A while back, I listened to a podcast -- Bill Gates and Rashida Jones Ask Big Questions. Episode four is a conversation about climate change, and importantly, whether it is too late to stop it. I thought it was a solid climate change 101 type of episode, but I believe it missed an important point.
The culmination of the episode, in my view, was at the 41 minute 47 second mark:
RASHIDA JONES: What is the single, not to put any pressure on you, but the single most important thing that an individual can do to help stop or slow climate change?
BILL GATES: The biggest thing is their political voice. To tell the government, this is something we want you to hire the best scientists, the best modelers. In the same way you should've gotten us ready for the pandemic, this one is 100% sure to come, we want you to take all the brains in the country and activate them to solve this problem. That is the biggest thing. Without the governments we could get slight reductions through changes in individual behavior, but not significant.
What I imagine Mr. Gates means by “political voice” is that he wants to see more people vote for politicians who would advance agendas prioritizing climate change. I can’t agree more with him here. However, I disagree with Mr. Gates when it comes to the impact of changes in individual behaviour.
In this article I will attempt to show why I believe political voice is not enough to address the issue of climate change, or, put another way, that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition. I propose that changes in individual behaviour actually play a significant role in tackling climate change.
Political Parties’ Platforms
The platforms of political parties are built around a set of basic principles and priority issues its members care about. Parties’ platforms can be built around issues such as healthcare, immigration, education, taxation, the economy, climate change, or other issues. The importance, or emphasis, parties place on each one of those issues is determined by their assessment of the current or future demands of the population.
Let’s take a hypothetical three-party system: Party 1 (P1), Party 2 (P2), and Party 3 (P3) and consider each one’s stance on climate change, one element of which is the aggressiveness of the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction targets they each have set. Because individual party members have different views about what these targets should be, the party can be represented at any given time (say T1) as a cloud of points, rather than a single point. In the figure below, the membership of P1 on average supports more aggressive GHG emission targets than does P2, which in turn supports more aggressive targets than P3.
Suppose P2 won the election this year (time T1). The question is: when the next election rolls around at time T2, how will the views of P2’s membership on GHG emission reduction targets have changed, and by extension, how much emphasis will be placed on the issue of climate change?
This is the essence of what Bill Gates suggests – if we have the right political party in power, they will naturally advance the climate change agenda forward. In our example specifically, increasing the aggressiveness of GHG emission reduction targets. However, as we’ll see later, this outcome is not guaranteed.
Individuals’ Behaviours
So, where do individual behaviours fit in? Most individual behaviours in a given society have a corresponding GHG emission: driving to work, flying to a vacation destination, online shopping, driving to the store to shop in person, and the list goes on. These behaviours range on a scale from high carbon-emitting, i.e. less “green” (e.g. driving a Hummer to work), to low carbon-emitting, i.e. more “green” (e.g. riding a bike to work). Averaged out (A), they represent the collective attitude of a given population toward the issue of GHG emissions at a given moment in time, which might, in turn, be understood as a certain degree of “green consciousness”.
The important thing to note here is that this collective attitude is not static and changes constantly. When an election happens, at Time 1 (T1), there is a baseline reference point of the population’s degree of “green consciousness”.
By the time of the next election (T2) a population’s attitude can change, or not, (as reflected in changes in behaviour and, consequently the GHG emission of those behaviours) potentially resulting in a different degree of “green consciousness”.
There are two ways in which individual’s behaviour can change:
Reactively. Individuals change their behaviour in response to government incentives or disincentives. For example, if new bicycle lanes are built and bikeshares installed, more people may start using bicycles as a mode of transportation, thus, moving attitudes toward B, a more population with a higher degree of "green consciousness". Or, the opposite, attitudes can regress to C if, for example, bike lanes are removed and more people start driving to work. Government policies or regulations designed to promote and encourage low GHG behaviours represent the “pull”.
Proactively. Individuals can also change their behaviour through growing awareness of the problem of climate change and desire to proactively reduce their personal carbon footprint. With the motivation to help mitigate its effects, individuals voluntarily adopt low GHG-emitting behaviours (e.g. decide that they are only going to make one trip by plane per year, or adopt a “Meatless Monday”), thus, lowering average GHG emission of behaviours to B which represent a higher level of “green” attitude of the population. Or the opposite, average GHG emission of behaviours can increase to C if people become less concerned with the carbon footprint of their actions and engage in higher carbon-emitting behaviour, for example, if people start feeling powerless, or develop apathy towards the topic. Individual behaviours can collectively generate momentum - the “push” - that political parties can capitalize on to get elected.
Elections
By the time the next election rolls around at Time 2 (T2), the population’s demands, or at least expectations, from their government related to the climate change agenda will have changed to reflect the collective attitude at that time. If enough “push” momentum was generated leading up the election, political parties may adapt their platforms to appeal to the largest base of potential voters, and adjust their platform to reflect the changes in the “green-ness” of the collective attitude as measured by the average GHG emission of individual behaviours.
At T2 a political party may run on a platform (if such platform is consistent with the party's values and principles) with more aggressive GHG targets, if it assesses that their voters would be more likely to accept a more aggressive GHG strategy based on a shift in the “green-ness” of their collective attitudes. Importantantly, the opposite is true too. If through the collection of its behaviour the population appears to have lost interest in or deprioritized climate change over other issues, a party might assess that it is less likely to support more aggressive climate change policy, and consequently, the party will pursue less aggressive GHG reduction targets, or deprioritize the issue.
Why individual behaviours matters
While I agree with Mr. Gates about the importance of supporting and voting for people and parties that prioritize climate change, this needs to be accompanied by strong messaging from the leaders in our society around the importance of changes in individual behaviours. Downplaying the role of individual behaviours risks people thinking that as long as they vote for a party that advances the climate change agenda they can justify not modifying their behaviour, or, even more worryingly, think that their responsibility is removed by the act of voting.
The important thing to remember is that elections happen at a specific point in time, and therefore, votes only count during that time. If not enough “push” momentum is generated by individuals of a society before the election period, parties’ platforms and consequently their government’s “pull” may be focused elsewhere.
Political parties’ platforms are the byproduct of the population's fears, concerns, demands, and actions. To be governed by parties that not only have a green policy agenda but continuously improve on it, individual behaviours between elections are what matters. Ultimately, it is collective individual actions that inform party platforms during the next election cycle and, more specifically, the prominence of their climate change agenda.
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Thanks to Anneke Bruinsma-Findlay for tirelessly reading drafts of this article.