talking and changing

In talking about reducing our impact on the Earth, you'll often hear people talking about redesigning cities, or setting up global energy grids, or putting in monorails or solar panels on the roof. Rather fewer people talking about walking or biking instead of riding, turning the heating and airconditioning off, and so on. We prefer large expensive technical distant solutions to simple cheap or money-saving down-to-earth solutions.

Part of this is our technophilic society. We just like high-tech gadget stuff. We prefer the mp3 player to the stereo, the electronic calculator to the slide rule, the cappuccino maker to the stovetop coffee pot, and so on. Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with the higher-tech solution, but there's nothing inherently right with it, either. Technology is simply a tool, and a good craftsperson chooses the right tool for the job.

A while back I had a chat with a friend about energy conservation. He said, "It turns out that if you orient your house towards the sun right, build removable overhangs on the sunward side, and install synthetic insulation, your cooling energy use will be reduced by about 90%."
"Or," I replied, "you could just turn off the 2,500 Watt airconditioning, turn on a 50 Watt fan and have a cool drink."
"Well, yes but -"
"So you could spend $20,000 on renovating your house and insulating it and reduce energy use by 90%, or $30 on a fan and reduce cooling energy use by 98%."
He smiled sheepishly.

This is not to mock my friend who like me is a product of our Western culture, but simply to point out that the high-tech and expensive solution is not always the best one. Why then do we instinctively go for it? Well, because that's our culture - we love gadgets and money. We think that in them lies the perfect solution to all our troubles.

But I think that beyond our technophilia, a second reason is that we don't really want to change. If the answer to our problems lies with corporations and governments and regulations and laws and installing high-tech machinery and redesigning cities and so on, then we need do nothing except write a letter or sign a petition. But if the answer to our problems lies with ourselves, we have no excuse not to start today.

Technophilia thus leads to passivity, or perhaps our passivity makes us technophilic. Humans have a habit of being messianic, waiting for a Redeemer to come and save us all from ourselves. We believe the solution to our troubles lies in some higher abstract force - God, karma, Science! or The Market!

As I discussed about the so-called paradox of choice, we tend to be infantile, to expect everything now and for some abstract force we don't understand to provide it to us. To an infant their mother is a higher abstract force, an infant doesn't understand that their mother is a person with her own needs and desires, so the infant reaches blindly to suckle and cries helplessly if she isn't there instantly. Likewise, we cry helplessly that we would reduce our impact on the environment if only this abstract force could help us, and we reach blindly for it - while doing nothing.

This does not mean that technology cannot help us reduce our impact and improve the Earth, of course it can. But it does mean that we should not hold our breaths. Insulating your house is good, but that does not mean you cannot turn off your airconditioning and use a fan instead now. Having more walkable and bikable cities and better public transport is good, but that does not mean you cannot walk 3km to the shops now.

It's worth bearing in mind that social and economic change is often slow. A recent article describes why new ideas take time to have impact - so there could be a brilliant invention today but we'd still have a generation to wait for it to have any real effect on us. It's hard to get everyone to agree on one thing - just think of the last time you went to the cinema with a dozen friends and tried to agree on which movie to see, or the last time you went to dinner and tried to sort out the bill afterwards. Keep that in mind when you sigh over how slow parliament is to do things - they're dealing with ten or twenty times as many people and much more complex questions than which movie to see or who had the caesar salad.

So we should not expect social and economic change to be very great very soon. Abstract forces move slowly, though of course it's not slow and steady, but slow with little bursts of sudden change and then years of being slow again. But we ourselves can move quickly.

Consider the list of things to do in the one tonne CO₂ lifestyle: none of those involve extra expense or require any high-tech devices. Any one of them would be a significant change in your impact, but most Westerners can do most of those tomorrow, and almost all of us can do all of them within five years.

The obstacles to putting in monorails and rooftop solar panels and building more walkable cities and the like are very great, the obstacles to individual action are much smaller. They're mostly psychological, as Marguerite describes here, telling us that there are no social, financial, safety or other obstacles to her ridding herself of her car, she just can't really wrap her mind around the concept of never driving.

The truth is that we need both individual and wider social and economic change, but commonly we get things backwards: we think that for us to change, the whole country or world must change first, when in fact our personal change is needed first. For example, if we don't want animals to be factory-farmed, the best way for us to achieve that is not to eat them, rather than waiting for the factories to stop operating by themselves while we still munch away.

