A Belated Re-Post

This is the week of Christmas.

Perhaps you don’t celebrate Christmas. Many people don’t–it isn’t my primary winter holiday, either, though I join the celebrations of family and friends. But chances are Christmas is on your mind today, whether you celebrate it personally or not.

There are the TV adds, the holiday specials, the new holiday movies, the incessant Christmas carols in public spaces. For example, I’ve heard “Little Drummer Boy” at least three or four times already without having sought out the song even once and I’m basically a homebody who ignores popular culture whenever possible (except as relates to climate change and a few other political and scientific issues). I am aware that some people harbor a special hatred of that over-played song.

But I kind of like it.

Actually, I really like it. That song has been known to make me cry whenever I really pay attention to the lyrics. Minus the rum-pa-pum-pums  and traditional lyrical line-breaks, here they are:

“Come,” they told me, “a new born King to see. Our finest gifts we bring to lay before the King, so, to honor Him when we come.”
“Little baby, I am a poor boy too. I have no gift to bring that’s fit to give our King. Shall I play for you on my drum?”
Mary nodded. The ox and lamb kept time. I played my drum for Him. I played my best for Him.
Then He smiled at me, me and my drum.

I mean, seriously, picture this. There’s this little boy who has this fantastic experience–mysterious grown-ups appear from some exotic place and tell him of this amazing baby–this King whose birth was announced by angels and by a new, very bright star, the subject of prophesies about the redemption of the whole world. The drummer boy probably doesn’t understand most of it, but he knows this is a Big Deal, and when the grown-ups urge him to come with them to worship and honor the newborn King, he eagerly agrees.

Except what can he give? He has no money, no expensive gifts. He’s poor and he’s just a child–compared to all these Wise Men and other important people, what can he do? He doesn’t know how to do anything except play his drum, and maybe he can’t even do that very well. Poor little drummer boys just don’t get to go visit kings. It isn’t done.

But then the child gets to see the baby, and he sees this King is actually a poor little boy just like him. They aren’t that different. And the baby is looking up at him, expectant. The drummer boy just has to give something. So he does the one thing he can do, knowing it can’t possibly be enough. He plays his drum and he plays it just as well as he can.

And it makes the baby smile.

We’re all like that, in one way or another. Most of us probably feel inadequate most of the time–I certainly do–and, frankly, in the face of global warming, we are each inadequate, at least by any reasonable definition. We don’t have enough money; we don’t have the right skills; we lack the cooperation of friends and family (or the Federal government); or we have other, competing responsibilities; or grave problems of our own to cope with. These are entirely valid excuses, real stumbling blocks, and arrayed against us is the full power and might of some extremely rich people who do not want us to get off fossil fuel at all, ever. We’re running out of time.

And yet, sometimes the universe isn’t reasonable. Sometimes one person can change the world. Sometimes one’s best turns out to be good enough after all.

May it be so for you. Merry Christmas.

An Odd Thing

Photo by Gaelle Marcel on Unsplash

So, last year, I made a Hanukkah post. Not being Jewish, I didn’t consider my own thoughts on the subject very relevant, so instead I simply curated a list of other people’s climate-related holiday posts. This year I decided to do the same thing. I checked to make sure all the links from last year still work, then looked for new ones to add.

There weren’t any.

The same links as last year came up, plus a few older ones. None from this year. So I specified “Hanukkah climate change 2022” and got a whole lotta nothing. Somebody was planning on doing a Hanukkah-themed political-writing workshop a few days ago. A synagogue has put up solar panels. That’s it. And yes, I tried alternate spellings, too. No dice.

Why is it that last year there were a pile of online articles on this topic, but this year there are none? Where did everybody go?

Of course, it may be I’m just too early, that more articles will come out as the week progresses, but this blog of mine comes out on Tuesday, and Tuesday it now is, so I’ve got to go with what I’ve got. And rather than simply re-post last year’s list, I’m going to humbly offer a thought. Please let me know whether this resonates because, as I said, I’m very much a guest in this territory.

My thought: Hanukkah commemorates a victory that seemed impossible, doesn’t it? At this point, that’s a very comforting idea, in relation to climate change.

