Acting for the climate

Do people have a clue what they really mean ?

(I previously had just this little text on the climate topic; then considered the need to write this much bigger one. I usually never dare to give my readers any advice. Here will be a kind of exception, as, you know, we have no Planet B...)

I once joined a meeting of a local branch of the Extinction Rebellion international movement, that seemed to be their first introductory, organizational meeting there, as, of course I consider it crucial to be deeply concerned about climate change, as anyone should, that is a huge flaw in the way the world is currently working, that would urgently need some kind of big fixes, and at first sight that seemed to be what they were trying to be all about. I just listened for a long while to what they were trying to organize. But, waiting and listening, left me the deep feeling that something crucial was lacking about their explanations. Then came the time of questions. So then as came my turn to speak, I expressed my concern. Not easy to say. I logically had to start with the disclaimer that maybe the problem is all because they just did not have the time to address those points of my concern, which would require some much more lengthy discussion. Then I tried to express these. Roughly it is just one big thing, but which I expressed in the following two main ways.

My first point, or aspect of the point, could be expressed as kind of a vocabulary problem: over and over again in their discourse they were taking about "action". But what kind of "action" were they talking about ? None of all the specific "actions" they were effectively describing, could seem to fit into the name of "action" in my dictionary. Instead, they were all about demonstrating, communicating, doing strong or spectacular things, that kind of stuff. That reminded me about that very strange use of vocabulary in the French media, following its use by the concerned self-called "activists": using the expression "day of action" to mean a day of strike, that is, a day where some people decide to not go to work, or even, to block other people from going to work, and/or to block trains from driving, blocking roads, etc. So, my problem: if all their "actions" are purely focused on impacting the minds of people, then in which way will the CO2 outside in the atmosphere, ever be concerned ? as it is not in the heads of people that the troubling greenhouse effect is actually taking place. Now, do they have in plans, any other action with any more directly, concretely environmental target to hit ?
My second point, or aspect of the point, is the following. All the time they spent being obsessed with their desperation over what they claimed to be the lack of concern for the climate from the part of the government, so they were all about trying to undertake desperate actions for the purpose of getting the governments to finally take the problem seriously and so on. But then what ? here was my question, my challenge to them. Can you make this simple thought experiment. Let us imagine for a minute that you are the government. Now which measures for the climate are you planning to take ?
To these questions I could not get any answer, nor any indication or reference of answers which they could have ready to read on the web or wherever. The only kind of slightly more concrete stuff I then heard in final discussion : they would have a scientific committee to study things and have files of facts ready to contradict some misinformation which might appear in any mainstream media or politicians declarations...
Finally after the meeting, I noticed the link to their reference web site... as a supposedly international movement with many national branches, I must say that their volume of reference literature (I only explored their main international site and then the site of the French branch, but...) seems miserably small. In guise of main reference with their most extensive stuff, they have a video... a format I see typical of superficial, thoughtless people. Looking through that video, my questions remain with no answered.
Later looking again, and letting aside all the fuss about how to make a lot of noise, organize the organization of the organization of activism to multiply the number of activists, and to push for new politics of political organization, I noticed they actually give some more documentation, which can be found browsing links well enough, here, there, there, there, there and there. I still have to analyze these in details... I can't agree with everything, in particular not with the idea of printing money under the excuse of emergency.

Leadership

One of the problems with expectations of government actions, is that governments are currently supposed to be in control of what is happening, but are they really ? Remember: for a huge lot of time, at least in France, the main "concern" of governments and political parties of all sides of the political spectrum has been the strive against unemployment. Yet, and despite the alternating political sides of governments with supposedly different methods, unemployment came growing with no decrease. This suggest that, despite some people's expectations, having the government "concerned" about an issue may not help this issue to be effectively resolved. But, is it really surprising ? I don't think so, for several reasons. Let me explain.

Let us come down to the basics. Having zero clue and therefore zero belief about their own individual or collective ability to directly impact the atmosphere, these climate activists expect all effective action there to be done by governments. But what is a government ? Actually, it is just an abstraction. Looking at the increase of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere as a vague, global, mysterious problem, somehow elementary like a single quantity (just like the overall statistics of unemployment) much more powerful than themselves, they look for "solutions" of that kind ; seeing governments as also matching these characters (being also a global, huge and mysterious entity...), it seems to them as if both mysteries had to be fundamentally related. By necessity, by lack of any clue what other culprit or kind of solutions one should run after.

Authorities. Leaders. But what, exactly, is a leader ? And how do people conceive this ? Something comes to mind. A famous, popular understanding of what a leader is, the one I heard of (I am not familiar with studies of public administration and political science, sorry):

" Toastmasters International: WHERE LEADERS ARE MADE".
That is, the main quality of a leader consists in the ability to make good speeches without hesitation, on any topic, sometimes a topic of his choice, but other times to improvise on a surprise topic: the ability to make speeches so as to gather the enthousiasm and support of the audience, looking like an expert on any topic, regardless that one actually isn't. Well hiding the vacuity of what one has to say there.

Indeed, that is a main "quality" of a politician, what will lead him or not to power: the skill of making great speeches to convince voters to elect him. The actual content and possible effectiveness of his future actions are of very little concern in this process. Somehow we might say politicians are mainly there to play a kind of role of movie actors to appear well on TV. So, if some "powerless" people act spectacularly, there is a little chance it might influence politicians into responding... with verbal support. All right, this still does not mean that they won't take any more effective action beyond speeches, as somehow they can. They have some effective power. Yet the road remains long until the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will be affected.

