‘Being the Change’: How to Spark a Climate Revolution
While the science behind climate change is solid,
there remains a lot of resistance to curtailing carbon emissions because of the
perception that doing so will cause the world economy to take a big hit. What
if the capitalist system could coexist with a smaller carbon footprint? Peter
Kalmus, an atmospheric scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
California, has written a book on the idea based on what he’s done in his own
life to have a more positive impact on the environment. Kalmus, who says his
comments represent his own views and not necessarily those of NASA, talked
about his book, Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution on
the Knowledge@Wharton show, which airs on
SiriusXM channel 111.
An edited transcript of the conversation
follows.
Knowledge@Wharton: Aside
from your work, what was the driving idea behind your book?
Peter Kalmus: It
was 2010 and I’d been getting increasingly concerned about global warming the
more I read scientific papers on it. I was doing astrophysics at the time, but
I got increasingly concerned about it. I live in southern California where it’s
fairly warm, and I don’t like heat waves at all. I get really grumpy when they
happen.
I took a look at how my actions were translating to carbon
emissions, and I realized that one of the biggest things that I was doing to
emit carbon was flying a lot. Academics fly a huge amount. They go to
collaboration meetings. They go to conferences. Flying had been 75% of my
emissions, and that’s being really generous to the planes. I was flying about
50,000 miles a year back then. I knew no matter what else I did — I could give
up meat, bicycle a lot — nothing would really matter as long as I kept flying
that much.
Knowledge@Wharton: How
did you make the change?
Kalmus: Over the next few
years, I just stopped flying so much because I would get on a plane and feel
really bad, like I shouldn’t be here. What am I doing here? Is the conference
that I’m flying to worth the emissions?
I learned more about how long this carbon is going to stay in
the atmosphere and for how many hundreds of years. The impacts of climate
change have several time scales. But the planet is going to be warmer for a
long time. The carbon is not going to completely come out for tens of thousands
of years. Then there’s one final time scale, which is global warming is
contributing to a major extinction event. Scientists that look at the fossil
record of recovery after the other major extinction events that happened our
planet, which also had a climate component. They find that it takes about 10
million years for biodiversity to recover to the same level it was at before
the extinction event. That’s a very long time scale.
I’d be sitting on a plane and would just feel like, I’ll be
happier if I’m not here on this plane. I just gradually stopped flying. I try
to do good work, write good papers, and I go to regional conferences and try to
teleconference when I can.
Knowledge@Wharton: These
changes could be made by a lot more people because we have the technology to
connect digitally with people around the world.
Kalmus: That’s right, we
have the technology. What I think we lack is the cultural will to do that. If
employers and universities started to say, “We want to do more teleconferencing
and less live travel,” and if there were maybe more regional conferences, if
there was a shift in culture, it would make it a lot easier. As it is, I take a
bit of a hit. There are people that I would know and that would know me if I
flew more or at all. But I feel like I’ve struck a good balance between fast
career advancement and following my deeper principles and doing what I know I
need to do.
Knowledge@Wharton: Is
the book also is about how we could still have a successful capitalist culture
yet drive the change necessary to get a handle on global warming?
Kalmus: Right. Not everyone
is going to gravitate towards voluntary individual reductions. We need
systematic, systemic collective actions as well. This is a little controversial
for scientists to make any kind of suggestions about what policies we could
implement to have that collective change. So, I’d say I’m speaking as a
scientifically informed human now.
There’s one solution that I think is kind of a no-brainer. If
that wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t make the suggestion. But a lot of scientists
agree with this, and a lot of economists agree with this as well. The best step
we could take right now to rapidly reduce emissions at a national level would
be to adopt a carbon price, specifically a fee and dividend. That would take
our system of capitalism and fix this gaping market failure of using our
atmosphere as an open sewer without including those costs, the cost to society
of doing that in the price of a gallon of gasoline or a ton of coal. If we
charged that price, it could increase gradually so it wouldn’t be a huge shock
on the economy initially. It would incentivize everything from food to
transport to how we heat and cool our buildings. It would push renewables
forward because fossil fuels would get increasingly expensive over time.
Corporations would be able to plan for the future because there would be a
predictable price signal.
The best part about it is if you return the revenue that’s
collected as a fee — it’s technically not a tax if the government doesn’t keep
it — it could actually provide an economic boost because then you’re putting
more money in the pockets of everyday people. You’re stimulating these various
economies as we transition to the new energy economy. It wouldn’t be
regressive. It would be progressive because the wealthier you are, the more
fossil fuel you likely burn. Under this policy, if you were collecting revenue
based on how much fossil fuel people burn, you’re redistributing it equally.