Christmas Planning

Photo by Chad Madden on Unsplash

Tis the season to get ready for Christmas, if you celebrate Christmas, which of course not everybody does–but lots of people do, and some of those who don’t may have similar holiday planning going on. So I figure it’s time to post a version of my traditional holiday planning post.

Maybe it will give you some ideas.

Before we get started, I want to remind you of a few things.

First, although this article focuses on carbon reduction via lifestyle change, voting and other political action are far more important.

Second, I’m not advocating a joyless, abstemious approach to the holiday. If you discover that some beloved tradition you really enjoy has an unacceptably large carbon footprint, find something else to that you enjoy just as much–or more!

Finally, while the average person might be responsible for lots of unnecessary holiday-related greenhouse gas emissions, that doesn’t mean everybody is. Maybe your holiday is already very “green.” Or maybe there is something going on in your life that means you can’t really change much this year. Either way, if you are not somebody who can shrink your carbon budget, then don’t worry about it. Find something else to do.

In general, please don’t let the issue of lifestyle change hang you up and cause you stress. There are more important things to do, and we need you to be ready, willing, and able to do them. Lifestyle change is just an added bonus.

The Carbon Cost of a Holiday

Some years ago, I found an article entitled “The Carbon Cost of Christmas.” That article is almost fifteen years ago, now, and it was based on calculations made for the UK. I doubt that the numbers for the United States this year are exactly the same, but I suspect the picture is still broadly similar. Christmas is still a very carbon-intensive season for most people, and it doesn’t have to be.

The article estimated that Christmas was responsible for 5.5% of the UK’s entire annual carbon cost. That is, while much of that carbon was released outside of the holiday itself, it was all expended for the holiday. Five-point-five might not seem like a big number, but 5.5% of the year is 20 days, so Christmas basically adds almost an extra month of emissions to the year. Personally, I suspect that America’s numbers are worse, but I can’t be sure.

But what really caught my eye as useful was the following breakdown of average carbon emissions in kilograms of carbon-dioxide equivalent per individual:

Christmas shopping = 310

Decorative lights = 218

Car travel= 96

Holiday food = 26

Look at those first two figures! Non-food shopping and decorative lights are FAR AND AWAY the heavy hitters. Even a slight reduction to either is going to have a disproportionate effect on the total. Wanna bet there are easy, painless ways for many people to make changes here?

Picking Low-Hanging Fruit

The first thing to do is to eliminate emissions that don’t actually make human life better. For example, those lights—I don’t know how many hours per night those lights are on in the UK, but American holiday lights seem to be on all night in many cases. Who’s looking at holiday lights late at night? How much joy does that carbon buy? None.

Similarly, a lot of that Christmas shopping results in unwanted gifts. The Carbon Cost of Christmas reported that Brits spent an annual total of £4 billion on unwanted Christmas gifts, which they estimated had a carbon cost of 80 kg carbon-dioxide equivalent per person. That means almost a third of the Christmas shopping cost goes for gifts no one wants to receive.

And to be clear that means that if the average Brit simply stops buying gifts nobody wants, they’ll achieve almost as much footprint reduction as if they did no holiday driving at all.

I’m not sure what the equivalent American carbon cost is, but our financial cost of unwanted gifts is a whopping $15.2 billion (about $46 per person), so clearly we have wiggle-room, too.

Oh, Christmas Tree

A few years back, I wrote an article on whether live Christmas trees or fake ones are better. I used information gleaned from articles written by two other authors, whose work you might want to check out.

The short answer was that live, cut trees have a substantially smaller carbon footprint than artificial trees, and in some circumstances live, cut trees can even be carbon-negative. Christmas trees are typically grown on farms, so they are not a driver of deforestation, and a Christmas-tree farm is almost always environmentally better than what the land would be used for if the farm failed. In contrast, artificial trees are made of metal and plastic, facilities to disentangle these materials for recycling do not exist, and while the same tree can be re-used year after year, verses a real tree that must be replaced every year, most artificial trees are replaced before the savings can add up to much.