On the sincerity of politicians intentions

One question is, whether governments will really care. Either sincerely, or for the sake of being re-elected. They might feel directly interested in the future of the planet. However, insofar as each one only "controls" a single country (at best), it is hard to feel directly impacted by the influence of one's own country on the planet, when the effective result to be suffered is only a matter of the total sum of contributions of all countries, most of which one has no control over.
The potentially sincere interest of politicians looks clearer in the case of the strive against unemployment, obviously : the better the employment rate, the more people of their country will be happy to reelect them, and the bigger total amount of taxes will be raised. Aren't governments sincerely interested in this ? Yet it appeared to not suffice for resolving the employment problem. Because, except for the case of employment by public services and administration, employment is basically a decision of private employers having to deal with the necessities of efficient production. Something which governments are most often quite far from properly understanding. Maybe, the problem will be the same with climate change. We shall come back to this later.

Specifying the policy

Here is THE question: if you want to express disapproval with the current policy, so you want the government to take action, now which action do you want him to take ? If you want the government to care about your disapproval of their policy, and you tell it very strongly, well, nothing ensures they will really care to satisfy you. Because accepting to satisfy you just because of your strong methods, might be interpreted as a weakness towards strong methods, making it advantageous for you or whoever else to use strong methods to try to influence them. It would actually be neither their interest, nor the interest of society in general, to somehow reward some kind of use of force in politics. Who knows what it would lead to. But we actually know... more comments later.

But putting this aside and admitting for a moment that the government would be inclined to satisfy your request. Now what should they do to satisfy you ??? Which way of judging them will you choose : either by the result (the reduction of CO2 in the atmosphere), or by the concrete decision taken for that end.
It would be hard to judge by the result, since even with the best efforts, the CO2 is likely to keep increasing anyway. The result is a global and long-term one, while governments are national. Making the effort to reduce the CO2 emission by the industries of one's own country may be hiding the fact of moving the faulty industries in other countries, so that the nominal result may be an illusion.
Now if you want the government to be concerned about you judging them for their actions, then you need at least to be clear about the criteria by which you will judge their actions. Because if you don't know the criteria by which you threaten to judge their actions, then are you expecting them to know these for you ? Also, your criteria need to be satisfiable by at least one possible policy - it would not be useful to request something impossible.

Participatory democracy

That is their other claim aside climate concerns. Now is there any logical articulation between both concerns or not ? If they want, as people, to participate in political decisions, then, well, it is not yet clear whether this request will be satisfied, that is, that the political decisions process will change as to become inclusive of the people's views on what should be done. However, a participatory democracy process roughly takes two steps: the first step is to gather the expression of people's will, then the second step is to implement its conclusions into concrete action. The hard problem is, or at least is supposed to be, to get the second one go through. The first step, however, would seem a priori much cheaper and independent of the government's acceptance. It would be just a matter of the people's decision to debate together and synthetize their views on what needs to be done. Mysteriously, I could hardly find any trace of such process. Which raises the difficult question: what the heck are the people waiting for, if participation is what they seemingly want ?

The art of debating

In order for such a synthesis of collective views and wills to proceed, there is actually one difficulty : people would need to practice some kind of debate together. But, do they actually know how to debate ? Hmm... I would not dare to suggest that I would know better than them how they should do. Rather, I'm a little curious about how they may view this issue. Unfortunately, in spite of my exploration of a number of events and organizations, I fail to remember any precise elaborate view or practice of debates around. Except this one, which seems by far the most famous.
It is conceived as a game, where participants first formed 2 opposing teams of 2 people each, then the organizer reveals the topic of the debate in the form of a simple yes/no question "Should... ?" and assigns to each team the side they will have to support. So: nobody is here to sincerely defend their personal opinion but only have the duty to keep supporting to the end a position which some organizer above them decided for them, regardless anything; they are not supposed to have any particular interest in the topic, as they should just be ready to debate anything ; topics therefore must be trivial enough to fit this format; they are not supposed to work on developing some imaginative solution of how some complex concrete goal may be acheived, but the strategy is only there to promote a trivial candidate concrete decision that is fixed in advance.
Unfortunately, it seems, the complex kind of question that would be needed for the above purpose, that is "Let us try to invent a policy which could work as the best strategy to protect the environment, reducing climate change" is light years away from the kind of format that would make it a possible object of so conceived "debates".
Looking for debates in other web sites, the process seems to be a bit more serious, still it usually remains of the form for/against a claim or a proposal that this very easy for everyone to understand.

The Yellow Vest movement

Meanwhile, the Yellow Vest movement has risen, starting from France. A number of deep similarities can be found between the Yellow Vests and Extinction Rebellion: both are grassroot movements, undertaking strong "actions" in the streets to influence policy. Both want a change in the political system, in particular for more direct democracy, as direct citizen initiative referendum is among the requests of the Yellow vest movement.
Yet I see two main differences between them: a big one and a small one.
The big one is that the Yellow Vest movement is much more popular, and thus automatically has much stronger influence on policy, regardless whether it is through street actions as now, or through a participatory democracy in an hypothetical future.
The small one is that they put their opposition to rising taxes on fuel as top priority, while their environmental concern is present only in last priority after that of popular initiative referendum.

