Perhaps you have already seen this article on the latest IPCC report, or another like it. If not, take the time to read that one, or another one about the same event. 

My immediate response to the article was to panic. We all knew this day was coming, but the starkness of the report, with its 12 year horizon, is still eye-opening, even for those of us who are keeping track. But I’ve had a couple of hours to stew now, and I’m going in a different direction. There are a lot of questions I need to ask to really sort out how to make my carbon footprint smaller, from how much I eat to whether I deserve to be alive at all(!), and I don’t intend to shy away from any of them, and I don’t intend to give up, either.

I expect I’ll be writing on this subject regularly for the rest of my life, so I’ll be trying to take my time in answering my own questions. It could be slow at times. We’ll see. 

If you have anything helpful to share, leave a comment or look me up on Twitter.

First Question: Do I Deserve a Life at All?

I mentioned this above, but before you get too worried, let me expand on my thoughts here.

First, it’s been said over and over again, but residents of “first world” countries are kind of fucking this planet up out of all proportion to our population.

Look at this 2009 chart from the Guardian. Canada was up EIGHTEEN PERCENT from our previous benchmark! We’re pretty even overall with the United States on a per-capita basis, which sucks on a lot of levels. Not least there is that we (and I include myself here) sometimes evince moral superiority that we just don’t possess a lot of the time. I mean, some of the time, yes, in some areas, but most of the time it’s more like a lag indicator than an actual difference.

So given 5 people in China, or 10 in Uruguay, or 20+ in Nigeria(!) could live on my resource footprint, how do I even have the right to continue to exist?

I think there are several ways to potentially respond to this:

Human Rights

Let’s get this out of the way first, because I think it’s the weakest argument. In terms of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, we all have the right to life. It’s axiomatic in a modern society that we all have the right to be alive.

The problem with harnessing this argument is that if my entire society vanished from the face of the planet, it would actually mean a lot more people got to live for a while. So whose rights do we consider? We need to consider more evidence

Economic

My existence tends to drive a certain amount of economic activity. I’m not going to argue that capitalism isn’t contributing to the problem, but I do think that it powers the system in which we live, and 12 years (or 25, or maybe even 50) just isn’t enough time to alter the basis of that system all that radically without a violent revolution, and we’re not at that entry just yet!

So what value do I create right now? 

  1. I earn a salary. Let’s round that number off to $100,000/yr, which is pretty common for folks at my stage in my particular field. 
    1. After taxes and other necessary fees, that’s roughly $60,000/yr. 
    2. My carbon footprint is somewhere in the neighbourhood of 18 tonnes per year.
    3. The costs associated with a metric ton of carbon are somewhere in the range of $37-220 as of 2015, and those numbers are only going to go up more rapidly the longer we wait
    4. Given that, I could almost certainly completely offset my carbon footprint by spending around $4000/yr right now, which is around 7% of my net income from my day job. This is somewhere around half of what I spend on food for myself and my partner. It’s a rounding error compared to my interest payments for my home and rotating credit.
    5. This brings home a big point for me, which is that the money I (and many other people, not to mention governments) spend on servicing debt vastly outstrips the cost of climate change mitigation. There may be something to discuss there, thought not today.
    6. I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that if I just wanted to offset my carbon tonnage, I could go somewhere like COTAP.org and pay a massively reduced price while also contributing towards other worthy goals, like economic equality in the developing world. It’s too early for me to grapple with the difference between the Stanford figure and the COTAP price, so I won’t (today).
  2. I write software on the side. That represents a very small amount of income at the moment, but let’s call it $5000/yr for kicks. That money, by and large, goes towards extras in my life. I could probably spend it all on carbon offsets without missing it, though there is some question as to whether using it to reduce debt would make more long term sense.
  3. I own a house with an apartment. The net income from this business is actually a fairly complex calculation, thanks to questions like the impact on my home’s long term value and the impact on my personal tax situation, but thus far I am net-negative nearly every year on the property.
    1. In general, my partner and I consider this our “emergency life support” income in case one of us takes a significant financial hit (which, sadly, still happens too often), so even if we do manage to start turning a profit, it’s not really money I can tap into to further offset my footprint. 
    2. Nonetheless, it figures into my total economic contribution.
  4. My economic contribution is actually significantly larger than just my personal net spending.
    1. My taxes pay for services.
    2. My direct spending fuels someone else’s livelihood, which fuels their spending, and so on. This effect tends to spiral down quickly, but it’s worth noting.
    3. There’s also my employer’s profit margin. If they’re making more from my work than they’re paying me to do it, then my economic impact is magnified by a certain factor.
    4. Finally there is the question of non-monetary economic contributions. I have a nonzero effect on the viability of starting a new software business in the province, for example, and my work with Gamedev NL, while modest in its value, probably contributes at least something to the overall functioning of the local economy.

