Our obsession with carbon emissions is hurting the planet.
An article inspired by responses to a semi-viral LinkedIn post.
Climate change. Carbon emissions. Carbon footprint. Carbon accounting. Carbon removal. Carbon capture, no wait, carbon sequestration. The list goes on. Carbon seems to be the main focus of the climate crisis conversation, with businesses touting how they’re going to be net zero by 2050 (or even 2030, wow) and organisations encouraging us all to cut down on our carbon footprint by using less energy or getting better light bulbs (don’t actually stop buying new stuff though, instead buy this new sustainable stuff). If we all just managed to get those pesky carbon emissions down a little bit the planet would be saved and we can go on living as usual. Except not really.
Read the environmental or climate change section of any news site and you will be inundated with articles about carbon emissions, carbon neutrality, net zero emissions, and CO2. In fact, one news site has this lovely, ever-increasing CO2 tracker that announces the “most important number of the climate crisis” and shows how far we’re over the “safe” level of emissions. A number still far exceeds pre-industrial levels of 280 ppm. (Although it’s hard to imagine what “safe” levels of emissions are when we breached them 20 years before I was born.)
In our obsession with carbon emissions, there’s also the fact, which I feel has been ignored, that if we reach net zero emissions global temperatures will still rise. We need to reduce all human emissions to zero, including greenhouse gases and aerosols, for temperatures to begin declining again.
Now, I am not saying that emissions aren’t important. I am not saying that we shouldn’t be concerned about carbon emissions. What I am saying is that we need to expand our focus of concern, and I am going to share why. I also think it’s important to note that I’m not the first person to mention this, nor do I believe that if only I could speak to the head of the United Nations then we could solve this climate change business, but if we widen our horizons then many of us could find more ways heal the planet.
(People have also told me that I am wrong because, technically, climate change IS caused by emissions. Let’s be real, climate change, in our day-to-day conversations does not just mean shifts in weather patterns.)
In the simplest of terms, I feel like our obsession with carbon emissions is a dangerously easy argument to dismantle. If we stop a cement plant because just of carbon emissions, we are implying that if carbon wasn’t an issue, the plant would be fine. Carbon emissions may not be directly responsible for the degradation of ecosystems, the draining of wetlands, the clearing of forest land, the erosion of soil, or the poisoning of the air and water, but these are all still increasingly prevalent problems we are facing.
This focus on carbon emissions and carbon accounting also messes up our perceptions. If someone was going to cut down a forest, but they were going to do it using an electric bulldozer and plant two trees for every one they cut down, we could calculate a positive effect. But the emissions aren’t why we want to keep the forest, we want to keep it for the habitats, the biodiversity, and the beauty.
The fact is, environmental derangement will still happen even if we stop emitting carbon. Calamity will still happen even if temperatures don’t rise. (That is, if we don’t do something about it.)
“Are we in this trouble because of a piece of bad luck with atmospheric chemistry–that all the CO2 unleashed by burning fossil fuels turned out to have unhappy and unforeseeable aide effects–or did we get here because of an approach to the world, a way of seeing and treating everything, that would have always brought us to such a pass, even if the climate system had been less sensitive to our industrial emissions?” At Work In the Ruins, Dougald Hine. Emphasis mine.
I’ve also witnessed intellectual debates about how we can’t spend time trying to stop sweatshop labour or worry about racially biased criminalisation because, duh, there won’t be a habitable place to live if carbon emissions keep rising. Technically, yes, but this creates a patronising, crusading front that will turn everyone off.
On a global scale, it's almost as if framing climate change as an emissions issue allows you to continue emitting carbon. Does it really matter if one little city builds a coal plant? This city really needs the jobs, can’t another nation handle the cuts? How many times have you heard a sentence along the lines of “It doesn’t matter if X country does anything about climate change, you should really be worried about Y’s country emissions levels”?
This is a topic I explored on LinkedIn a couple of weeks ago, and it received an interesting reaction, to say the least. People told me my thought process was drawing focus away from the “main contributor” of climate change. That addressing carbon is our main priority at the moment, otherwise we are diluting the issue and losing focus. I believe this misses the point. I think the reason for this discomfort is because we want the climate crisis to be calculable, to be solved through means-tested solutions that can be easily shared in a PowerPoint presentation. We want a checklist of manageable climate change solutions–reduce this number by X, increase this number by Y–because it makes the problem seem less scary. It makes us feel more in control. But we aren’t in control, we can’t number-crunch our way out of the problem.
This focus on carbon emissions has also given us the incredibly self-important sense that if we just had the right technology we could fix all of the world’s problems. If only we had the right carbon capture technology we could continue to endlessly grow the economy. If only we could spray dust into the atmosphere then we could block sunlight and cool the earth. If only we had the right air filters, water filters, nutrient supplements, robot bees and GMO veg then we could stop worrying about climate change.
I’m not sure about you but, as I’ve written before, I fear the Bill-Gates-Elon-Musk-funded-technomodernist-and-ecomodernist future more than the disaster of climate change itself. I don’t want to live in a bubble city where we get our nutrition from bacteria grown in a vat in Scandinavia. Even if we hit net zero emissions, there are so many more environmental issues going on in our world that need to be tended to if we want to create a better planet.
But I say that last sentence not to encourage fear, but to encourage hope. So many of the solutions we are presented with today sound unrealistic or downright terrifying. Instead, if we all worked together on healing the things we find the most sacred–perhaps you have an affinity for the ocean and want to tackle plastic pollution, or you want to bring permaculture farms to the masses, or maybe you just want to take small actions to improve your local area, care for your neighbours, reduce your waste, and pick up litter–then we could resolve so many of the loom issues climate change and environmental derangement presents.
“[T]he land is dying before our eyes, as it has been doing since ancient times. We have to stop killing it. This is bigger than cutting greenhouse gas emissions. It is reserving a relationship to soil and sea that has been part of civilization for thousands of years.” Climate, Charles Eisenstein.
Whether or not we reduce emissions, if we ignore ecological healing then environmental derangement will continue. We must stop killing the land, and this is more than just cutting carbon emissions. We need to recapture our passion and compassion for the land around us and the people - human and otherwise - who live on it. Serving planet Earth and our communities, both human and not, in the ways we feel individually passionate about, will make the change we need to create a better future.
How do you feel called to serve the Earth?
Inspiration and resources
Climate — A New Story | Charles Eisenstein
so cool to find your newsletter. we have so much overlap in terms of stuff we write and think about. this post of mine, from a while back, resonates with yours and also draws on eisenstein: https://environmentalhealth.substack.com/p/choosing-beauty-over-optimization
Absolutely. Not sure what to say really apart from "how f***ed are we?" because business-as-usual is not going away until everybody feels like us and then make it known and then those in charge finally realise they have failed and hopefully step aside.