The Overwhelming Hugeness of Climate Change
Ditching fossil fuels will take a lot more than “going green”
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Within 30 years, parts of Miami will be under water. The coral reefs will mostly be dead. Swaths of West Africa will dry up and become infertile.
Such are the predictions of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), whose most recent report details with terrifying precision what’s likely to happen if we keep burning planet-warming fossil fuels. Without “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society,” the report reads, the planet is on track to warm beyond 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, thrusting us into a hotter, more dangerous, and less predictable world within several decades. Already in 2018, two major hurricanes have rocked the United States, and a typhoon left 127 dead in the Philippines. Disasters like these, which mostly hurt people who lack wealth and political power, are going to get worse.
Yet as the planet heats up, the U.S. government remains frozen. And Americans, raised in an oil-hungry society, are struggling to kick their fossil-fuel habit. While there’s been much effort to “green” individual behavior, experts say rousing people to slash emissions is more complicated than it seems.
Waging a personal war of attrition against emissions—like ditching beef or installing energy-efficient bulbs—can feel like important changes because they involve actions that sit within the narrow band of individual power. In the supermarket or at home, you’re the boss; you can buy tempeh or unplug your toaster.
“We have to entirely reframe our response to what’s going on.”
Yet even the most optimistic studies suggest that if every person on Earth switched to a plant-based diet, it would reduce agricultural emissions, which account for a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, by 30 to 70 percent. That’s a lot, but it’s not enough.
At this point, to believe changing consumer habits alone will solve the problem isn’t just unrealistic, it’s delusional. And it’s also paralyzing.
“The whole culture of focusing exclusively on discrete actions and solutions is a strategy for dealing with feeling powerless,” says Renee…