So, 70% of households would come out ahead even if they didn’t change their
behaviors. And if they did ramp down their fossil fuel use, then they’d come
out even more ahead.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
talk about the idea of whether some sort of border adjustment is necessary.
There are companies that do business in countries that don’t necessarily follow
those philosophies, correct?
Kalmus: That’s absolutely
necessary. The other good thing about the border adjustment is it would turn a
national fee and dividend gradually into a sort of international impetus
towards emissions reduction.
We’ve seen that it’s very difficult to do emissions reduction at
the international negotiations table, like with the Kyoto Protocol and more
recently with the Paris Agreement. You often end up getting something out that
isn’t as strong as you might like, that doesn’t actually reduce emissions as
quickly as we need to. But if you have a border adjustment, then a country that
didn’t have a carbon fee would be exporting its products to us and it would
have to pay that border adjustment. That country would very quickly realize
that they’d be better off with their own border adjustment for a couple of
reasons. First, they could keep that money instead of giving it to another
country. Second, the manufacturers, the corporations there would have this
conundrum. We’d be producing things with increasingly less carbon intensity
because we’d have an incentive to do so because of the carbon price. In another
country, they’d be competing with domestic producers and they’d want to keep
our market share, so they’d be trying to ride two horses. If they tried to
reduce their carbon intensity, their products would get more expensive
domestically. And if they didn’t, then they’d lose market share over here.
Knowledge@Wharton: The
ideas on border adjustment and carbon pricing have been discussed a good bit.
If these were to be formalized, how do you think they would be received?
Kalmus: It’s interesting —
the political dynamics behind it. I can’t really pretend to understand them
thoroughly, but it’s interesting because there’s some support coming from a
faction of the Republican side, which is calling for a carbon tax. Progressives
who want to see action on climate change, some of them are calling for it as
well. There is even a coalition of energy corporations that would like to see
some form of carbon tax.
I don’t think the energy corporations necessarily care what’s
done with the revenue, but what they want is a predictable price signal. I
think they see that action is coming at some point, whether it’s in the form of
regulations. Maybe not this government, but perhaps some future administration
could try to regulate our carbon emissions. Or, there could be a gradually
increasing price on carbon. From the corporations’ point of view, I think
planning an investment is much easier if there’s a carbon price. I think they’d
prefer that over cap and trade because there’s less volatility.
Interestingly, I think because some of the energy corporations
are okay with this policy, some of the environmentalists haven’t embraced it
maybe as quickly as they otherwise might have. They have a hard time pushing
for something that energy corporations are OK with, that energy corporations
want. I think they assume that there must be something wrong with it.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
bring up this idea of what you call a steady-state economy. Can you explain
that?
Kalmus: I don’t think
anyone really knows the answer to that question yet. But as someone who is
trained as a physicist, this is going to be controversial. I don’t personally
think that we can decouple our economy from physical resources well enough to
continue indefinite exponential growth. Even if we transition to a completely information
economy, it still takes energy and it still creates thermodynamic heat to move
bits of information. The problem with exponential growth is that over a century
or over a millennium you just get very quickly to these really absurd levels of
size that won’t fit onto the finite resource space of this planet. I don’t see
any way around that other than a transition to some kind of steady state where
the economy isn’t based on exponential growth.
Knowledge@Wharton: You
really do take this down to a personal level in the book and give examples of
some things you have done. You list 15 or 20 different things that people could
consider to cut back on their personal emissions.
Kalmus: For people who are
concerned with global warming, one of the things they can do to feel better and
feel like they’re contributing to a solution is to actually change their lives.
There’s so many people on the planet. Global warming is such a huge,
overwhelming problem with 7.5 billion people contributing to it, some more than
others. Reducing one’s emissions isn’t going to solve that problem directly.
But it contributes to changing the story, to showing what’s possible, to
showing that it’s possible to live with drastically less fossil fuels. That
would gradually shift the culture. Right now, I think it’s really hard to see
beyond the expressways and the airplanes and the gas stations and the huge
parking lots.
We need to start imagining what a world that didn’t run on
fossil fuels would look like. If everyone just keeps burning fossil fuels like
they have been, everyone else looks around and says, “Well, I guess it’s not
such a big emergency.” If people start to use less, they would realize it’s not
as bad as they thought it would be and maybe even better for a lot of reasons, which
is what I found. It hasn’t made my life less satisfying; it’s actually made it
more satisfying. I think more and more people are longing for more of a sense
of stillness and less of this frantic pace of modern life. So, there’s a lot of
benefit to actually reducing yourself.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/change-live-well-spark-climate-revolution/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-10-05
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