Inconsequentialism

The irony is that the very goal of the rise of taxes on fuel was the environmental concern: to try to deter people from consuming fossil carbon. Looks like something I previously noticed for another example: people requesting the policy to pursue a goal, yet rejecting the necessary means for that goal. Which of the requests should the government actually fulfill then at the expense of the other : follow the goal or abandon the means ?
Yet, of course as some people noticed, there is a subtlety here: that precise policy of rising tax on fuel was not the perfect way of pursuing the goal, as it is "unfair": it focuses on taxing the "fuel of the poor" (used in cars and road transport), while still leaving untaxed the "fuel of the rich" that is kerosene and mazut (used in planes and sea transport). Of course a good environmental policy should put the tax fairly over all kinds of fuels proportionally to their carbon footprint.
However I wonder whether this explanation really accounts for what was bringing people to the streets, or whether it would be a mere good excuse by some intellectuals to rationalize a movement which effectively only cared to oppose the rise of tax on fuels, ignoring environmental concerns.
Unfortunately, the real need of the planet with respect to the risk of climate change, would be to stop all fossil carbon emissions, or at least give a limit to the total amount that is emitted, while the temperatures would still keep going higher because of the delay in reaction. Just slowing down the speed of consumption without an ultimate limit of total amount only gives a little delay on the coming disaster, not ultimately preventing it; an only thinkable advantage of slowing it down for the long term would be that maybe by being given more delay some species would have more chances to adapt, and there is a little hope this delay letting more time for technological progress to go on compared with the speed of CO2 emission, can help lead to a technological environment in which we can live without fossil fuels, so as to finally end the total release to a smaller amount. But this argument remains quite speculative.
Now what do people think is wrong with only taxing the fuel of the poor ? It is that it "puts the burden of the effort" of the green policy on some of the poorest, namely those who work in the countryside and for whom the use of cars is a necessity.
Sorry, effort of what ? The thread of the logic seems to have been lost here. The principle of the concept of carbon tax as a tool against climate change, was to serve as an incentive to reduce the use of fossil fuels. That means, people would protect the environment by reducing their payment of the tax through a change of habits ; they are not helping the environment directly by paying more taxes. Now if the people's claim is based on a conception of this carbon tax in terms of a "burden to bear" that would only consist in the "sacrifice" of paying more taxes, ignoring as a priori unconceivable the idea of the sacrifice of changing one's method of living to consume less fuel, then the planet is in serious trouble.
Indeed, if the definition of the poor must be that they are people who anyway cannot afford or consider to reduce their use of fossil fuel no matter the tax that is put over it, then who can be bold enough to define the rich as people who could no more afford to pay their own other fuel if only it was taxed at a similar rate per volume ? (for a more accurate picture I wish to know the proportion of currently taxed vs. untaxed volumes of consumed fossil fuel, say, for French use or European use, and don't know how to find this figure).

Developing renewable energies

That is a good slogan for some people expecting the governments to care about the planet. But how to put it into practice, and with which effectiveness ? Should we destroy the rainforest to make room for the farming needed to grow the plants which are then used to produce biofuels ? Probably not. Yet this is what is actually happening as a result of some "green" policies.
Many people think that governments should subsidize the research and development of renewable energies. Because without these grants, such development would not be profitable enough... in competition with fossil fuels, whose use is too cheap... because it is not taxed up to its real harm. So, if only the use of fossil carbon was taxed to a sufficient level, it would provide the incentive (competitiveness) needed for the development of alternatives... hopefully, if such technical possibilities exist at that level of cost.
Thus, the idea of subsidizing renewable energies is raised just because we could not dare taxing fossil carbon to a sufficient level, in the face of opposition. Now can this be a good substitute ? I'm afraid not, for the following reasons.
A general problem is that whenever incentives are put not following the exactly adequate policies in conformity with the proper logical understanding of how it would lead market mechanisms to naturally optimize things in the intended way, then it will lead to a sub-optimal result. Such as, money invested in an irresponsible manner into projects which look like they are contributing to the green transition, but this may be a mere illusion given for the eyes of public administrators who, managing public funds instead of their own, will provide the grants following some bureaucratic criteria offset from proper measures of long-term usefulness for the stated goals.
A precise resulting trend here comes from what it logically means to subsidize renewable energy instead of properly taxing the use of fossil resources in hope to reduce it : the difference is that it generally favors an increase of total consumption instead of deterring it. The result ? that should not be surprising. We already know it, as a result of the policies of subsidizing renewable energies that were already undertaken. The surprising thing is why is anyone surprised.
The result, of course, is that the total amount of energy consumption keeps increasing : the use of renewable energy does increase as a result of subsidies, yet the use of fossil resources does not decrease. Why should it ?
A big hope is, of course, to develop solar power plants, especially in deserts, but some obstacles need to be overcome.

The Cube of Truth

At least a movement with a meaningful sense of effective action. While they do also make actions of communication in the streets, their expectation of result has the remarkable merit of being clear, independent of any superstitious assumption of workability of some endless chain of speculative, widely assumed but never justified political mechanisms.
Namely, their action consists in showing shocking videos from slaughterhouses and other industrial farming facilities, and giving arguments, to invite people to become vegan. One of the main reasons is, of course, that meet consumption involves much more of the Earth's resources than vegan food.
Their goal ? "To get 5M people to take veganism seriously by 2025".
Problem: according to wikipedia, "Global human population growth amounts to around 83 million annually". So, around 2025, are going to be about 50M more people on Earth than now. If we succeed getting 5M of them to become vegans, we are still left with 45M additional non-vegans. So, this still seems far from from sufficient as a global solution, unfortunately.

Reducing the human population

I once joined a meeting about global concerned where an idea put forward was that the main threat is overpopulation, so that we should petition the UN to put this concern as priority. The man was hoping for millions of signatures to this petition because overpopulation really is among the main causes of the coming disaster; that the UN had to respond when a petition is massively signed ; and that the UN is currently the most powerful structure to take action. One of the remarks also was to deplore the fact that many people are influenced to make a lot of children by their fundamentalist religiosity.

