The Lost Opportunity Of 1990

The above graphic is five years old, but the trend line has only stretched upward since then in this year of record carbon and record heat. I have to apologize to younger and future generations for being so naive and not doing more in the past 35 years. We didn't have to be where we are now with a world on fire. I wrote of post along similar lines a few years ago title Thirty Years of Failure.

 

What is most interesting about this graph is the date of 1990, which demarcates the boundary beyond which more than half of all carbon emissions have been emitted. It is often cited because in 1990 we knew all we needed to know to have stopped and not emitted half the anthropogenic carbon in human history. It was the first decade where it was clear what needed to be done to avert climate change, though some could argue we had enough knowledge in 1980. At a Senate hearing  Pennsylvania Republican Robert Walker said: "In each of the last five years, we have been told and told and told that there is a problem with the increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We all accept that fact, and we realize that the potential consequences are certainly major in their impact on mankind.” Yet they had failed to propose a single law. “Now is the time,” he said. “The research is clear. It is up to us now to summon the political will.” That was in 1982 and he was a Republican. How we have gone backward.

 

My life has been bounded by Climate Change. One of the first warnings happened in 1968, the year I was born. Then in 1988, my first year in college, James Hansen gave his famous presentation to Congress. In addition to being the halfway point of carbon emissions, 1990 is the boundary date of my own adulthood, having turned 21 in that year. At that age, I was just beginning to get an awareness of ideas like climate change. I thought the challenge of this existential threat would pull us toward a more ecological path in the following decades, because the alternative (we are beginning to live through now) was unacceptable. I was wrong.

 

As a teen, I had been interested in off-the-grid living and the nascent technologies of wind and solar that held great promise even in the 1980s. I wanted to build my cabin and grow my own food in a sort of teenage mix of Thoreau and Amish survivalist. Had it been more socially acceptable, (or had I been able to think outside the box) I might have dived in. Instead, like my environmentalism, I have eaten around the edges without taking a big, meaningful bite. Had I gone off grid in 1990, by now, I might have built a durable living statement to my personal philosophy instead of paying hollow dues to live paycheck to paycheck in a culture eating itself and its members alive. Plus, I would have had decades of gardens and my own chickens, something I miss and haven't had with any stability since my teens. Of course, that is the larger story of 1990. What could we have built by now had we started then?

 

As a youth, I felt that new technologies, the power of American know how, and the clear path that needed to be taken would push us toward more sustainable living. I believed that my generation, Generation X, would be the catalyst that would create the change through voting, lifestyle choices, and a realization that through slow, incremental change, we could transition our society in the most significant energy shift since the Industrial Revolution. I was wrong and I was naive. What I thought would come about is still happening too slowly almost 35 years later. After 1990, my generation mostly bought into the promises of a consumer civilization while being tricked and fooled by powers with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. 

 

I was too passive in those early years, because I thought change was inevitable. The 1992 Earth Summit, a few years after 1990, brought me hope that a new, holistic approach to our biophysical world was dawning. Al Gore's 1992 book Earth In The Balance and the environmental focus of his presidential bid, lulled me into believing that political momentum would save the future. It seemed every politician around the world had the environment on their lips. The two combined to make me feel the momentum of events would propel us forward. The privilege of naive youth is the belief that the future will be different than what has already been, when it is really just more of the same. Youth has been the engine of great change throughout history, but there are more failures than successes. Instead of Gore, we got Slick Willy, and instead of continued holistic meetings about the Earth, we got compartmentalized discussions like the COP climate series that got nowhere. Decades rolled past, much as they had before, and brought us to the crisis point we are at now.

 

Reflecting on 35 years of far too slow progress, I have, like the writer Paul Kingsnorth, who is also of my generation, become a "recovering environmentalist," worrying less about living ecologically than I once did, believing we will just run this thing into a wall before we change. To quote the Duke of Wellington, it will be a very "close run thing" if we can salvage the future from our misspent past. Renewables could save us only to drown us in the consumerist waste it will produce. Renewables will not save us without a holistic approach to how we live on the Earth.

