutes, dispersed communities, and our fossil-fuel based infrastructure all prevent meaningful action. Before we can reasonably expect big climate solutions, we need to create an environment where large-scale policy shift is possible. We need some new roots. The “Why Why Why?” game helps us to visualize and discuss how our world got to be the way it is. We can play it in reverse to help imagine what society might look like with different roots, such as more generosity, a strong local food culture, and/or a different pattern of land use. It can feel abstract to examine the branching roots of climate change, but a broader perspective can help us design a more sustainable future. 19
Tool 4: Ecological Footprints of Belief and Culture
Culture and belief have carbon footprints If you ask the average person where their carbon footprint comes from, they will likely talk about physical processes: flying in airplanes, driving cars, eating animal products, air conditioning a house. In the public mind, carbon footprints are the results of specific actions. Over the decades, changing people’s actions in the United States has proved extremely difficult, and average person’s carbon footprint has only changed incrementally. We look at carbon footprints with a limited imagination. What if we attributed carbon footprints to cultures and beliefs instead of to specific actions? 20
Two sources of carbon, one set of values Of any country, the U.S. has the highest car ownership rate and the smallest household size.22 Our carbon footprint is large not only because we live in large houses and drive cars. It’s because we do it alone. Both car culture and living in “nuclear families” are new inventions, products of the same cultural values: individualism, privacy, and a sense of freedom.23 They both prioritize a narrow vision of comfort and control. Instead of seeing climate change’s cultural origins, most U.S.-based viewpoints see technological origins like internal combustion engines, inefficient buildings, and old appliances. Naturally, we have concluded that the best use of time and resources is to invest in electric cars, new appliances, and efficient buildings. Rather than treating these as purely technological problems, would we come up with additional solutions if we tried addressing their common cultural source? 21
Addressing cultural footprints What’s the fastest and cheapest way to decrease per capita emissions from a residential building? Add another resident. For the majority of the world, multi-generational households are the norm, as they were in this country until recently. Today, especially in wealthier and whiter communities in the U.S., extended families do not live together. We disperse ourselves into smaller, individual households that end up having a larger carbon footprint. The other faces of individualism, privacy, and personal freedom are selďŹ shness, inability to share space, and lack of responsibility to others. We have forgotten how to live together in a constructive and peaceful way. What is the carbon footprint of family conict? Of poor communication?
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What’s the fastest and cheapest way to decrease per capita emissions from driving? Design spaces that require less driving. A shift to electric cars isolates and addresses tailpipe emissions, ignoring the fact that all car-based systems require more energy, infrastructure, and space than any other mobility system. Catering to electric cars entrenches our car-based system by validating the construction of more highways and parking lots. More car infrastructure keeps gas-powered cars viable into the future and locks us into a system that’s inefficient. There are cheaper, more equitable, and more sustainable ways to reduce car emissions than shifting to electric cars. We could shift zoning to allow neighborhood corner stores, reducing the need for long trips. We could join the majority of the world by encouraging public transit using vans for small local routes instead of buses on a few main roads. We could halt construction of new car infrastructure and redirect those funds towards infrastructure that shifts our society away from cars altogether. 23
Conclusion Acknowledging that culture and belief have enough agency to have their own carbon footprints brings a new question to the table: If we address carbon emissions without addressing culture, does it guarantee a sustainable future? Culture creates the conditions for climate change to grow. It’s the roots. If we don’t address the roots, the systems we establish to solve climate change will fall short of the mark because they will still incorporate the destructive cultures, beliefs, and habits of the past. These tools were designed to encourage broader, more substantive conversations about climate change. Broader perspective tends to produce actions that are more wise, effective, and far-reaching. Please help the conversation to grow. Pass this booklet to somebody in your community who will appreciate it.
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