Unfortunately, while I do agree that overpopulation is a major cause of troubles and that anything possible should in principle be undertaken to reduce the world's population (at least until some future technological and other progress will provide greener means of living, but still anyway this will only define a higher limit to not exceed either), I do not believe that significant numbers of people in the world can be logical enough to grasp and support this.
Moreover, what can the UN actually do ? It has already recognized climate change as a major problem and it is not resolved. In many cases the resolutions voted there have been ignored or its effects have been insignificant. It has often just served as a dialectical playing ground for countries to push forward ambiguous resolutions just so as to pretend something and then play on ambiguities in order to not let these resolutions mean anything effective.

Some people believe we should pray the Virgin Mary to pray for us sinners. Some others rather think that we should pray the United Nations to pray for us over-reproducers. Some are even angry at the government for not taking effective action against climate change. Me too, just like I can be angry at Jesus-Christ for his crime of not actually existing.
Seriously, what could the UN do against overpopulation ? Control what the people are doing in bed ? Eliminate some fundamentalist religious beliefs currently pushing many people to have a lot of children, therefore contradicting its declaration of "right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion" ? Ending many humanitarian programs currently working to save lives from starvation and diseases might be more effective for the real global welfare in the long run. But it would also be highly controversial. The only easily acceptable and therefore necessary measures would be to provide worldwide free means of contraception and sterilization; the next step, which remains controversial (I'd say for not well calculated morality reasons, since overpopulation is a much more serious threat in the long run than the concerns of individual lives), would be a worldwide defense of abortion right (to Christians who are fanatically opposed to that right, I wrote a response here). More ideas on what could be done are detailed in the dedicated page.

So what can be done ???

In the face of all above described obstacles, it is actually hard to find any hope of an effective solution to work for. So many ideas of possible actions can rightly be dismissed as superstitious for a reason or another. Some people dream of deeper change of civilization, but without very clear definitions and methods of how the world of their dream might actually work well enough for people to accept it, such dreams remain probably just other superstitions as well. Then, if most conceivable actions turn out to be superstitious, what can still be thought of that could still be non-superstitious ? that is the question, to which I will now try to propose answers.
Now if you want a short answer, as short answers are what people usually expect in reply to any issue, then I'd say the primary need is

The Patience of Making Long Enumerations

A problem with multiple causes, requires a multiplicity of solutions. The effect of global warming and other environmental damage is a result of multiple actions, with multiple responsibilities. Some of the damage is due to diverse aspects of government policies ; some come from the operation of industries and other corporations; some just come from the sum of behaviors of large numbers of people; and of course in many cases, the responsibilities of these diverse kinds of actors are entangled. But in order to be really serious about the whole problem, I think... requires to make a lengthy enumeration of as much as possible of all of these. So many they are, that, I'm sorry but I'll only be able to scratch the surface of these here. By necessity I must make some arbitrary and anyway not well justifiable selection of some aspects of the whole problem, which I will point out in the below rest of this text.
So, let me choose to describe first how I think some wide ranges of aspects of individual responsibilities could be addressed.
I want to invite people to inquire into the following questions:
  1. Which are the many ways in which you think your actions, and those of people you know, participate in the damage to climate or other aspects of the environment (or protect it) ?
  2. Which circumstances of life do you see pushing you (and these people you know) to that behavior ?
  3. Which conditions can you imagine, if that is possible, that a hypothetical but reasonably conceivable better organized civilization should fulfill, in order to prevent or at least reduce the risk or frequency of these circumstances, so that in such different context your participation to the global environmental harm would be lower ?
I wish to see people writing books full of answers to these questions. A work in which many people should participate. Indeed people are diverse, with diverse needs and diverse reasons to take decisions to consume things in diverse ways. If you cannot analyze what is your own impact on the planet, what is driving you to it and what might drive you otherwise, then can you expect anyone else to know it for you ? And how might you better know the reasons for other people's environmental footprint ? And if you don't really understand the causes of anybody's environmental footprint, or don't care to share and formally explain them in written form to put the diverse contributions together into a more complete picture, then how can you understand the responsibilities of the actual result, and properly pressure into wise, useful change, the rest of the world: both other people, and governments whose members may have themselves such radically different living standards that it can be hard for them to figure out the main features of the needs and behaviors of people like you ?
Many of the needed details would develop this question : why are people consuming so much, and how could they do otherwise ?

Degrowth

Many ideas in the right direction have already been explored by the Degrowth movement : the general idea of reducing both production and consumption, therefore choosing to enjoy the growth of productivity more in the form of taking more free time, instead of the widespread trend of keeping oneself always busy working hard to consume more and more. Among these ideas, I would often see more relevance in the general ideas of self-chosen simple living, than in any ideas of political action and system change, as I see the free decisions of individuals usually much more relevant and powerful than any government's actions in matters of discerning and revising one's own needs and modes of consumption which can be appropriate to those needs. In other words, I see as often futile the idea of trying to blame the economic and political system, and expect changes to come from there, as if it was the main factor responsible for the issue. Sometimes it does play a role, but not necessarily in the ways that people assume.

Driving or not driving

I never tried passing a driving license, as I don't see the need to drive. Why should I ? I understand that some people need it, and I am not trying to criticize them if they do. I just want to point out that not all people need it, and it is very possible to live without it. To explain why I consider that I really do not need it, for those who would have troubles to understand. I might not need to explain this to fellow Europeans, for whom it is usually accepted as normal to live without driving, but rather for people living in the US, because that may be not a very hospitable place of living for non-drivers, as reported in point 13 of this famous list of cultural clashes between the US and Europe: just by being used to driving and living in a country that turned out to be optimized for the assumption that everyone can drive, can let people lose sense of how it is possible to live without driving. Well it can become much less of a problem just if you leave the places that are now making it a problem.
Not only do I see it ridiculous and useless wastes of money to buy a car and fuel for it, but: Without a car, I usually manage going to places either by foot, or by public transport depending on distance. Occasionally of course, I can also be driven by relatives or use carpooling.