I know two men for whom social justice and the rights of refugees is important. One lectures regularly at a venue, providing nothing but words, and sternly lectures others on the importance of the right words and the right thinking. The other never lectures anyone, but provides his time and service to refugees. The two have had a falling out, the first calling the second an "arsehole", the second calling the first a "hypocrite". I'm sure you can guess who my sympathies are with. Like Al Gore, too many of us in the greenish movement offer nothing but words. This is why I'm so unimpressed with movements like 350.org, since their version of "take action" means talking about being aware of things, as though I could find my way to Timbuktu simply by being aware of it and talking about going there someday.

As Gandhi said, be the change you wish to see in the world. If you want people to reduce their impact, begin by reducing your own - which you can do tomorrow, needing no grand social and economic and technological changes to do.

Now, why bother changing when it's just you? That's a question for another article.

The Infantile Paradox of Choice

A response to Marguerite's Where is my fishbowl?, which was her own response to this speech by Barry Schwartz. It's pretty interesting, and really shows the way our consumerist culture works.



The problem is that he's entirely wrong.

He says that Western societies have the assumption that by allowing individuals freedom of choice, people will benefit. And I say it's true, and is a good philosophy.

He says that our choices overwhelm us and make us miserable, and that this is inevitable because we've so many choices; this is his "paradox of choice". He's wrong because he fails to make a distinction between meaningful and meaningless choices. He gives examples of 175 different salad dressings at his supermarket, and a doctor offering two different treatments. One is a meaningful choice, the other is not. A mature person realises that some choices are meaningful and should be considered seriously, and others are not and should be dealt with quickly without worry or stress.

Other examples he gives like when to marry might be meaningful or meaningless, it's up to the judgment of the person. A mature person realises that whether a particular choice is meaningful or not is particular to them; if in a couple marrying one is religious and the other indifferent to it, which particular religious minister marries them is important to one and not the other.

Freedom of choice can indeed be overwhelming. He speaks of the doctor offering the choice of treatments to the patient as putting responsibility for it onto the patient. But why not? This is what the Biblical story of Adam and Eve being expelled from Eden was about - Eve and Adam chose to eat from "the tree of knowledge of good and evil" and were thus expelled from paradise. Paradise has no real choices because none of the choices are meaningful - whatever you do, things will turn out lovely. There was only one meaningful choice open to them, and God's warning to not eat of the tree was simply, "if you make the one meaningful choice, then you're going to be adults, and have a lot more meaningful choices later on." The "punishment" inflicted on them of "earn your bread by the sweat of your brow" was simply that freedom to make meaningful choices gives risk of unpleasant consequences.

I've a friend who was a disability care worker. One of her clients was a young man in a wheelchair she took out to the pub - it's the sort of thing they do, widening the experiences of people who might be inclined to hide away. He liked a girl and wanted to ask her out, asking my friend if he should. "I don't know!" she replied, "that's up to you." He said, "but she might say no, or be disgusted by me..." She told him that was a real love life. She explained to me that as a care worker her job was not to ensure nothing bad happened to her clients, but that they had freedom of meaningful choice, saying, "On the UN Human Rights Charter should be freedom to fuck up."

So yes, all these choices are a burden; but that's part of being an adult, deciding which are meaningful choices and which meaningless for you, and then making those meaningful choices.

I don't think that what Schwartz presents is accurate, that in the past there were less choices - it's only true if you fail to distinguish between meaningful and meaningless choices. Because we're in a consumerist society, we have a lot more meaningless choices, like Bruce Springsteen sung, "fifty-seven channels and nothin' on". But the meaningful ones are the same as always - who to marry, what to believe in, what work to do, how to bring up children, how to live and so on.

He's right that the large number of choices available produces paralysis. However, this is simple immaturity, which is encouraged by consumerism. To want things now, and everything now, that's being an infant. And infants are not capable of deciding what's a meaningful choice or not - everything's of Earth-shaking importance all the time, that's why infants both cry and laugh so easily. Nowadays infancy and adolescence are a bit longer than they used to be, this is of course encouraged by our consumerist culture.

