Earth Day
No exit
Yesterday, when driving to the river (yes, burning gasoline, I know) I saw a bigger car (yes, every car is bigger than ours, I know) with a bumper sticker that said that:
There is only one kind of humans on this planet
Humans who will die!
Now, that is simultaneously an uplifting message that we humans are all the same where we are and however we look, while broadcasting a very depressing message that we are going to die!
Another, a big SUV, had a familiar “Save the Earth” sticker, which annoys me because anytime I see that I feel like I should to tell the driver that there is no way that we can save the planet and that our focus ought to be on how to safeguard our future on this planet.
Are these people so vain that they think people can save the planet?
Planet earth has been around for 4.5 billion years, on which we homo sapiens have existed for about 200,000 years.
Let’s do that math here: 200,000 out of 4.5 billion is 0.00004. We haven’t been here for a measurable fraction of time and we think we can save the planet?
But, I get their message, even though it is terribly phrased. It is a bumper sticker that expresses concerns over climate change, endangerment of species and the loss of biodiversity, etc.
I know that I contribute to the problem. By flying.
A couple of weeks ago, I put together a spreadsheet of my travels to India ever since Covid began to ease. Ten trips to India in four years. Of course those were important trips to spend time with my parents, with my mother beginning to phase out of this planet because of cancer, and then my father’s rapid decline. But, ten trips to the other side of the planet is a lot of carbon that was burnt, an amount of CO2 that I don’t even want to know. And then there are the other flights within the country. And the driving.
I can claim credits for eating plant-based foods that we cook at home (and occasionally falling off the wagon), for wearing clothes until they begin to develop visible tears; turning lights off when not needed; recycling; not buying stuff just because; generating very little trash; and more. And I hope that the credits balance out the debits on the ledger.
I argue over and over in my blogging that consumption is the problem. Consumption in many forms: From the huge mansions in which we live or want to live, the huge and many cars that we own or want to own, the clothes that we buy and toss away, the electronic gadgets that we accumulate and toss away, even the grapes that we want to have when not in season, …
We can choose to be selective and merely point fingers at plastic straws and plastic bags that litter beautiful waterways, or criticize somebody else’s palatial homes where only two people live, or whatever. We might think that buying plastic-wrapped English cucumber is the problem because of the plastic wrapper that will end up in the trash can, but how many unwrapped cucumbers and bananas are being bought and never eaten, which then end up in landfills only to produce methane that is far worse than CO2 as a greenhouse gas?
It is the total consumption that matters.
I like to imagine every human being allocated an amount of carbon to consume. If people want to spend their allocation on clothes, more power to them. But that will mean that they will have less carbon to spend on something else. I might spend a lot of my allocation to fly to Timbuktu but then my carbon consumption elsewhere ought to be minimal.
Like with taxes, I wish there were a mechanism to tell us about the carbon budget. Or, maybe, we can simply tax carbon. Well, given the politics of it all, a post about carbon tax is far more appropriate on April 1st than it is on the 22nd!
So, sure, recycle all that you can. Eating plant-based foods is healthy for the body and the planet. It is okay not to have the latest in fashion. Throughout it all, keep thinking about your personal carbon consumption.
What are your plans to reduce your total carbon consumption so that we humans might be able to make tomorrow better than today, or at least not worse than today?