Driving to work vs telecommuting

But of course, there are also many people who really need to drive anyway for professional reasons. Yet there are different cases.
Some have it as a job to drive, either for cargo or passengers. In particular farmers, as mentioned above. Of course they directly suffer a rise of tax on fuels for this reason. But the goal of the tax then, is not to directly make them poorer, but to push the economy towards a different equilibrium, where some of them would have changed job, while remaining ones would have their higher tax balanced by the higher market value of their work which comes from this resulting relative scarcity.
Others only need to drive in order to commute between home and working place. On this topic I once saw a little comic in a degrowth magazine, with two parts : in one, the man says "I don't like to drive but I need it to go to work" ; in the other "I don't like to work but I need it to buy my gasoline". Of course it is a caricature, as work should bring much more money than the one spent on gasoline to go there, hopefully. Yet the idea can draw attention on possible absurdities in ways of managing things. Which may turn out to be more acute once gasoline would be paid at its real cost including that of its environmental footprint.

In this issue, I roughly see 3 questions:
What makes people keep a long distance between home and work ? Maybe that is unavoidable... still in some cases the average commuting time may be reduced by sometimes sleeping at working place and then going back home for longer periods.
Why not telecommute instead ? Depends on technologies that might someday let more and more jobs be done at distance, depending on the progress of man/machine interaction and remote controlled robots, which may develop further in the future.
Why do people need to work so much in a lifetime, for which they so commute ? The general management of life and any inefficiency there may need to be questioned. Any alternative way of managing life which would reduce the global amount of working time needed to earn the means of living that one needs, could be therefore also a chance to reduce one's use of fuel, if that use is due to the need of going to work. At least, if the time freed from the necessity to go to work is not then replaced by a similar use of fuel for visiting places of leisure, which may be tempting for some.
In particular, telecommuting technologies can also be useful to reduce some people's amount of needed work to earn their living, by living in cheap places (countryside with low housing cost) or countries, while working for well-paying clients or companies of richer places.
As already explained, overpopulation has a heavy share of responsibility in keeping many people "poor" and obliged to spend so much time of their life working in spite of the continuous growth of work productivity which makes wealthier the average of the world and thus more precisely the rich owners : it is both what keeps food expensive (price of land), and what takes so much of people's income in the form of renting expenses in cities. At least for those who insist to keep competing against each other for living places in city centers, while others can prefer to live in suburbs for cheaper housing but therefore may need to commute longer.

Degrowth and education

Existing education systems have lots of troubles. One aspects is that it behaves like everyone must abandon the idea of free time in life and dedicate one's life to working, working, working. As if it was not, then what would that huge sacrifice of youth life be for ? Since everybody so had to give up life and breath for an absolute commitment to work, then by the force of this conditioning, everyone keeps assuming that they must keep working all the time of their life, to earn whatever money they will earn, but never take the time wondering whether or not they really need that.
The idea of degrowth would first need to be applied to education itself, as it is currently, in many cases, a big waste of efforts for not much valuable purpose (as it may be only "useful" to select people instead of making them actually more productive than they naturally were). Or for purposes which might be as well served in fewer efforts.
Then, the idea of students having to be physically present in class and so often passing exams, thus requiring many of them to use a lot of transport, can also be questioned, versus the possibility of MOOC.
Finally, we may consider the idea of degrowth education, that is to re-orient education to give more consideration and assistance to the idea of orienting one's life towards degrowth. Namely, learning how to consume less may be finally just as useful for one's life, in the sense of helping for the balance of one's budget, as learning how to produce more.
For degrowth like for other educational purposes, there are those for whom this may go naturally without help, and others who need some teaching for it. I personally don't really understand the people who think that they need a lot of money, so I don't understand either the need for them to be taught how to reduce their expenses. But I admit that it may exist.
Then comes the question to specify what such a degrowth education should contain. That is where the above mentioned long enumeration should be useful. That is, to notice the list of cases where, well, the supposed need to consume turns out after examination to not have any real reason at all, but simply occurred just because the individual failed to pay attention to the fact that it was not really needed : it can then be considered the role of education to draw attention to this fact.
Once again, the question of the content of the desired policy needs anyway to be addressed first, before worrying about whether or not one might succeed to convince any government to implement it. Because, if you do not know in advance what should really be contained in the degrowth education policy that you want to request the government to adopt, then are you expecting the government to know it for you ?
Now if you seriously undertake the writing of such an educational book, then you might face some difficulties...

Challenging some social taboos

Many of the causes of waste are actually deeply rooted in social habits. Let us start with a very symbolic example. One day I was walking with someone who claims to be very "spiritual", he new I was depressed... at one moment he picked a little flower from the ground and gave me. He intended to be nice. But this made me upset : Please don't damage Nature for me !!!