Of course, using a second-hand artificial tree that would otherwise be trashed is a different story.

Thinking Strategically

But if you can “green” your holidays, do it. There are lots of tips available online. I add just three:

1. Do the research to find out where your environmental impact really is. It is entirely possible that something you’ve been stressing about actually isn’t important, while something else has a huge footprint you didn’t think of.

2. Don’t fall into thinking environmental issues in simplistic, good/bad terms. First of all, the real world isn’t black and white, and effective action begins by grounding yourself in the real world. Second, if you do start thinking in binary good/bad terms, you will sooner or later discover that all your options count as bad in one way or another, and you will make yourself crazy. Nuance is good. Only the Sith think in absolutes!

3. Don’t assume that fewer emissions mean less joy. Your holiday might be a bit different if you reduce its carbon footprint, but different isn’t always bad. You can change the things that don’t matter and keep the ones that do.

A Final Response to Dr. Hayhoe

I’ve already written two posts in response to Katharine Hayhoe’s book, Saving Us. Having finished the book, here in my third response.

Or, not actually “finished,” but read as much as I’m likely to any time soon. The thing is that I found the book depressing, although that is the exact opposite of the author’s intent. And the way that I found it so is interesting.

I want to be clear–this is not a bad book. There was a time in my life when I would have been very receptive to it, and I assume there are those who are at a point to be receptive to it now. And to be very clear, I don’t mean that I am “beyond” such people. I am not. We don’t all need to learn the same things in the same order, for one thing. For another, the directions and hints we get in life tend to be relative–one person may need to hear “turn right” while the other must hear “turn left” to get to the same place because they have different starting places. So if this book has the message you need, I am in no way criticizing it. Maybe in the future, I’ll need to hear it again myself. It’s just that right now I need something else.

Dr. Hayhoe’s primary strategy for pursuing climate action seems to be to (gently and effectively) convince as many people as possible that climate action is a good and necessary thing. She offers various clearly-described tips on how people who want climate action can talk with those who aren’t so sure, and marshals some impressive arguments to the effect that her methods work. OK. Except there is an unstated assumption here–that the reason we don’t have meaningful climate action yet is that not enough people want it.

BS.

A majority of US citizens have been asking for climate action for years, according to polls, right? Admittedly, fewer people prioritize the issue, and there are other complications, but America has made necessary changes before with similarly wobbly public support–the passage of the 13th Amendment springs to mind, as does the nationwide legalization of interracial marriage. We have enough public support to get climate action, so why don’t we have it?

The issue is not how many people don’t want climate action, it’s which people don’t want climate action. And the fact of the matter is some of the people who don’t want it are very powerful.

The inequality of power among Americans, the fact that some people can simply do things others cannot, is the elephant in the room that many environmentalist writers simply do not and will not address. And as long as they do not address it, as long as they do not acknowledge where we really are, I do not believe their protestations of hope.

We need a climate action strategy that acknowledges the true situation we are in, for the same reason that a lost traveler needs a set of directions that start from where they actually are. Anything else is useless.

Failure to acknowledge the political reality we face is as bad as the failure to acknowledge the climatological reality.

I want directions I can use. I want a strategy that begins here. And more and more I am becoming convinced that the place to get that strategy is from the world of social justice and democracy. For one thing, many white, liberal environmentalists have little to no experience thinking in terms of power differentials. We were raised to believe that either everybody is equal or, if somebody is on top, it’s us. We’re slow to believe that systemic inequality exists, that unfairness exists, that success is not as simple as picking ourselves up by our own bootstraps and being nice to everybody. Black and brown activists have no such difficulty. Same-sex couples watching lawyers cheerfully argue that some families aren’t real don’t have this kind of problem. People with Down syndrome or autism who aren’t eligible to receive organ transplants certainly have no trouble understanding unfairness exists. Journalists in the Philippines or Saudi Arabia, protesters in Iran or China, I could go on. That’s who knows what needs to be done and how to do it.

And it could be that that’s what this really is, that all the social justice fights are the same fight, and that when any one of them truly wins, we all will.