 

For thirty-plus years, I have driven tiny cars, partly because of affordability, but also a belief in living smaller at every level of my life. I've tried to make good choices and vote for what might bring about change. Have my choices or my votes made a difference? The choices of individuals are small, and the politics of 1990, when both Republicans and Democrats seemed to be on board, now seems like a lost golden age. In 2024, I feel like we have moved backward from where we were in 1990.

 

As a recovering environmentalist, my wife and I flew around the world this year, expanding our carbon footprint as only rich Westerners can. Though I have guilt, it is less than it might have been just a few years ago when every choice was sifted through the lens of its impact on the planet. We needed to fly to the Philippines anyway to see family, and long-haul flights are better than driving (if one could drive across the ocean). At least that is how I rationalize choices that most people don't have the extreme privilege to make. The irony of our flights and our general American profligacy is that we won't be able to fly much of anywhere soon due to extreme weather and extreme politics linked to climate.change. Still, where do we cut back to save this thing before it crashes? As illustrated by toilet paper shortages during Covid, the complexity of this thing we have built is fragile. Covid showed us how a few cracks in the system can bring the whole thing to a halt.

 

Modern life requires us to own a car, heat our home and live inside a system that is bringing us to ruin. It is only the few with land and ability that can "unhook" and live "off the grid" and live counter to our culture as was once my dream. Of course 8 billion people can't live sustainably in anything but a new model for living we must create. Without leadership, it is hard to see, the future left to the chance that we "might" make it. I joke that it would be great if we could stick a Hitler mustache on everything and we might take it seriously. Then, with a Churchillian character preaching "blood, sweat, toil and tears," we might just save ourselves before it is too late. As a student of history, we only need to look at the horrifying bulk of human history of famine, war and lives of struggle to understand that our moment is special in human history and we are about to lose it. Never before have so many people lived lives of such comfort and security and freedom. If people understood this, they wouldn't be so passive about change.

In 1990, most of the world's burning and consumption was done by a small fraction of the population in the rich world and our leadership would have helped set a low-carbon course for nations like India and China. Now China, India, the Philippines and the rest of the world are developing by following the path left by the rich world. While I was growing up in the 1980s, I lived within much the same consumer culture I live in today. Conversely, my wife from the Philippines, grew up much more like my great grandparents than me. Her parents, six brothers and sisters lived in a house the size of a one car garage with no transport, no electricity and a hand pump for water outside. Today, her and all her family members have vehicles, phones, computers and trendy clothing. While that is wonderful for them, from a climate perspective it adds to the challenges we face since 1990.

 

We can still make an impact, but it would have been so much bigger had we started in 1990 when nations looked to us more than they do now. Now they have their own ideas and everyone wants to live lives of unlimited prosperity like they see us living. Fortunate for us, while they are buying into the high consumption, high carbon lifestyle, they are also pulling our sad American ass along with things like huge investments in solar and amazing passenger rail.

 

While we were in the Philippines after a six-year absence, I was shocked by the growth in the number of American-sized SUVs and pickup trucks since our last visit. From a prosperity perspective, it is a good sign that people are entering the middle class and are doing well, but from a climate perspective, just like our freeways clogged with massive vehicles most people don't need, it is worrying. People are buying into the model we have created as the products of a "good life". Everyone in the world wants to live like an American and buy into the popular and consumer culture that is largely based on models we have pioneered. 

 

Also, while we were in the Philippines we caught the tail end of record heat from May where temps hit 50 Celsius. Enduring the daily 95 degrees and 80-90 percent humidity, I could feel how close we are to places like that becoming unlivable before we know it. As we experienced regular brown outs where we relied on solar fans to keep cool, the scary future was visceral and present unlike anything I had ever experienced before.

 

What if we had changed what it means to be an American in the world 35 years ago? Where would we and the rest of the world be now? What if we had changed the orientation of the graphic below decades ago so that Americans live closer to Indians in impact rather than Indians in need of five more planets striving to live like profligate Americans? If so, we wouldn't be facing the crisis we continue to largely ignore. Maybe it is time for me and the rest of the nation to go off the grid before it is too late.