I see many people making large mixtures between environmental concerns and "social" concerns, I mean the ideas of economic egalitarianism, welfare and redistribution, almost as if being an ecologist and being a socialist meant the same thing.
Of course, naively they seem related, as... unregulated market mechanisms leave the environment unprotected... waste of resources at the expense of future genrations is a greedy thing... socialism is associated with generosity and regulations for common good issues...
However, just because ultimately environmental protection is a moral issue and the waste of resources is an evil greedy thing, still does not mean that focusing on "being nice", and pushing for a new socialist revolution rejecting (the understanding of) the laws of market, will automatically result in actions that protect the environment; I would dismiss that as just another superstition. To debunk this illusion I would refer to the MBTI classification of personality types, which I commented elsewhere :

To tell things even more harshly : since all the troubles suffered by the environment come from the presence of humans, in the absence of which there would be no trouble, in other words, humanity is objectively the worst enemy of Nature... maybe we must admit that being good to humans automatically makes you an enemy of Nature !!!
Maybe, we need to recognize that humanitarian actions trying to save lives from wars, starvation and diseases, is actually irresponsible as it contributes to feed the overpopulation which is itself the root cause of both environmental destruction and economic inequalities.
What about the practice of making gifts ? That is, buying something as a surprise for someone, who would probably not have made this purchase spontaneously. Isn't it a high risk for this expense to be at least partly a waste ? So many people turn out to resell their gifts on online markets ! At the risk of looking like an awfully insociable person in the eyes of my relatives (parents and sister) I actually hardly took any participation in this widespread practice of "goodness" which looks quite nonsensical to me. I am actually such an introvert person with such different interests from the rest of people that with my own relatives (parents and sister) we had to conclude that we just can't guess each other's tastes. They can't know what kind of gifts I'd like as there really was hardly anything I liked (except for chocolates), and I could not figure out what they'd like either, no matter how surprising this may look.
Other examples of usual practices usually seen as cool but actually forms of waste, are given in the same article of cultural clashes already linked above : "7. Wasteful consumerism" and "16. Unhealthy portions". I will still give further examples at the end of this page.
So when genuine, exhaustive concerns for the planet turn out to conflict some widely accepted rules of social correctness, what do you think should be done : keep them or challenge them ? That is the question that you have to face if you want to be serious when writing the educational books which you need to write before petitioning your minister of education to include it into the new school curriculum, to teach the next generation how to better protect our planet. If you have not the courage to seriously face these questions and give clear, coherent case by case answers in the face of the world, a prayer to the United Nations won't help you.

Bad policies

There are surely lots of examples of bad policies which contribute to harming the environment, such as financial support to coal industries, and the absurd idea of carbon market which actually results in giving the financial reward of monopolistic advantages to the worst polluting industries, while only taxation is the effective method... somehow it may be argued that the full resolution of the "one problem" that is the environmental concern, requires a global solution including that of other problems as well : any internal conflicts (contradictions) of our societies: imply altogether But for a serious exposition, exhaustiveness would be needed, which means giving hundreds of further, seemingly small examples, many of which would not naturally come to mind but require some kind of special attention to notice, just like so many aspects of daily life which people spontaneously follow as they assume necessary without paying attention to the environmental impact.... things that, metaphorically speaking, can be standing on people's noses but which they keep failing to see... I won't invest myself into the research of so many things I currently don't know about. I'll just mention one random case I stumbled on.

Diverse countries in the world have diverse visa policies, ruling the conditions for foreigners to enter their territories, and for how long. Some time ago, requirements of costly visa formalities were commonplace. The simplification offered by visa-free policies is of course welcome. However in many cases, these come with strange requirements. Namely, the right of visa-free visit is often limited to a certain time period. These may be indeed nicer than putting absurd obligations of complicated formalities (and I don't understand why formalities need to be complicated, since all information on identities at border crossing is digitally available to authorities, and if some kind of residence tax is decided, why not make this simply payable at border control or local police office...). But two formal conditions are still often required:

  1. The period of right to stay under visa-free regime has a limit such as 1 month or 3 months, which cannot be exceeded unless fulfilling some special cases to make a visa...
  2. This law is "enforced" by conditioning the right to enter the country by the condition of providing a proof of outbound flight which must be booked in advance.
However the rationality of these two requirements remains unclear. As an extended presence of tourists is actually good for the economy, why still put any obstacles ? Who or what can be considered disturbed by such an extended presence ? If a limit is given to the total amount of staying time per year, as with the case of Ukraine, the rationality of this requirement remains unclear, but at least it has some kind of coherence. But other countries do not put such a limit, so that the simplest way to extend a stay there is to make a round flight to somewhere else, which results in restarting from zero the count of staying time (which can be longer in the case of a flight than in the case of a land crossing, but why ?). Now the rationality of this obligation of making a round flight abroad is very unclear. Which logical purpose does it serve, if not the purpose of wasting kerosene for the pure pleasure of wasting kerosene (and possibly making local airlines and airports a bit wealthier on the way) ?
The rationality of the second requirement is also very unclear, especially when the period of stay is longer, as, what is the sense of obliging people to decide in advance the day and destination of their next flight ? Such a requirement can be very unpractical, as life can have a lot of unknowns, the reasons to choose one or another destination, or to prefer a day rather than another, may depend on many things which often cannot be known in advance, such as discovering some info about interesting events, or even the weather... airlines have a system of modifying the price of tickets depending on bookings for the precise purpose of balancing the load of passengers between the different flights: early bookings at specific dates induce a price signal that is an incentive for other people to book for other dates where more places remain available. This system is actually an ingenious way of forming compromises between the decisions of people who have a priori imperatives on dates, and those whose travel plans are more flexible. But obliging people to make very early bookings for specific dates when they actually had no personal need for this, introduces artificial additional rigidity into the system, making it sub-optimal (with the possible consequences of making flights more often either full or very incomplete, thus a larger total number of needed physical flights for the same number of needed tickets). But a very odd thing is that for people who really need flexibility there is a known way around : there exist companies whose job is, for a rather cheap price, to take care of booking a refundable outbound flight that will be valid for travelers to show to border control at their day of crossing, and then cancelling it. This can be useful for people who decide to not decide their next flight long in advance indeed. So a kind of flexibility is restored at some moderate cost, but what remains of the rationality of the legal requirement of "giving a proof of outbound flight" then ?