So the problem really is not the number of choices available, or that people have freedom, but people being immature and unable to distinguish between meaningful and meaningless choices. Half a century ago Erich From wrote,

"Increasingly people feel that they should have no doubts, no problems, that they should have to take no risks, and that they should always feel "secure" [...] How can a sensitive and alive person ever feel secure? [...] The psychic task which a person can and must set for himself, is not to feel secure, but to be able to tolerate insecurity, without panic and undue fear."
- The Sane Society, 1955

Schwartz speaks of how in Western consumerism we expect perfection - the large number of choices we have raises our expectations, until with infinite choices we expect infinite joy - and in some ways it's true. However, again this is not inevitable. He goes on to say that when there are no choices, you can blame the world for failure, but when there are so many choices, you can blame only yourself.

And that's true, but by the same token, when there are no choices you cannot credit yourself with your successes, and when there are many choices you can. This goes back to Adam and Eve in Eden, they had neither blame nor credit, no great misery but no great happiness, either. By making a meaningful choice they accepted adulthood and more meaningful choices - the risk of misery and the chance of glorious happiness.

Scwartz speaks of depression as a result of high expectations not being met. However, here he's confusing depression with sadness. Depression is not mere sadness, but an absence of feeling, an emptiness. That emptiness, says Fromm (and I agree), comes not from disappointed expectations but rather a lack of meaning in life. If you don't know what's important to you then you can't distinguish between meaningful and meaningless choices; all choices then seem meaningless. That Schwartz overlaps discussion of choice of who to marry with discussion of buying a pair of jeans shows this consumerism as an all-encompassing thing. We talk of "the dating market", and Schwartz of "settling" for a particular spouse - as though human beings are commodities like gold or wheat, you get what you can afford in barter for yourself.

The consumer culture presents the truly meaningful choices as no different in nature to meaningless ones, which then makes everything meaningless. Feeling that everything is meaningless is a key characteristic of depression. Disappointed expectations is more a characteristic of sadness.

So when Schwartz says "that we do better objectively, but we feel worse", the reason is not disappointed expectations, but that our measures of "doing better objectively" - having more cash and more stuff - are such poor measures of actually doing well. Again it's being unable to distinguish meaningless from meaningful choices.

Scwartz presents "the official dogma" that "more choice means more freedom" and "more choice means more welfare", and says that none of it is true. He is entirely wrong, simply because he like many in our culture can't distinguish between meaningless and meaningful choices, between democracy and capitalism. Consumerismy has offered us more meaningless choices, not more meaningful ones - the more meaningful choices have come from advances in democracy, human rights and education.

Our lives aren't better by more meaningless choices, but by more meaningful choices. A life where I can choose between 175 salad dressings rather than 5 - a consumerist choice - is not a better life; but a life where I can choose whether to live as a subsistence farmer or an artisan, and what kind of artisan, or be a merchant or lawyer or doctor or whatever - a democratic choice - that's a better life.

He tells us that somewhere between the fish in the fishbowl and the broken fishbowl is a good number of choices. Marguerite asks how we get to the "fishbowl", the place where our choices are a number that doesn't overwhelm us. The way we get to Schwartz's metaphorical fishbowl is to look at the choices in our lives and decide which are meaningful, and which not. That's part of being an adult. It's hard to be an adult in a consumerist society. A non-consumerist society forces you to be adult pretty early on, but a consumerist society encourages infantilism because it makes more cash. That's why salesmen head straight over to young adults but are wary of middle-aged, the middle-aged are less likely to buy without thought.

But deciding which are meaningful choices can be done. We're doing it right now. This blog and others are part of a greater conversation we're having in our Western society, deciding what's important to us: burgers and SUVs, or a future for the world? The glass outside the fishbowl is simply where we throw out the meaningless choices. We make our own fishbowls.

A leg-up into sunlight

Recently here in Australia the newly-elected government has presented a budget with some addressing of climate change issues. Unfortunately it has been shit. Governments claim they want to encourage homes to put up renewable energy generation, however this is expensive - a photovoltaic unit which could generate the average Australian household's consumption of 14kWh would cost about $36,000. So the previous government offered a rebate, up to $8,000 back. This helped but not much, you're still left with $28,000 to spend. Not many people have that sort of cash lying about.

