For starters we are really really bad at judging the carbon cost of a product. Think of all this crap about buying locally grown. It makes sense that locally grown would use less carbon but it all depends. Actually shipping on giant ships or moving by train is so carbon efficient that they are easily outweighed by the short distances and other choices when less efficient means is used. Worse, we have no real intuitive handle on how much carbon is used to make a computer or to create a piece of wood furniture and corporations who want to sell us things have an incentive to mislead us into thinking their product is more enviornmentally friendly than it truly is.

If this wasn’t bad enough consider the fact that by personally conserving you encourage someone else to pollute. Certainly in the short term (and perhaps now in the long term) gasoline has a fixed supply. Thus every gallon of gas I conserve lowers the price enough to convince someone else to use a gallon of gas. Even in the long term where in theory your conservation might encourage less future investment in refining and drilling you have to keep in mind that decreasing the demand for gas will still decrease the price and the other person who buys gas as a result will partially offset any conservation on your part. Worse, conservation as guilt encourages people to compare themselves to their neighbors and even useless acts that feel like they are saving CO2 work against support for real solutions (I do my part why should I pay more too).

Really though this shouldn’t bother us to much because the idea of environmentalism as personal conservation was a dumb one to begin with. It’s like responding to the fact that we would all like to own a porsche by deciding to have everyone conserve the time they spend driving a porsche so we can loan them out. Obviously driving a porsche or buying CO2 using products will be worth more to some than others and a better solution is to let those who get more benefit from it pay more for it and compensate the rest of us.

The only thing that we can do to really combat global warming is actual taxes on CO2 use. I don’t get why some people seem to think it needs to involve personal sacrifice when really what it needs to involve is societal sacrifice in the form of taxes (which can be made revenue neutral to offset any potential shifts in the tax burden). It’s really not that hard but with two nominees for president proposing a gas tax holiday that every economist agrees will be useless I don’t have much hope.

This is one of the big reasons that I adopted the Slow Food movement as worthy of my volunteer time: It’s not guilt based.

They’re only nominally environmental (it’s a side effect of their core proposition) and aren’t transparently lefty (though the founder is a literal communist, politics are also not their core proposition). It’s a conservative manifesto with liberal secondary side effects. How cool is that?

The basic gist of the movement is that EVERYONE deserves good food. Rich, poor, even you. And when you dig in and work out what “good” means, you find that all kinds of secondary effects that are really good for us, the planet, local economies, the future, our culture… all of these things happen by accident.

And it’s not about “oh, I shouldn’t eat tuna — the dolphins” it’s about what I deserve. It’s about dignity and maybe entitlement… much better sales tools than guilt, IMO.

I haven’t worked out yet how to take this brilliant idea to other political activism.

http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/iaq.html

I come to PyCon to be around optimists. I don’t know where I’d be without having a community of creative and optimistic people as a role model.

A problem comes up when Pythonistas ask me what I do. Whether they’re of the “what about global warming on Mars, buddy, huh? huh?”school or not, the conversation always ends up depressing. I think I’m just going to say I’m a geophysicist. I study, um, coral depositions, that’s the ticket. It’s dull. Let’s talk about whether we understand what the heck Ian Bicking is going on about this week, instead. Isn’t Python amazing?

It’s hard to know how to sell bad news. The fact is that the future holds a lot of risks, and a believable model of how we’re going to conduct ourselves under the new circumstances hasn’t emerged.

The sort of optimism where we would all be better off if everybody changed everything about themselves just isn’t realistic. I’m old enough that I’ve been through that one before. We really believed we’d change the world, rearrange the world. What ended up happening is our legacy is Starbucks, Apple, Dreamworks. All great stuff, all better than went before, but only mind changing, not world changing, pretty much world leaving exactly the same way it was before-ing actually.

What we need, ideally, isn’t guilt, and it isn’t a new philosophy either. Neither of those scales well.