What I do for the planet

In a sense I don't have the impression of doing much for the planet, but yet behave much better than most others... who seem to be doing much against the planet and I don't understand why.
Beyond accommodation I seldom buy anything. I most often just walk to go to places. I only exceptionally buy clothes when I really need to change something, but that is usually second-hand only. I even sometimes found nice clothes abandoned in the street or in a trash.
My food expenses are also small. I rather bought discounted pastries at evening times, when buying them was the way for these to not be trashed, and usually re-using some plastic bag I carried from outside instead of using a new one. But I also often find a lot of good food in trashes. I don't understand people who put so much good food in trashes and so few of them pick these from there. I don't understand why so many people may keep queuing for minutes waiting for the opportunity to buy food when some good free food can be directly picked in the nearest trash. I don't understand why many people who find a boiler with enough hot water for what they need, go to throw this water, fill the boiler again with much more cold water than they need and wait for it all to boil, as if they loved bothering themselves with the pseudo-need to wait for the water to boil for the longest possible time. Would they fail to figure out that boiling a large amount of water takes slightly more than twice the time and energy of boiling half of it in the same boiler, just because nobody told them this possibly counter-intuitive fact ? Precisely, people do not realize this when they buy boilers, but usual boilers are too large, misleading users to the temptation to fill a larger volume than actually needed. A capacity of just 1 liter for example, would be more optimal. (I also don't understand why people may love going to restaurants where food is not only overpriced but also requires to wait for 10 or 20 minutes before being served).
People don't understand me either. Sometimes someone seeing me pick food from trash wants to give me something, but no I'm not poor at all ! I only happen to understand that what I can really afford has nothing to do with how much money I have. So thanks but no thanks, do I need to insist : the trash is rich !! If I needed something more I could buy it but I don't, so people's gifts have no reason to be better for me than what was already there. It may even get me embarrassed. Some people think that just because they are giving me fresh food, it should be better than what I could find in trashes, but I do not see such a correlation. When they saw me finding food in the trash, why are some eager to give me more food, failing to realize that having found food in the trash is precisely evidence that I'm already going to be full so that I don't need more, so that adding more will put on me a load I did not want, either the physical load of carrying a food I did not need, or the moral load of the shame of putting myself in the trash that fresh food which would have not otherwise gone there ? And why are others reacting by trying to give me some money (which I try my best to politely refuse), failing to understand what they saw as evidence that money is not actually needed to find good food ?
I'm not going to make a list of the food I could find in trashes, as it is so diverse, it is such a great opportunity of discovering a diversity of good things and get balanced nutrition (smaller portions of diverse things in larger number instead of getting bored finishing one big thing), without having to bother caring about it (to buy a similar diversity of things would require to search for new things and wonder what can there be and how good it can be). If I don't like something I can just drop it without regret. Many times I found some ice cream, and while I must admit Nutella pancakes are usually not found in trashes, it did happen.
I am aware that such a way of doing is not generalizable to significant extents, as just doubling the number of people doing like this would quickly result in shortages there, but well for now, the situation being as it is, I just fulfill my little bit of responsibility for the planet's sake and do not feel responsible for the role of others.

One day I had the surprise to find an internet cafe which displays prices per number of hours of internet but customers are not allowed to just pay that price for that time: they are also required to buy a drink to stay there. Because, well, it is like in a bar, one needs to buy a drink as a justification to stay.

A parenthesis about bartending

The latter case is very common indeed but I would already see it questionable: if the goal is for the bar to make money, than rather than consuming a drink, why not be allowed to just pay a smaller amount of money only for staying without drink ? The question comes as a logically obvious question, however it looks as if nobody thought about it earlier...
(except that there are otherwise some "anti-café" that precisely make people pay per time instead of paying per thing bought. I guess the optimal solution would be in between this, adding up a price per time with a price per things consumed, but that this double counting would just be too much of a trouble for people to bother managing it. )
Surely people could think about it, but since they are not doing it, there hould be a reason, or is there ?
We can understand that there are some possible complications: the actual "cost" of staying would not be near zero most of the time as there are available places so that it does not disturb, however if it was free then then space might become occupied by such people, not leaving place for the rest of people, and... it would be a little bothering then to just come and say: "hey, can you please leave because some people would wish to buy a drink to stay but the space is lacking"...
Or maybe, just pay when it happens but this would be too complicated as well...
but of course a main reason is that buying a drink gives some profit, to the owner, who is looking for profit when letting people come.
However we may wonder : in the price of the drink, how much is the real cost and how much is the profit ? I suspect, the drink itself may be about 10% cost only, and the rest for profit, which may not mean that it would be unjustified, since of course, ifever owning a bar was itself a jackpot then more bars would open than there already are...so the "profit" must have a kind of justification, that, apart from taxes, is likely to be shared between the income of the barman and the renting of the place (if it is rent). The share of the place is clear, but that of the barman is more interesting to comment further. That is, we have the following problem : to run a bar we need a barman and he needs an income to work. There needs to be enough of them to avoid most of the time having any significant queues of customers waiting to be served, but it also implies that for much of the time there is no queue at all so that the barman must stay idle (unless there is something else to work on...). And the problem with having a barman stay idle is that he needs to be paid anyway. So, while it may be okay for a little while to welcome a visitor who is not thirsty to just sit as long as the barman is busy serving the thirsty ones who are queuing, sooner or later the queue will end and the barman is going to suddenly start crying for a job, and logically put the guilt of this lack on any present person who failed to give him one.
We can understand that people at jobs may not only not like to stay idle, but they may even dislike to be paid for doing nothing for someone who is there, as they need the feeling of doing something useful for someone, even if it is an illusion as the need they serve is not real. So, if the visitor of a bar must buy a drink, it is mainly because the barman just needs to be paid this price for being there, while the drink itself is but a symbolic little gift by which the barman altogether thanks the client for this contribution to his salary, and gives to himself the impression of being there for something, but whose actual cost plays no significant role in the story.
This only, as far as I can guess (sorry I have no experience in that profession, does this need correction ?) can form a rational explanation of why the natural forces of market, while logical in themselves towards some approach to a kind of optimization, may remain actually inefficient in the job of limiting the waste of natural resources.

