BIG PIVOTS: How to Quit the Carbon Navel Gazing

This story by Allen Best appeared on BigPivots.com on December 12, 2024.

The civil rights movement of the mid-20th century has greatly informed the life’s work of Auden Schendler in pushing for the massive changes at the scale necessary to confront the risks of global climate change.

So far efforts have fallen woefully short. We have the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, but we need more action at the federal level — and fast. He sees tactics of the civil rights movement being relevant today. We need an infusion of morality. Calculations premised solely on economics have failed.

“The literal future of civilization depends on rapid change, not glacial nudging from within, an approach that has demonstrably failed for decades,” Schendler writes in his new book, “Terrible Beauty.”

Schendler uses the word “revolution” several times in the book, and in that he means not lobbing of literal bombs but rather an upheaval in thinking akin to that found in the civil rights movement.

Many who have heard Schendler speak have been inclined to see bomb-throwing as an apt metaphor for his work. He speaks with passion and bluntness. They abound in “Terrible Beauty.”

So do facts and analysis.

That includes an understanding of the many tactics and strategies deployed in the civil rights movement. That movement had foot soldiers, including most famously the children of Selma, Alabama, who took to the streets when their elders, effectively barred from voting, stood back.

“If we’re unable to recruit people on a moral and even a spiritual journey into why it matters to engage on climate with force and energy, we won’t win this fight,” Schendler writes.

Americans, of course, are not alone in polluting the atmosphere and we are making progress. U.S. per-capita greenhouse gas emissions have actually dropped 19% since 1990 while those of China, India, and Indonesia have been rising.

That still leaves Americans among the world’s leaders at 267% of the global average. Oil- and gas-producing countries surpass us, but not many others. Those global emissions have been pulsing upward rapidly. They are now within striking distance of the levels that many scientists have predicted would begin to rapidly destabilize our climate. That will create problems not solved by ramping up production of air conditioners.

Americans, says Schendler, have bought into actions that have largely avoided meaningful change. We sort plastic bottles that never actually get recycled. We buy Priuses and LED light bulbs, thinking that our individual actions will be sufficient to solve the global problem. Instead, we need systemic change.

The response of business leaders has similarly amounted to little more than what Schendler describes as “carbon navel-gazing.” Those efforts may be well-intentioned, at least in some cases, but they fail to effect the large changes we need.

An earlier version of this navel-gazing had businesses theoretically wanting to shave energy use because it saved them money.

“In this way, the thinking went, businesses could lead – even show government the way – in the climate fix,” he writes. “It was a technocratic fantasy, but it was also an intentional dodge of meaningful action, akin to responding to racism in American by asking people to just be nicer, instead of passing the Voting Rights Act.”

The root problem is both simple and confounding. Capitalism, as currently constructed, mostly gets a pass on the pollution and the costs it imposes — costs that will rise dramatically as the atmosphere gets to higher levels of concentrations.

Many have argued for a tax on emissions. This is usually called a carbon tax, sometimes accompanied by a dividend, to ensure that this is a redistribution, not a make-government-bigger tax. To be effective, though, it needs to be high, commensurate to the true cost of the emissions now and into the future. Can you imagine a politician anywhere willing to support a tax per gallon of gasoline commensurate with its true cost?

Paul Krugman, who until recently wrote for the New York Times, several years ago said that he feared his credentials as an economist would be revoked if he did not support a carbon tax. Politically, he added, it was impossible. And that was when Joe Biden was president. Now we have Donald Trump returning to the White House and promising to help the fossil fuel industries.

Schendler’s book was at the press long before the November election. He made no attempt to address what strategies will be necessary during the coming four years, but the fact remains, as he points out, that the world needs to reduce emissions about twice as fast as has ever been achieved and do it everywhere. This continually during the next 50 years.

Whew.

Seems like a dismal, unattainable task, doesn’t it?

Where “Terrible Beauty” shines – and some other works on climate-change activism fall short – is in its specificity about actions. He talks about federal action, but he also cites work at the very local and personal level. One chapter describes the effort of more than a decade to reform the thinking of Holy Cross Energy, the electrical supplier for both the Aspen and Vail ski areas. He describes in great detail the great effort, successful after defeats, to elect directors who could foresee a more rapid shift from coal generation.

Schendler does this work from a base in Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, where he and his wife have raised two children and where he has been a member of the governing council of Basalt. He works for the Aspen Skiing Co. as its senior vice president for sustainability.

That employment, I am sure, makes him suspect in the eyes of many. After all, among the company’s clientele are people who have their own jets for shuttling around the planet. Think of that carbon footprint. Schendler acknowledges the distorted economics of such places when some customers will pay $10,000 for a very good bottle of wine.

This arena of great wealth has also put Schendler in an position to think deeply about the challenge. It has helped that the owners and managers of Aspen Skiing have been generally supportive of his work. He even persuaded the former CEO of the company to testify before a congressional committee considering legislation.

In a previous book, “Getting Green Done,” Schendler covered some of the same ground. “Terrible Beauty” has a far broader outlook and sharpened arguments.

This book has many levels. One I see is a reframing of the old Aspen vs. Vail rivalry. Aspen always has been multi-dimensional, always more prone to wearing its politics on its sleeves. Vail, particularly the community, also has flickers of activism but the skiing enterprise has been more purely business driven. Vail Resorts falls neatly within his definition of a company with feel-good programs that achieve very little in practice.

Underlying Schendler’s message is hope. Most certainly not lollipop-laden hope. Instead, it is rooted in the very understandable goal of wanting to bequeath a world of light, not darkness, to his two children.

What informs that world view? He shares some of his upbring, two very different worlds of his childhood. One was a sketchy neighborhood in New Jersey, minutes from New York City. He describes playing baseball on a diamond above the Lincoln Tunnel and of the pollution that turned the New Jersey sky purple. He also spent summers with his grandparents in a farming town of North Dakota.

He talks about his adventures as a young man skiing the backcountry in California, of accompanying his employer, the energy visionary Amory Lovins, on a personal visit to a hero, Yvon Chouinard, of talking to a Rotary Club, and most frequently of his delights in observing the growth and learning of his two children.

These anecdotal passages tell of an individual informed by many life experiences. It creates of the writer a human being, one that I would think most people can relate to.

The book brims with well-crafted analogies but also references that testify to voracious reading. In just two paragraphs he mentions the journalist I.F. Stone, the novelist Cormac McCarthy, and the French philosopher Camus. The previous page mentioned J.R.R. Tolkien as well as the poet Jorge Luis Borges. Jack Kerouac makes several appearances.

But yes, this book is an argument: that we must achieve solutions at scale commensurate to the problem. That will require a “firm, steady push on the huge institutional structures that are holding back progress,” he writes. This requires focus not just on government and policy, but in the realm of a social movement and in everyday civil life.

“Every day, a nudge of a system. Every week, a push on power through techniques and ideas employed by Martin Luther King Jr., Gandhi, Myles Horton, Rosa Parks, American revolutionaries, and the youth plaintiffs who, as part of the climate movement, are starting to win lawsuits against the fossil fuel industry.”

Such a practice, he continues, “starts with a deep understanding of the scale of the problem, so it means reading a little climate science, every day. It continues with an understanding of how revolutions and social change happen in society – that means reading widely in the subject,” he says, citing a list of writers.

“Informed by the science, our actions must be to scale but also omnipresent in our lives, the same way that John Lewis likely never woke up without thinking about civil rights.”
It’s not about little things, he says. “This is about power. And revolution.”