Social

I don’t value myself as an individual particularly highly, but I do expect that my value to my society is not zero. I’d like to believe, for example, that in the course of writing this series I will provide a few folks with some ideas that will help them contribute to the cause of climate change.

It’s impossible not to get political when calculating social contribution, so I won’t spend a lot of effort avoiding it.

I am a progressive at heart. I think that feminism will ultimately advance the human race as a whole, and the broader and more intersectional it becomes, the more powerful its impact, and I think that those are both positive and necessary social changes.

I think that capitalism is an excellent system until it’s not, at which point we have to measure more than one metric in order to optimize the total good of our economy. Climate change is the poster child here – the acceleration in technological progress, including those underpinning the rapid growth of both populations and standards of living in many areas of the world – come at the cost of compromising the ecosystems on which all life depends. That’s not a price worth paying, to my mind. 

Climate isn’t the only problem with capitalism, of course. Beyond a certain point, markets become self-predatory – look at high frequency trading, for example. Capitalism tends to drive policies that destroy social institutions. Capitalist institutions are more fragile individually than their public counterparts, largely because the quest for “efficiency” drives them to pare away the redundancies that protect them from certain kinds of shocks.

And, of course, economic inequality exacerbates every other problem by pitting people against each other and drawing working capital out of the system. By itself, it also drives consumerism far past the point where its rewards are worth their costs. And, though I don’t have the research at hand to back this up today, I also believe inequality drives us towards a pinch point where violence is going to become unavoidable, which is definitely a topic for another day.

Just by holding these opinions, I contribute something of value to democracy. Even if it’s just the conflicting opinion that forces everyone to hone their own positions, there must be social value there somewhere.

Intellectual

I want to talk through what I think I offer intellectually separately from my worth as a social person, mostly for selfish reasons: I can (or at least I think I can) clearly define my contributions as an intellectual.

The first thing I can offer as evidence of my intellectual worth has little to do with me. I’ve tutored people over the years in a lot of different settings – university help centres, high school tutoring services, personal favours, even some of the books I’ve loaned out. This has to have produced at least a little value for someone else. 

For much of my career, I’ve been focused on automated testing. If you’re already a software developer, you’re probably laughing at my hubris here, but every organization I’ve worked for has had some level of trouble getting tests right, and every time I’ve added to the test base, it’s gotten slightly better.  Moreover, I’ve helped other devs get better at the practice, both by personally coaching them in the art of testing and by writing tools and articles that can help advance their knowledge. I’ve been at it for 15 years, after all; if I can’t help a new grad, I should probably give up entirely.

I believe automated testing is a huge win in multiple senses, and I’m proud of my contributions in that area. It reduces the amount of work required to avoid bugs in software, which avoids the amount of work wasted by those using the software. It improves the quality of the end product for most practitioners. It even improves the quality of life for many of us, which in turn means the industry operates more effectively, because we don’t leave our career as readily.

I also do a lot of creative work. I’m not sure how to quantify my effects there, but at minimum, the ideas I’m working with have demonstrable effects on others. I’ve written plays and stories and essays. I’ve drawn a few comics. I’ve worked on video games. I’ve even trod the boards as an actor. You don’t get to know your full reach in these efforts, but I believe they’re there all the same.

Summation

I don’t know if anything here makes me worth all the extra resources required to keep me going. I’d like to think so. At minimum, I feel like the economics of it makes sense.

Maybe that’s enough.