Home Truths and Hard Choices

 

What's it going to be? You decide.

A terrific op-ed in The Globe & Mail (of all places) titled, "Tesla Owners Have No Reason to Gloat About Saving the Environment." Cambridge political economist, John Rapely, gives Canadians something to mull over before we head for the polls.

In my college days, I had a friend who could polish off a dozen doughnuts at a go. Afterward, he’d order a Diet Coke, whereupon the counter attendant invariably told him he was wasting his time; the caloric damage had already been done.

Earlier this month, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a bombshell report that declared “warming of the climate system is unequivocal, human influence on the climate system is clear, and limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.” The report comes at a time when governments are making bold pledges to create sustainable growth, investors are pushing firms to phase out fossil fuels, and some consumers are rushing to substitute “green” products such as electrical vehicles for the dirty old technology.

Unfortunately, most of this amounts to the climate equivalent of capping a 3,000-calorie binge with a diet drink. That humble soda reveals why technology can’t save us from a system overload.

Rapley points out that, today, it's even possible to buy a SUV that gets impressive fuel economy.

So it goes for all manner of other technologies, from refrigerators to televisions, their relentless gains in efficiency being what gives tech entrepreneurs and politicians the faith that we can beat climate change with ingenuity.

Except we aren’t. For all those improvements, our carbon emissions have only gone up. It’s not the fault of technology, which has been doing a good job of reducing our waste. It’s the fault of the users – of us. As our cars used less fuel, that left more for other purposes. Like flying, for instance. We’ve been doing it with abandon, the number of international travellers, the vast majority of them from Western countries, doubling each decade. Back in the days of clunky cars, hardly anyone flew abroad. Today, many of us think nothing of hopping a plane across the world for a week or two in an Airbnb.

Which brings us to Tesla.

Don’t get me wrong: Since they reduce carbon emissions, the vehicles themselves are a good thing. The problem? Well, let’s picture the stereotypical Tesla buyer, he of the marketing literature: a virtuous and healthful middle-aged man who scoffs at the climate destruction wrought by the ignorant, climate-denying Trump voter, the sort of voter who’ll drive a gas-guzzling pickup to a rally to hear the former president mock global warming. What our Tesla buyer doesn’t know, though, is that of the two, he’s the one doing more harm to the climate.

That’s because while the typical pickup driver has an income that hovers around the median, the typical Tesla owner has an income twice the average – and the strongest predictor of a person’s carbon emissions isn’t what he buys, but what he spends.

...too many of us persist in the delusion that buying and investing “green” will save us from hell on Earth as we resume old ways, much as medieval Europeans imagined that buying indulgences saved them from hell in the afterlife. Technology can facilitate our transition to a more sustainable way of life – think how video calls enabled us to slash travel and commuting during the pandemic. However, it can’t actually substitute for that change.

As Canadians head to the polls, they might want to contemplate the existential choice they now face. Either we can continue living in the style to which we’ve grown accustomed, or we can bequeath a planet to our descendants that is habitable. Those of us who have children in our lives might consider having that conversation – of telling them, openly and frankly, which option we’ve decided on.

Halfway through this election campaign I'm struck by how those who plead for our votes avoid mention of the perils that face us and our children and what they're prepared to do to protect us and preserve a habitable Canada for our grandkids. The fact they won't talk about any of this speaks volumes. These things are not on their agenda.