One of the most shocking observations about human nature that I have ever heard was told to me by my wife, a psychologist and intuitive eating specialist. It is the following true statement:
Intentional weight loss (dieting) does not work, statistically speaking. 95% of individuals do not succeed in losing weight and keeping it off by dieting.
Stop for a moment and think about this: failing to lose weight by dieting is such a common human experience that it is the subject of innumerable cultural references, jokes, and a $4bn industry of quack fad diets. The observation that dieting doesn’t work for most people is so blindingly obvious, once you see it, as to be banal. And yet, we persist in this facially false belief that failing to lose weight is our fault.
Never mind that much of the medical world is finally starting to realize that the correlation between weight and health is not causation. The fact of the matter is that on average, people gain 1 to 2 pounds a year over the course of their life. If a diet promises you weight loss, and fails to deliver, it’s not because you failed. It’s because the diet industry lied to you: dieting doesn’t work for most people.
What’s worse, our fascination with body size isn’t harmless. The constant stigmatization of people in bigger bodies kills thousands of young women a year, a shocking toll when you realize that it’s based on a gigantic cruel lie. So why do we persist in pretending that dieting works?
One reason is that it gives us the illusion of control. Humans tend to stigmatize anyone who is too far outside the norm along any axis: too fat, too skinny, too smart, too stupid, too ugly, too hot. Living in a larger sized body can be a deeply painful experience, and holding boundaries around society’s insistence that you are to blame for the unacceptable size of your body can be nearly impossible. If you could just lose 15 pounds…
Humans are susceptible to developing cargo cult beliefs about things that they feel like are outside of their control (anti-vaxers and Autism Spectrum Disorder, anyone?) And the incessant drumbeat of climate doomism can make people grasp at straws for ways to contribute. Everybody pitch in and do their part! As they say: 1. Something must be done! 2. This is something. 3. Therefore, we must do it!
So we bike to work, go vegetarian, and eschew plastic bottles1. And, admittedly, it does have some impact, from a purely numerical standpoint. But that impact is so negligible compared to the overall problem that it is is below the level of noise. It’s delusional to believe that we can make any progress whatsoever on climate change by “everybody pitching in” voluntarily, without any agreements about what we should be pitching in for.
There is a big difference between “everybody pitching in” and “everybody working together.”
One reason people believe in the power of personal choice is the same reason that we believe in dieting: it seems to confer a measure of control over things that feel like they’re outside of our control. Biking to work one day a year may make you feel like you’re helping out, but it’s symbolic. In fact, the idea of personal responsibility for your own carbon footprint has been a time-honored tactic to shift the blame from corporate carbon emitters to consumers.
The climate crisis is a global problem, and the way you solve global problems is with coordinated effort. For example, if some countries decide to stop using coal, that’s great! But because coal is cheap and fungible, it mostly means that other countries will ramp up their coal usage, leaving things more or less net neutral. The way we express our shared values, as a society, is through legislation, regulation, and international cooperation. And, as slow and cumbersome as these tools can be, they are some of the most effective tools we have that have a chance of fixing the climate crisis.
To be sure, there are merits to individual action. For one thing, choosing to work on climate technology is a way to heavily leverage your personal contributions. Enabling lower emissions technologies (like renewable energy), and bringing them towards price-parity with equivalent carbon emitting technologies (like coal burning) can have a huge impact: making capitalism work in our favor, by making carbon reduction cost effective.
Activism and organizing are also great ways to engage in individual action with high impact. Often times, when people ask me how they can best contribute to fighting climate change, my answer is “Write to your senator.” Politics is our expression of shared values, and the political power of the climate movement has grown tremendously over the past 10 years. The Inflation Reduction act is one of the most inspiring political moments of my life, and I hope to see many more.
And, there is an argument that individual climate action primes us to support pro-climate policies, by engaging the public in the issue. On the other hand, some studies seem to show that personal climate action also tends to make people feel like they’ve “done enough” and don’t need to support other, more scalable forms of change2.
But none of these are arguments that individual action, in and of itself, creates meaningful change. Technology and politics and personal motivation are all means to an end: scalable climate solutions. Even this Washington Post article that asks “Can individuals solve climate change?” points to the Inflation Reduction Act creating systemic incentives, exactly the kind of collective climate action that is the opposite of individual action3.
The main way in which Everybody working together is different than Everybody doing their part is mostly that we will probably have to accept that wealthy, privileged people in the first world will have to pay somewhat more for things we like, like flying and eating meat, and will have to accept some more inconvenience in the near term for things like driving. There is no doubt that the effects of the climate crisis will be unevenly distributed, and will impact marginalized and developing communities more than wealthy and privileged ones. We already see this happening in places like Yemen. But, technology is one of the levers we have to make this transition less painful, by helping to reduce and mitigate the impacts of climate change. For those with the skills and training, working on climate technology is one way to leverage our privilege to help reduce the pain and suffering of others, at a scale that individuals working on their own cannot achieve.
So, please go ahead and bike to work. Biking to work is great for your physical and mental health. But don’t mistake biking to work for a substantive contribution to the climate crisis. We can only solve the climate crisis by working together.
One of the smuggest assholes I ever met was the husband of a friend of my wife’s who came over one evening for dinner. My wife offered him a bottle of water, and he sighed a weary sigh and pulled out an aluminum water bottle and proceeded to lecture my wife on how wasteful plastic bottles are. My wife, ever amiable and polite, bought a filter pitcher, and the next time they came over, she offered him a glass of water from the pitcher. Once again, he gave a mighty sigh, and told her how amazing the tap water in the Bay Area is, and that the filter was wasteful. There are a lot of ways to try to engage people in activism and change, but being a supercilious prick usually is not a great strategy.
I am going to apologize here for not digging up references to these studies; I will leave it as an exercise to the reader for the moment, and if my memory has failed me, I am open to corrections.
It also serves as indirect proof of my thesis, due to Betteridge’s Law, which famously states, “For any article whose title is a question, the answer is No.”