Back to that internet cafe

So what was strange in that one is that, to form the real price they wanted for people to stay on computer there, they decided to write this price as looking like a sum of 2 parts: one being the official price of internet time, and the other being the price of a drink. Surely, the idea is to give the impression of a smaller price for internet than it really is, as the complement, in the form of the price of a drink, will look like it is normal just because the price of this drink remains in similar range to the price of drinks in other bars. Many clients who usually go to bars and buy drinks while doing nothing interesting meanwhile, may feel interest in rather going to that internet cafe where they can altogether have the same pleasure drinking, and better occupy themselves with computer while slowly digesting their drink.
The cost management problem of this kind of place is actually similar to that of bars, as there is also a receptionist who needs to be paid and often suffers idleness, and the space takes a cost to rent. However there are differences, as follows.

There already is a price of stay in the form of the price of use of computer per time, and we can consider that a price of stay for a time means the whole use of an individual place : a chair+a computer.
Internet cafes can be expected to be more regularly occupied along the day, than usual bars whose business is usually concentrated at evening times.
The calculation of the price per space and per time is clearer and more rational in an internet cafe (one computer per client) than in bars where each table can be occupied by variable numbers of people for unclear lengths of time.
As the price is paid for computer space, with a little bit of table which can anyway be needed to put some paper or a smartphone, adding a drink does not form a significant additional use of space.

The logical solution, therefore, would be to express the price of the use of space and the working time of receptionist as price of internet time, while making drinks cheaper. But, it turns out he does not like to make drinks cheaper, but still "needs" the price, and for this, since it is often easy to make the needed profit from clients who come and buy drinks by giving these drinks usual price, profit in large part coming from the price of those drinks whose cost is small, the manager decided to maybe put a relatively smaller nominal price of internet than needed (?) but make consumption of drinks compulsory.
While I understand that reasons for going to sit in a bar with no intention to buy a drink may be considered a little strange, that is not the case with people coming to an internet cafe for the purpose of only using a computer.
As I consider it shocking to face such an obligation to consume something I do not need, less as a matter of price than as a matter of principle (waste of natural resources) which would financially contribute to a business which practices this compulsory waste with its clients (making many of them consume something they would not spontaneously buy), after asking again a few times for the possibility of buying only internet time without drink and again getting the request to also buy a drink because I "must" in guise of reply, I decided to refuse the deal and go away.
Now my question is : how many people would be educated enough to do the same ? I dream of an education system which would make students to expatiate on this kind of topic as a written test of civic education : "Imagine you enter an internet cafe only intending to use computer but the guy says you must also buy a drink for this, what do you do and why" without explicit hint that they are supposed to remember about environmental issues, and see if they spontaneously do ! that could be fun.

Usual discourses about the abuse of natural resources blame the "law of market" and that businesses are "driven by profit". Of course the exact causes may depend on cases, so a long review and case by case analysis of different kinds of ways in which business can take profit in environmentally harmful methods would be needed. Let me just finish with this example, which somehow enters the category of profit-driven decisions of businesses resulting in a waste of natural resources. So how can we understand the causes which led to it, and which kind of change in people or policies might fix the problem ? Of course we might fight the small business dictatorship of waste by the force of a big dictatorship that would outlaw it. But would that be a reasonable, appropriate solution ? I'd rather leave this question open, and focus on other dimensions of explanation and possible works towards a resolution.
Maybe I'm dreamer, but I do wish many people behaved as I did, in the sense that, among the times someone would wish to go there without buying a drink, this "obligation to consume" would result more often in refusing the deal than in accepting to buy something one did not need. I believe it is an educational gap when people accept such a deal, which would need some kind of educational fix (and just like other educational issues, I mean an issue that is only educational for those not having the natural skills to do things spontaneously right with no need of teaching...).
Yet I cannot be sure of the exact situation, so I cannot exclude that a last kind of possible source of trouble may be at play: failures in the field of business education. I mean, a trouble actually made of a pure logical failure, kind of like the logical loop of Christian faith, where people have the faith that in order to be saved (or to be good people, or to be happy) they need to follow the faith that in order to be saved they need to follow that faith, as I explained elsewhere in terms of divine corruption.
So my fear here, is that the business culture might have so much hypnotized itself with its own obsession of marketing, and marketing of marketing, and how to advertise your stocks to sell them at a higher price than the realistic profits of your company, by trying to present your own marketing activities as if they were more powerful at the art of fooling people than they really are... that it is not even clear whether the "profitable waste" is done only insofar as it is really profitable, or would it also sometimes be done just because its managers assume it so, even though it really isn't profitable ? Just look: for a long time Monsanto behaved as if its decisions were good, until legal troubles sent down its stocks...
Not being in a position to answer, I'll leave this question of business education open and end here this presentation of my invitation into a huge field of questioning that I could only barely sketch here.

Back to main page of the series: On the world's failures to steer itself properly