At the New Republic Emily Atkin circles the wagons defending Al Gore’s outsized carbon footprint:
As David Roberts pointed out in Vox last year, the reason climate advocates don’t intensely advocate for personal behavioral changes is that they’re “insignificant to the big picture on climate.†That’s true even for huge energy users. DiCaprio’s emissions “are a fart in the wind when it comes to climate change,†Roberts wrote. “If he vanished tomorrow, and all his emissions with him, the effect on global temperature, even on US emissions, even on film-industry emissions, would be lost in the noise.†And it wouldn’t be hypocrisy, since DiCaprio isn’t asking you to stop flying.
That precisely wrong both factually and in behavior terms. In this non-linear world carbon emissions rise exponentially with income. An Indian peasant living on $1 a day has a very small carbon footprint. Al Gore’s income is 30,000 times and and his carbon footprint is a multiple of 30,000 times that. Plus one should model the behavior one wishes to see in others. It’s how you change people’s behavior.
I’m not complaining about hypocrisy. I’m pointing out that reducing carbon emissions on the backs of the poor is impractical. It won’t work.
Yes, it does matter for both credibility (putting money where your mouth is) as well as practically. Suppose everyone on the planet could live an Al Gore lifestyle – would he still make an exception for himself?
There is a lot of “good enough for thee, but not for me” going around.
This attack comes out pretty regularly. The only way wealthy people don’t use more electricity is if they live in small houses. Not happening. What you really want is for people to take steps to minimize energy usage, and for it to come from renewable sources. So you don’t really find people saying that they want the poor guy in India to use less energy.
So, the piece on Gore says “34 times more” when they look at a peak month. They don’t really look at what percentage of that is renewable or “clean”. They don’t look at how the house is used. This is all too nuanced. Much easier to just say he uses a lot of electricity.
Of course my bias is that the hypocrite argument is not a strong one, though I suspect I am in a minority on this. Heaven knows there is no shortage of hypocrisy on the right, I just don’t see all that much value in pursuing it.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/gorehome.asp
Steve
Since energy use isn’t linear with respect to income, that means that the measures used to propose reducing energy utilization are both regressive and ineffective.