Hard times evangelist Ben Polito asked an interesting question on his blog a week ago: “Why is it that even people who care about [global warming and oil supply issues] don’t actually make relatively simple choices that could significantly reduce their impact?”

I’ve wondered about this myself. Our behavior is complex, but I think the answer is that we are accustomed to the idea that environmental problems can be solved by marginal changes. There are two ideas here– that our behavior is guided by our expectations of what sorts of behavior are customary, and that marginal changes can solve big problems.

Our yard is an example of the first idea. We live near the corner of two streets with a decent amount of pedestrian traffic and near a convenience store. The result is that trash is thrown in our yard at a rate of a few liters per month. There are two trashcans near the convenience store (and I don’t really know that the trash comes from the patrons of the convenience store), but people definitely throw trash over the fence into the bushes in our yard on a daily basis.

Mysteriously, of the thousands of hours I have spent walking around neighborhoods with other people, I have never– seriously, never– seen one of my friends throw trash in anyone’s yard, and I have never done so myself. I suspect that I live in a culture where littering is unacceptable, but I live in a city where a decent fraction of the population lives in a culture where littering is normal. It’s not that I think about throwing trash on the street every day but decide not to– I don’t even think of it.

To bring it back to climate change: I suspect that most people, even those who care about climate change, don’t think carefully about their levels of energy consumption. They feel worried about sea levels rising and hot summers, but knowing no solar hermits or people who grow most of their own food, they don’t place those among the options. To the question, “Want to see a movie tonight?” they do not answer, “Yes, let’s build a gigantic zoopraxiscope in the backyard.” Instead, it’s “Hmm, we already saw An Inconvenient Truth. How about the new Rambo movie? I know Sylvester Stallone is 61, but I hear he does all the killing with his shirt on.” Options that don’t involve living in a house regulated to 20 °C year-round and driving a car on a daily basis are not on the menu.

The second idea is the strangely common conviction that we can solve large environmental problems with marginal changes to our current behavior. I don’t know why this idea so popular. Suppose Ben invited me over for dinner party, and heavy rains meant that his basement was flooded. If I suggested to the dozen other guests, “Hey guys, I’ve got a great idea. We’ll each take one of these drinking glasses down to the basement and fill it up. We’ll bring them back up and pour the water on Ben’s vegetable garden. If we each do our part, we all win!” I would be correctly regarded as a moron. The problem requires a high capacity pump running for several hours, or hundreds of trips with a bucket, or thousands of trips with drinking glasses.

Our bizarre love affair with hybrid cars is similar. Let’s optimistically assume that hybrid cars can reduce fuel usage per mile by 50%. The real number is probably below 25%, but say the technology works better than we expect, and then assume that every vehicle in the US is instantaneously converted to use a hybrid drivetrain. In the US, at present, our fuel consumption for transportation usage has been growing roughly linearly for the last 60 years [58 kB PDF]. The best we can expect for this massively optimistic, nationwide hybrid conversion is to return ourselves to 1970, but with 40 years of oil gone.

Ben asks what we can do. As he notes, “There’s also a sense in which it is irrational for any one person to make any significant sacrifice in order to change his behavior, on a planet with 6 billion people, the vast majority of them striving to achieve a lifestyle that allows them to consume as much energy and resources as possible.”

In the film metaphor, we need to popularize the backyard zoopraxiscope. Our cultural norms have a time constant around a decade; ideas come and go, and we need to make sure that “Let’s all commute 30 miles in SUVs” is not the only movie to watch.

To his credit, Ben, with his wind turbine and cidermaking, has already begun.

I’ve been commuting by bike exclusively for the last 6 months, even in the snow and ice, and once I adjusted my expectations, it’s fine. We’ve reduced our heating bill by about 30% by using a programmable thermostat; we’ll see what else I can come up with. Our current house is about as well insulated as a milk crate, so there is hope.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 24th, 2008 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Alternative energy, Green power, Hard times, Renewable energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.