In September I became a student again (at the California Institute of Integral Studies) after many years and it’s almost as much fun as it was the first time. Of course the first time you’re on your own, physically and legally an adult and permitted to make your own decisions, it’s a peak experience. Nowadays I’m pretty much used to that. But the education part is just as exciting.

As a transfer student who originally studied math, music, and literature, I’ve got a natural science requirement to finish. This semester my nat. sci. class is Renewable Energy; next semester it’s The Thinking Body.

The program I’m in meets every third weekend for many hours (between 6PM Friday and 2PM Sunday I’ve got 19 hours of class). Such infrequent meetings require a lot of reading, so far around 500 pages each time. For Renewable Energy, the first three assigned websites had various ways of calculating personal and household footprints. The fourth was an excellent overview of the seriousness of the situation, clearly stated and urgent but not throw-up-your-hands alarmist.

The three calculators share a tendency to return numbers that indicate greater precision than is credible. When you ask people how much they fly, and give them three choices (hardly any, some, a lot), you’re not starting with data that are precise enough to use decimals in your results. There’s a (usually) subconscious tendency to put decimals on numbers to give them the veneer of precision, which one is well advised to avoid.

The calculators also share some major positives. Each provides feedback on your individual consumption patterns as compared to others, and as compared to what we calculate might be sustainable. Which is admittedly a vague number. As one of them says, the question of carrying capacity can be calculated relatively confidantly for animals who don’t change their lifestyles, but to calculate that number for humans requires a lot of assumptions. Still, it’s good to have standards for comparison.

The Global Footprint Network has a cute calculator with Second Life-like animations, but doesn’t break down the results in much detail. It figures that 3.3 planets would be necessary to support a world full of people like me.

Redefining Progress breaks footprints into carbon, food, housing, and goods and services. It calculated that if everyone lived like I do, we’d need 3.55 planets (total score 137.69). In three out of four categories my footprint was 40% or less of the average American’s. My poorest performance was in food, where I was only average.

The Nature Conservancy site calculates your carbon footprint based on your patterns of occupancy, home energy, transportation, diet, and recycling. It estimated mine at 6.9 tons of carbon per year, as compared to the average American’s 27 tons and the world average of 5.5. Again food was my weakest area; but I got credit for not having a car, and they didn’t ask about rail travel. They also have a list of things you can do to reduce your impact on the planet. They calculate, for instance, that you can save

0.9 tons CO2 for driving 1,000 miles less per year.
2.2 tons CO2 for cutting back on one long airplane trip per year.

Admittedly it should really be CO₂; but I copied the original, it’s not my fault.

The first thing you notice about Bill McKibben’s National Geographic article is that this is a writer who can put big ideas into straightforward sentences.

Here’s how it works. Before the industrial revolution, the Earth’s atmosphere contained about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. That was a good amount — “good” defined as “what we were used to.” Since the molecular structure of carbon dioxide traps heat near the planet’s surface that would otherwise radiate back out to space, civilization grew up in a world whose thermostat was set by that number. It equated to a global average temperature of about 57 degrees Fahrenheit (about 14 degrees Celsius), which in turn equated to all the places we built our cities, all the crops we learned to grow and eat, all the water supplies we learned to depend on, even the passage of the seasons that, at higher latitudes, set our psychological calendars.

Once we started burning coal and gas and oil to power our lives, that 280 number started to rise. When we began measuring in the late 1950s, it had already reached the 315 level. Now it’s at 380, and increasing by roughly two parts per million annually. That doesn’t sound like very much, but it turns out that the extra heat that CO2 traps, a couple of watts per square meter of the Earth’s surface, is enough to warm the planet considerably. We’ve raised the temperature more than a degree Fahrenheit (0.56 degrees Celsius) already. It’s impossible to precisely predict the consequences of any further increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. But the warming we’ve seen so far has started almost everything frozen on Earth to melting; it has changed seasons and rainfall patterns; it’s set the sea to rising.

What McKinnen leaves us with is that saving the planet involves a change in the consciousness of humanity. John Lilly wrote a book called Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer, whose title tells us what we have to do: reprogram ourselves to act differently, to need and want differently. There’s never been any question about whether it can be done; but fixing our problems requires major changes to the power structures of our society. It’ll come to a fight between Thorstein Veblen’s leisure class, and those who want the planet to survive.

We may have to make climate-change denial illegal, like some countries do with Holocaust denial. But it would be far preferable if everyone would realize that the dream of unlimited consumption will not be realized by burning stuff, no matter what the stuff is. We have to switch to renewable power sources soon, or only the lucky few will get away before the Rapture crowd gets its wish and the planet is destroyed.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at October 03, 2008 07:37 AM

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