We need it to be fun to live lightly on the earth. We need it to be un-fun to have an SUV. We need it to be a hoot to have a seven dollar monthly energy expenditure.

Unfortunately, the hour is getting very late and what we need might not be what we get. It might not even be possible.

If we’re going to get out of this century intact the only way is through a huge shift in politics. Maybe that could be fun, but it’s hard to see it right now.

Aren’t Python metaclasses cool, though?

http://www.treehugger.com/

http://www.inhabitat.com/

http://sustainabledesignupdate.com/

http://www.hugg.com/

Environmentalism needn’t be guilt-based at all.

The problem for environmentalism is another: whatever you choose to believe, the hard truth is that domestic consumption is the smallest factor of the equation, completely irrelevant for the scale of the problem. Driving a hybrid to work, using different lightbulbs and recycling all your domestic waste will not change anything at all, even if it’s done by everyone in the world. The only factor that matters is economic activity: your fleet of trucks, the ships bringing your products back and forth from Asia, the robots assemblying them, the hundreds of computers you turn on at least 8 hours a day to design them, the lights of your thousands of offices… Until you radically change this infrastructure, “talking green” is just a waste of time.

You suggested my attitude proved your point, but to do that my opinions would have to be characteristic of mainstream environmentalism in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. (Am I reading “built on” too literally?) I don’t even represent environmentalism of this decade, or call myself an environmentalist in the first place.

The environmentalism that I have seen in inaction is built on empty promises, hopeful imagery of pandas and celebrity causes. It has steadfastly avoided criticism of individual decisions—guilt—and peddled a soft politics of awareness and fundraising. As this amounted to nothing, frustrated environmentalists formed their own harsher views outside the mainstream. The post you quoted suggests recruiting 300 “environmentalists” to ceremonially dismantle an SUV. But I would counter that, if you selected 300 Americans at random who called themselves environmentalists, very few of in this cross-section of the movement would be willing to participate in such barbary. (Thank goodness!)

Though environmentalism’s radical fringe has become more prominent, the message at the center of the movement has not budged. No changes is lifestyle will be required, just remember to turn off the lights when you leave and send in those Sierra Club dues. It’s not that I think advertising guilt would be effective: absolutely not. But there are ways to trasform “guilt” (recognition of the negative) into action. Unfortunately for environmentalism, the best tools for doing so are offensive to the socialism it finds itself intertwined with. Without those constraints you can promote conservation and make alternative energy competitive by pricing up negative impacts. You aren’t lamely asking people to feel guilty, you’re replacing guilt with a cost in dollars they will most definitely feel and act on.

For me, the main reason to go the environmental way is the search for efficiency. Nature, despite all its redundancy and idiosyncrasies is surprisingly efficient. The universe is one big optimization machine. If I eat meat, and meat takes way more energy to be produced than it gives me, then it’s clearly inefficient. Can I do better eating veggies instead of meat? Probably. But I also need some meat, our bodies were built to use it too. That’s when balance comes into play.

If you strive to live more efficiently, there’s always more to be done, but there’s no guilt about it. There’s always a challenge, and that’s motivating. But that challenge can be disheartening, if it seems to be impossible. To balance this continuous challenge, another principle is needed, and that’s how to pace your time. The universe is eternal. You’re not. You’ve got a finite time to live, and in this time, you’ve got to take one challenge at a time. So I may stop eating meat today, and stop driving a car for short distances tomorrow. The actual order and dates do not matter, what matter is the commitment for continuous improvement.

That’s what I doing for the past few years. I still eat meat, and eventually I go to a barbecue party, but I reduced my daily consumption a lot. I own a small. I keep things such as aluminum, glass and paper separate from the organic trash, and give them to recycling folks from time to time (note: in Brazil some people make a living out of recycling). That’s working for me. It’s not about guilty, it’s about modesty, about being part of a world bigger than me, and trying to do my part as efficiently as possible… while still being me.