A comparison of PV installation with other big purchases shows this common sense observation. Imagine if university courses had to be paid in full upfront - all three or four years - how many would go to university? Imagine if there were no mortgages, and all houses had to be paid for in cash - how many would buy homes? Imagine if there were no car loans, how many would buy cars? And so on. Being able to spread the cost over years makes big things affordable. Not being able to makes them unaffordable. And in general, we cannot yet spread the cost of home grid-connected renewable energy generators over years.

The new government has not helped, saying that from now on the PV rebate will only be available to those on less than $100,000 income. Of course, those with less than $100,000 income are unlikely to have $28,000 saved up.

Greens MPs have themselves noted this as an issue in their response to the Budget, with Senator Milne being quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald as saying,

“What family on less than $100,000 will spend $20,000 on solar panels?”

The first thing to note is that the means-testing of the rebate is, as I understand it, going to be directed at whoever’s name is on the purchase documents for the thing, rather than to 22 Smith St, or wherever. So families could try a similar dodge as was used with the “first home owner’s grant” - “Oh yes our three year old son has bought his first home…” However, if that loophole is closed, what we’re left with is that according to the tax office, something like 40% of households, but only 5% of individuals, earn over $100,000.

Even if the rebate were means-tested by household, the household/individual income distinction is important because I would suggest that a household where we have, say, one parent on $60,000, another on $30,000, a teenaged kid earning $10,000, and an infant earning nothing, though their total income is $100,000, they’re less likely to put that towards any single big purchase than a family whose sole earner is earning $70,000. Several incomes each less than $100,000 but adding up to more than $100,000 are less likely to put in solar panels than one income adding up to less than $100,000. If mum earns all the money she tends to say where it goes, it it's mum and dad and the kid then their spending is spread out.

If that is true, then combined with Senator Milne’s comment we find that only 5% of individuals are going to have enough money to put up solar panels. I would submit that 5% of Australian individuals having renewable energy is not very ambitious.

The most recent GreenPower report that I recently discussed, tells us that by the end of 2007 we had about 696,000 households and 44,000 businesses signed up for GreenPower. This was a rise of 250,000 on 2006. With about 7.8 million households in the country, we can say that about 9% of people have signed up for it - though it varies by state, a high of 13.3% in Victoria and a low of 0.9% in WA. Now, consider that GreenPower is a scheme which is poorly-advertised, and where people have to take the initiative to ask their retailer to charge them about a third more for electricity. Yet 9% of the country have signed up for it, a third of them just in 2007.

To me this says that Australians are increasingly conscious of climate and energy issues, and want to do something even if it’ll cost them more. So the will is there, what’s lacking is simply the means.

As Senator Milne says, households - or, I add, individuals - on less than $100,000 are unlikely to spend $20,000 (or more) on PV. We need to address this, so that more than 5% of the country can afford them. The Goverment’s proposed “green loans” scheme, of $10,000 each for 200,000 households, this may go a way to dealing with this, I haven’t seen the details. But we need more. We have 7.8 million households, and God knows how many businesses. Each of us is expected to provide our own money income, and only call on the public wealth in case of dire need - why shouldn't this be the same for electricity? And as with making our own income, so with electricity - sometimes we need a leg-up to help us into it.

The states of South Australia and Victoria each now have a feed-in tariff. It simply means that with a grid-connected system they pay you for the electricity you generate. In Germany they pay you for all you generate, in SA and Vic they'll pay for whatever you sell to the grid - if you produce more than you consume, you get an income. To encourage you to consume less and produce more, they pay twice or four times the retail rate. If you export nothing then it's all about the same as just buying electricity from the grid, if you conserve then in 10-15 years you'll have earned the same as you paid for the system while getting electricity for free. But still, there's the initial investment of $20-$30,000 to make. And that's too much for most.

We have in Australia a student loans scheme, called HECS, the Higher Education Contribution Scheme - it's paid off in your future taxes and proportional to your income, so that if you never earn much you never pay much, if you earn a lot you pay a lot. I suggest a RECS, renewable energy contribution scheme, where the cost of the unit would simply be applied to your electricity bill over some years. It could even be taken as a share of the electricity you generated and exported. If people buy the home with the RECS unpaid, they inherit that debt and of course the benefit of the system.

People want to contribute, they want to mitigate climate change and be responsible, but most lack the financial means. They need a leg-up into the sunlight.