Picture three trillion tons of stuff
Why almost none of the climate debate is actually about the climate
Take three slow breaths, clear your mind, close your eyes, and picture three trillion tons of something.
Really, try it.
I’ll be here.
…
How did it go?
Not great, I bet.
It’s too big a number. Too far outside the range of normal human experience to be imaginable.
The three point three trillion tons of carbon dioxide now floating around in Earth’s atmosphere is literally unimaginable.
I could tell you that Mount Fuji is made up of 1,400 cubic kilometers of basalt rock, which weighs about 2.8 tons per cubic meter, so when you do the math Mount Fuji weighs about as much as all the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (A bit more, actually — 3.9 trillion tons of Fuji vs. 3.3 trillion tons of CO₂.) But really that’s just another abstraction.
You can stare at a picture of Mount Fuji all day and all night and it brings you no closer to having a sense of how much stuff is in there. If you found out that Fuji-san weighs 39 trillion tons instead of 3.9 trillion, you wouldn’t really be surprised. None of it registers.
Editors, who aren’t fools, know very well there’s no point assaulting readers with billions of tons of this and trillions of tons of that. You can drive yourself crazy trying to think up ways of making these numbers relatable. It never helps.
Telling you humans are responsible for about a third of those 3.3 trillion tons may give you a vague sense of dread, but it leaves you none the wiser. Nobody really gets climate scale.
And that has consequences.
Our public discussions about climate are often bizarrely disconnected from climate-scale. People exhaust themselves in fights about stuff that doesn’t really make any difference one way or another. Our fights are almost always on the wrong scale.
If this happened on scales we’re more familiar with, we’d spot the absurdity right away. If you saw parents tearing each other apart over whether it’s better to feed their kids 2.000052 grams of fiber a day or 2.000054 grams, you’d conclude they’d lost their minds. If you heard a couple having a heated argument about whether to set the thermostate at 21 degrees or 21.00000001 degrees, you’d think you were watching some bizarre bit of performance art.
But tons of our climate debate amounts to that — overheated, emotional fights over a rounding-error to a rounding-error.
I could multiply examples of this pretty much infinitely. Vermont tearing itself apart over S.259, the “Climate Superfund” law allowing people to sue fossil fuel companies over the vanishing, inconsequential portion of atmospheric carbon generated in Vermont. The arcane fight over the relative lifetime carbon footprint of electric vehicles vs. those with internal combustion engines. The nasty, divisive conflicts in India over devoting scarce land to capture negligible amounts of carbon. There are thousands upon thousands of examples.
At some point it dawns on you: almost none of what we’re talking about when we’re talking about climate debate is actually about the climate at all.
Not if by “about the climate” you mean “about things that we might do that would have a perceptible impact on climate outcomes.”
What we’re really talking about when we’re talking about the climate is almost always something else. We’re processing a bunch of disagreements in society about the proper role of humanity in nature, about stewardship and virtue and the right and wrong ways to consume. These are all interesting and important things to discuss. People obviously find them fascinating — they want to talk about them, which is why they crowd out talk about the actual climate. But they’re not really about climate, in the sense of being linked with differing climate outcomes in some real way.
The climate pathway we’re on because Vermont passed a Climate Superfund law is precisely the same one we’d be on without it. The likelihood of catastrophic climate outcomes doesn’t really change whether we all drive gas-powered vehicles or EVs. The speed of sea-level rise will not change even a little bit if India devotes twice as much land to carbon sinks or half as much. Hundreds of tons or thousands of tons or millions of tons can’t move a needle calibrated in billions of tons.
This doesn’t mean that these aren’t important topics. If you’re in the litigation business, climate superfund laws matter a lot. Demand for EVs matters a lot to countries along the battery supply chain. How India uses its limited land will have huge, life-changing impacts for millions of Indians. It’s not that these things don’t matter, it’s that they don’t matter to the climate, so our decision to treat them as climate issues only muddies the waters.
The reality is that the scale climate change happens at is so vast, only a handful of policy interventions actually matter to the climate. Whether we cover growing demand for energy by burning stuff or by smashing atoms matters at climate scale. Whether we find ways to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere affordably billions of tons at a time matters. Whether we can work out a way to tweak earth albedo to modulate the amount of energy that reaches the atmosphere matters.
And…that’s it.
What’s bizarre is that the three things that really do matter at climate scale —nuclear energy, gigaton-scale carbon dioxide removal and albedo management— are sort of recondite niches within the climate world. You can go to COP after COP and basically never hear about them. In the bizarre climate debate we’ve built, the things that matter to the climate are incessantly drowned up by other, sexier, more symbolically resonant things that don’t and won’t and can’t move the climate needle. And that sucks.
I agree that the scale issue can make climate discussions focus on relatively insignificant things with higher emotional impact, But the specific conclusion you draw from it doesn't seem valid. What you describe is just tragedy of the commons. The actions of any one small polity (or person) doesn't matter, but as an aggregate they are everything.
If I catch you throwing your trash on the street and criticize you for it, is that actually "not about keeping streets clean" because one person littering is insignificant in the grand sceme of things?
The only way to get around the tragedy of the commons is to set a certain standard of behaviour, hold yourself to said standard and pressure others (carrot and stick) to adopt similar standards. Pointing fingers and demanding that others take action before you do is childish. Clean your own room first, especially when you're in one of the richest countries in the world with some of the highest emissions in the world.
In aggregate, there's probably no way of fighting climate change through encouraging action on individual/state/national level, in part because most people (hint hint) are quick to find excuses for why they shouldn't have to change anything. So I agree that focusing on technological innovation is probably a more fruitful avenue. But I disagree on why.
Well, all the excess got there via the behavior and consumption patterns of billions of people who also reduced the planet's ability to utilize, convert, and store it all by cutting down forests, etc.
One can infer the opposite might also true, that in order for it to simply not get worse, or to worsen more slowly, people who caused this, could stop a lot of what they have been doing. So there is still room for that debate, in my view, all the way down to burping of cows and kelp.
I think what is too often ignored is that these efforts won't remove what is already there unless we can recreate and accelerate the the planet's ability to store and convert it or devise a massive man made process.
The point is, that we do not know how much we can do in the restoring and converting part or how quickly, so it it is still useful to try to add less and reduce damage in the meantime, but the ultimate solutions will likely be in removal, like seeding the oceans with iron which you have mentioned, for one.