Varying Degrees of Relevance

The vast majority of the green advice you’ll read? It’s irrelevant. There are four primary activities that dump carbon into the atmosphere: traveling from place to place, keeping buildings at pleasant temperatures, creating electricity, and raising animals for meat.

The rest of the green living pantheon—bamboo utensils, composting, eating local, reclaimed wood tables, organic cotton sheets—are nice gestures. And they often have other benefits: they might keep chemicals out of the water or provide a livelihood for local farmers. Many are also better than the alternatives they’re replacing. But when it comes to tackling climate change—not only the most dangerous environmental issue the world faces, but also a looming human rights problem—choosing these green products can only make a tiny difference.

We pretty much pluck the value of things out of thin air, and then we cling to those arbitrarily precious things as if our lives depend on it. We can’t see our own blind spots, and we’re easily manipulated by our peers and by the persuasive propaganda of the myriad defenders of the status quo, who we are naturally inclined to conform with anyway. We know nothing of the real cost of things and we’ve externalized the most significant items on the bill. We are terrible at predicting what will make us happy and improve our future well-being under the best of circumstances, and we face a cluster of problems characterized by long time horizons, massive uncertainties as to scale and scope, significant short-term costs and unknown long-term benefits, and few precedents.

We are, in effect, stumbling blind on the edge of a cliff of unknown width and depth, utterly incapable of seeing what’s on the other side or assessing its use to us even if we could see it. And in any case, we have barely a clue how to build a bridge across or even what such a bridge might look like. The price tag seems to high and we are suspicious of the builders, the engineers, even the building materials. We are inclined by habit, circumstance and genetic disposition to stay where we are. These are the dimensions of the obstacles in our path [to the sustainability paradigm shift].