CONFESSION
I just came back from a long flight across the Atlantic and back. In the back of my mind I know that the flight itself contributes to global warming. In a year this is my third round trip flight over the Atlantic, plus one 7,700 mile round the country train trip, and I am planning another long flight, this time twice as far, to India, in January. My brother says that he doesn‘t want to keep flying overseas because it contributes to global warming. He is right. My cramped seat on the flight to Paris resulted in about 400 kg of carbon, about 880 pounds in all. The return trip against headwinds resulted in 571 kg or 1,256 pounds. For the trip this makes about 2000 pounds of carbon if the estimates the airline makes are right. That sounds like a lot of carbon to me, the weight of a car, to get me to get to Paris and back. But I want to keep on traveling as long as I can and my plan is take a long flight every three months for a month because travel makes me feel more alive. Anticipating the flight gives me pleasure, living in another country gives me pleasure, my memories of the places where I have been this year gives me pleasure. I won‘t give up travel unless I have to and to get to most of the world I have to fly.
I can rationalize about this in all kinds of ways to keep myself from feeling guilt. But the fact is that through my life style I am contributing tons of CO2 to global warming and an Indian villager or a resident of the Ramesh Singh Boundary in Varanasi where I have visited often, has none of the comfort or pleasures in life that I have, isn‘t contributing.
But my quandary is heightened by other facts. Yesterday the United Nations said that the pledges countries have made to avoid dangerous global warming are much less than necessary. It is the rich countries that are at fault, like the United States, the greatest polluter of all, not the poor countries. Yesterday I read an article in the New York Times, “What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay”. It argues that in order to live sustainably and prevent global warming we have to completely change our life style in almost every very. We can’t live as we do and not have a radical rise in global warming. And simply recycling or not flying or buying an electric car isn’t going to have much effect. We had to change where we live, change our transportation, change what we eat, change our whole economy from a capitalist system of ever increasing production to something else. Uruguay has transformed it’s economy not in order to avoid global warming but to live sustainably and equitably. They shifted from oil energy to green energy because they couldn’t afford the oil economy.
So the issue is not simply air travel, it is everything that I do. And today my church sent me the proposed budget for the next year and a request to do my share in making this budget possible.
I know the people in the church. They are all good people, they are all committed Christians, all of them do more to change the world and to make the world a better place than I do. But in the budget, only 7% of the money goes to outreach, and I’m not sure how much of that goes to the poor. The church is not even tithing, which is what Christians are often called on to do. It is mainly supporting itself. And this is because of the American lifestyle of all of us.
I’m not pointing a finger at the church, and I’m not blaming Americans for causing global warming. What I am doing is seeing that I, personally, am caught with a giant gap between what I say I believe and what I do. I can’t point to anyone else as a hypocrite if I am a hypocrite myself. But my problem is that I have almost no examples of anyone else who is doing the right thing, even though the right thing is pretty obvious. Maybe Greta Thunberg is, but she doesn’t yet have a family to support, and I am guessing that in spite of taking a boat across the Atlantic (at considerable expense) to avoid flying she is caught in the same quandary.
The problem is so huge that the it seems impossible to do anything about it. All I can do is not buy bottled water and recycle and turn the heat down a little and accept that this is all I can or will do. To do the right thing, to have the church give 80% to the poor, to reduce my life style by 80% so that I am closer to a sustainable life style for everyone on earth, because if anyone needs to have their living standards lifted (which contributes to global warming) it is the poor and not me.
And this isn’t something that only I have to do, we all have to do it, otherwise even if I live much more simply in the USA I will just be a freeloader in a rich culture depending on the roads and schools and parks and infrastructure provided by others. My not flying won’t change the world, it will just make me miserable.
What will force us to change is when the way we live becomes so unsustainable that there will be no way to continue, even for the very rich, of which, despite appearances, I am one. I only have to fly to India and look at the Ramesh Singh Boundary to be very aware of that. But, of course, when finally forced to change it will be too late to avoid global warming and all the problems that are going to come with it, that are already coming: more and more catastrophic weather patterns forcing people to emigrate around the world as life becomes unsustainable. No walls will protect us. We are caught unless we change radically, but I don’t seem to be able to change radically and no one around me seems ready to change, either. I feel stuck. So I’ll ignore the problem and look forward to my trip to India and not fret about the enormous gap between my standard of living and the people I will be moving among. I am going to die before Armageddon hits in any case, so why worry?
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 