A Personal Response to Climate Change
As our world gets slowly and belatedly among on the complex transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy sources, leading climate change scientists give us a mere five years to radically change how we power our industrial civilization without causing runaway global warning.
Implicit in belonging to the nation with the largest historical contribution to global warming is the imperative to drastically reduce our own and our family’s carbon dioxide footprint. This is something that people can do regardless of the slow response by many business and political leaders to the serious planetary changes expected as climate change speeds up.
In the coming decades, energy production will need to be more localized, gasoline usage will shrink – perhaps as much due to the peak oil phenomenon as to climate change mandates – and air travel will decline. People will need to work towards producing more of the energy and goods they need closer to home. Recycling will become even more important than it is today – as will using the collected recyclables as a feedstock for local industries. The amount of energy consumed by transporting current volumes of world trade is simply not sustainable.
While many Americans are feeling the pinch as our current recession deepens, and reducing their consumption accordingly, others of us have already been voluntarily simplifying our lives and our consumption patterns in order to reach a more sustainable level of usage of the planet’s resources (forests, minerals, fossil fuels, agriculture, water, etc.).
Our nation is in a pinch – high household debt levels have been welcomed by politicians as the driving force behind the past decade’s growth. As in President Bush’s request for us all to keep shopping after 9/11. The LA Times recently stated that consumer spending represents 70% of the US economy.
Meanwhile it’s imperative to meet the goals of drastically-reduced fossil fuel consumption in order to slow runaway climate change, which will seriously reduce our future availability of resources. It’s really a question of making gradual adjustments soon – or facing horrendous and inevitable changes to our lifestyles later. As one example, global warming is partly responsible for the current shrinking of winter snowpacks in the Sierras, upon which California’s cities and agriculture depend for water in the hot summer months. As these snowpacks lessen, farmers and homeowners will all need to make do with much less water supply. This change will be continuous, to be measured in generations, so it can be accurately stated that living more simply, in terms of resource consumption, is the only future that lays ahead of us. Building an entire sustainable economy that does not depend on constant growth in raw material consumption is going to pose quite a challenge – but individuals and families can start adjusting their carbon dioxide impacts right now.
ONE FAMILY’S GREEN HOME
Our family was fortunate enough to be able to build our own home six years ago. Making it a green structure was neither hard nor prohibitively expensive. A lumber company in Santa Barbara located a certified, sustainably-harvested lumber package from the forests near Santa Cruz, which fit on one delivery truck. We used a tremendous amount of recycled fixtures, as well as a beautiful tongue and groove ceiling that was diverted from the dump.
Six solar panels on the roof supply almost all our electricity – our annual electric bill is under $30. The solar electric system, which I installed under the supervision of a local solar contractor, cost a little over $5,000 after the state rebate. Currently the best rebates are federal. If you use modest amounts of electricity, solar power can be very affordable. It can also be installed by a competent handyman homeowner.
Perhaps the most important factor was size – our house is just over 1000 square feet in size. A green builder I know in Ojai complained to me recently how many clients want to build enormous green homes. Green implies modest-sized.
A PLEDGE NOT TO TRAVEL FAR
It’s been apparent for a while that the expanding global level of air travel is not sustainable. It is one of the fastest-growing sources of climate changing carbon dioxide emissions worldwide. Likewise, long summer car trips also now represent an unsustainable level of fossil fuel consumption.
About eight years ago I decided to curtail my travel outside Ventura County that was not work-related. For several years, I managed to stay put and only go to Santa Barbara once or twice a year, usually for a family gathering there. That was fairly easy, since I was building our house most weekends for nearly two years. By that time I’d gotten used to this. There have been occasional trips to collect friends at LAX since then, and I went to Sacramento twice a couple of years ago, to provide testimony for Keep Sespe Wild before legislative committees.
My big exception was a trip in October three years ago to Scotland, for a family wedding. Most of my relatives and friends there had not met my wife and children – we managed to visit around two dozen of them in only ten days! While it was a great trip, part of me realizes it may not be repeated. I have lived thirty years in Ojai. In the first two decades I visited Scotland around five times, twice for the funerals of my parents; in the last ten years, only once.
This was not an easy decision to make. I dearly love to travel. I spent many months in Germany, France and Kenya while a teenager, and I really enjoy to visit exotic places and different cultures. In a world without climate change, I guarantee I’d also plan to save up and return to the UK of my youth every few years, for a summer visit. I miss the old familiar landscapes and the many family and friends there. But I also understand the climate-changing cost of air travel.
Most of our family trips are now car camping or backpacking in Los Padres National Forest. The northern half of Ventura County is almost entirely public land, with plenty of trailheads and trails for a lifetime of regular exploring. Of course it helps that our family’s favorite watershed, Sespe Creek, is situated close to home. Ventura County is also fortunate to have a number of excellent beaches.
My decision to stop driving my 1967 El Camino art car a few years ago was also because of climate change – my “newer” red Toyota pickup gets twice the mileage.
Of course one family’s response to global climate change constitutes a mere drop in the bucket. So what else can one do? I make use of the opportunity to spread the word by writing about it. Educating yourself and your family and friends is also important.
THEN THERE ARE THE LITTLE THINGS
Most families’ climate change emissions are led by energy consumption in the home and for transportation, in that order.
All our purchasing can readily bear in mind climate change factors. In fact, Japan is instituting a program whereby every packaged item in supermarkets will soon have a panel on the label which uses a standardized formula to calculate the climate change emissions that went into its production.
Even without that level of labeling, buying fresh food in season is what makes sense. Those grapes and summer fruits that arrive from Chile in our winter should instead be marketed closer to where they were grown.
You can also reduce your energy consumption by buying less packaged foods and more unprocessed foods. We are fortunate in southern California to have available such a wide variety of fresh fruits and vegetables that haven’t been shipped halfway around the world.
Eating less meat is important, as the food and energy required to produce meat is many times more than what’s needed to grow a vegetarian diet. Did you know that the current world production of grains is plentiful enough to feed our burgeoning population? It is the diversion of a large percentage of the world’s grain to feed farm animals – and a further amount to produce corn syrup – that is the root cause of current food shortages in many nations.
Of course, growing much of your own food is still the most local and sustainable solution. Planting vegetables and fruit trees around your home, and planning for eventually irrigating them with recycled household wastewater is one of the most sensible long-term responses to climate change.
Finally, simply deciding to buy less “stuff” is very important. Finding satisfaction from other activities than shopping. Though this flies in the face of the perceived need to kick-start consumer spending of all types, our American way of life has been largely responsible for global climate change. Our consumer spending is unsustainable both in terms of household debt and planetary resources.
It’s time to devise new economic indicators that don’t depend for success on continuing resource depletion. A great place to start is building the green economy- putting millions of people to work insulating homes, installing rooftop solar panels, and the like. There’s plenty of this kind of work for decades. The upside of this effort will be the elimination of importing fossil fuels (which will also lessen geopolitical tensions), the slowing of climate change’s impacts on our planetary life-support systems, the availability of clean air to breathe in our cities, and a renewed sense of community around the nation. As America leads, the rest of the world is likely to follow.
