ingenuity gap

When I started my bet­ter liv­ing project it wasn’t really about qual­ity of life at all. It was more about fac­ing the ques­tion: “what kind of life is best for a per­son liv­ing in our times?” It was as much about being respon­si­ble as any­thing else. I was wor­ried espe­cially about intractable prob­lems like global ter­ror­ism and global warm­ing. Ten years later, ter­ror­ism is still a fear, but cli­mate change in par­tic­u­lar has emerged as the dom­i­nant chal­lenge of our times –our generation’s equiv­a­lent of walk­ing on the moon.

Liv­ing a good life means mak­ing a dif­fer­ence to an impor­tant issue like this, or at least doing our best. (We know that the only thing nec­es­sary for global prob­lems to per­sist is for good peo­ple to do noth­ing about them). But, if you’re any­thing like me, quite frankly as con­cerned as I am for the envi­ron­ment, I do very lit­tle with this con­vic­tion. When I make a choice, the effect it has on the envi­ron­ment is rarely fore­most in my mind. This dis­so­nance (between what we know is impor­tant and how we act) has a lot to do with the com­plex­ity of these kinds of issues. It’s hard to know quite how to make any kind of tar­geted inter­ven­tion, to make any kind of real dif­fer­ence at all.

Below I’ve listed some prac­ti­cal ways to get involved. But, first here are some great insights into the issue from Bill Gates.

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I’ve just taken an online test and found that my per­sonal C02 out­put every year is about 17 tonnes. This is much higher than I expected. 69% of these emis­sions come from trans­porta­tion, which is also sur­pris­ing con­sid­er­ing that, here in Bel­gium, I don’t drive a car. My emis­sions sim­ply from fly­ing equals about 10 tons per year. (If you’re inter­ested in what that means, here’s what one tonne of CO2 looks like).

If you’d like to take a test like this here are some you can use: from the EPA (from the US), from ActOnCO2 (from the UK), ICLEI (Inter­na­tional).

Small steps for man

The most impor­tant thing most of us can do to com­bat cli­mate is to sup­port (and encour­age) gov­ern­ment efforts to reduce emis­sions. Through the gov­ern­ment one per­son, or a small group can make a big difference.

Here area  few other things we all do to reduce our car­bon footprint:

• Reduce the miles you drive (i.e. by walk­ing, cycling, car­pool­ing  or tak­ing pub­lic transit)
• Reduce air travel (i.e. by using elec­tronic communications).
• If you do have to drive, pur­chase a vehi­cle with the high­est fuel effi­ciency avail­able (and also have it reg­u­larly ser­viced, avoid using the air­con­di­tioner, reduce your dri­ving speed and use it as rarely as you can
• Pay to off­set your CO2 foot­print through orga­ni­za­tions such as Con­ser­va­tion Inter­na­tional, Nature Con­ser­vancy, Cli­mate Trust, Native Energy, Terra Pass, or  The Car­bon Fund. (More details on the costs and projects of each of these orga­ni­za­tions are described here). I’ve done this before, but per­son­ally I am going to make a rou­tine of off­set­ting my emis­sions, by invest­ing in these types of projects.
• Plant trees. One tree, planted in the trop­ics, will absorb about 1 tonne of CO2 if it lives to 40. Con­sid­er­ing my 17 tonnes usage per year I will need to plant around 14oo trees in my life to make up the dif­fer­ence. Cer­tain other fac­tors, such as the like­ly­hood of some of these trees not sur­viv­ing so long and the ecosys­tems where I have a chance to plant mean that I should plant at least dou­ble that num­ber to ensure I am car­bon neutral.
• Increase the energy effi­ciency in your home (here is a good list of ways to do that)

The future

Bill Gates makes the point that a big push to inno­vate is also nec­es­sary. One idea I’d love to be a part of is imple­ment­ing crowd­sourc­ing meth­ods to inno­vate solu­tions to cli­mate change. (Stud­ies have shown that diverse groups of peo­ple can often have more suc­cess solv­ing really chal­leng­ing prob­lems than groups of experts.) That seems a log­i­cal way to use tech­nolo­gies (which have con­tributed to the prob­lem) to our advantage.

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