The Reliance School

1,000 Words / 4 min. Read

Whenever an article comes out identifying an action or behavior that contributes to climate change, you’ll invariably see some form of this statement in response:

X only contributes Y% to the problem. Even if we were to eliminate X entirely, it wouldn’t come close to solving climate change.

This is often followed up with a recommendation of what we should be focusing on instead (usually something entirely different). Here are some examples from Reddit; on emissions from cars and trucks:

On the impacts of meat consumption:

On emissions from air travel:

And on water waste from lawns:

As you can see, this is a common trope across a range of subjects. Rather than focusing on individual claims and statistics, we’d like to address two fundamental problems with this line of thought.

Death by Division

To start, you can make any problem impossible to solve by breaking it into smaller and smaller pieces, and then declaring each piece to be inconsequential.¹

Let’s say you need to clean your house from top to bottom. On your to-do list, you divide this task into two main areas; the upstairs (which you assign to the kids), and the downstairs (which you assign to yourself). You then break down each of those areas by room, and begin cataloging all the tasks within. When everything’s accounted for, there are over 100 items on your list!

So when you ask your youngest to put away the toys in their bedroom, they (correctly) proclaim: “My toys are only contributing to 1% of the mess. Even if I put away my toys every night for the rest of the year, that wouldn’t come close to solving the problem. Instead, you need to focus on the downstairs, as that’s where 50% of the mess is!”

By skewing the scale (comparing small solutions to big problems), it’s easy to make problems seem insurmountable, and solutions seem insignificant. Instead, we should recognize that small solutions are part of the big solution.²

Death by Scale

Next, let’s assume that our goal is to eliminate needless, preventable deaths. How should we go about that? To start, we could look up the leading causes of death in America. In 2022, those were heart disease (21%), cancer, (19%), unintentional injuries (7%), COVID (6%), and strokes (5%).³ So naturally, it would make sense to focus most of our efforts on the biggest contributors.

But what about smaller contributors? Drug overdoses accounted for “only” 3.3% of deaths;⁴ firearms and suicides for 1.5% each,^5,6 automobile accidents for 1.3%,⁷ and homicide, a paltry 0.6%.⁸ Let’s take some of those comments above, and apply their logic to those statistics:

My view is that overdoses are real and we should do our best to prevent them. BUT regulating opioids is really not the solution as the impact is tiny. Once read a study that said even if we were able to stop every overdose from happening (practically impossible), that would only reduce deaths by a mere 3%.

First of all, car accidents are only 1.3% of deaths. Yeah they matter, but compared to heart disease and cancer, not really. The point is that asking individuals to drive safely and put on seat belts is just (a) deflecting blame from the government and car manufacturers and (b) simply not going to work.

The relationship between murder and death is pretty much nonexistent. All of homicide only accounts for 0.6% of the mortality pie. Banning murder would do next to nothing, when a single war can kill more people than you could in your entire lifetime.

It’s one thing to argue about the efficacy of an action, but this logic is being used as an argument against action itself. These examples help illustrate the fallacy of that position; if our goal is reducing deaths, we should recognize the value and necessity of all preventative actions, regardless of their scale.

A Notable Exception

So why don’t we apply that same logic to climate change? In short, because of cognitive dissonance.⁹

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is described as the mental disturbance people feel when they realize their cognitions and actions are inconsistent or contradictory.¹⁰

Most of us aren’t going around giving people heart attacks and strokes, or shooting and running people over. So it’s easy for us to accept that those are bad things, and that working to eliminate them is a worthy cause.

But driving,¹¹ flying,¹² heating and cooling our homes,^13,14 eating meat,¹⁵ shopping online,¹⁶ keeping up with fashion and technology;^17,18 these are things that most of us do on a regular basis. If we care about climate change and the environment, it can be hard to reconcile that with the fact that our actions are contributing to the problem.¹⁹

Our first instinct is often to downplay our personal impact. It’s not us, it’s fossil fuel companies;²⁰ it’s banks and investors,²¹ big corporations,²² politicians and lobbyists.²³ A recent survey found that:

Americans largely believe they do not bear responsibility for global environmental problems. Only about 15 percent of U.S. respondents said that high- and middle-income Americans share responsibility for climate change and natural destruction. Instead, they attribute the most blame to businesses and governments of wealthy countries.²⁴

But the solution to cognitive dissonance isn’t to avoid personal responsibility or rationalize our behavior; it’s to begin bringing our actions into alignment with our beliefs.⁹ And that can be a long process. It may require going against societal norms and shaking up our value systems. It might mean opting out of consumerism, trends, and social comparisons. It might mean adopting a lower standard of living, at least in material terms.

It’s not nearly as easy as looking up a statistic and posting a comment. But it’s a small - and necessary - part of the big solution.

Footnotes & References

1. Fallacy of Composition (Kassiani Nikolopoulou, Scribbr)
2. The Role of Individual Responsibility in the Transition to Environmental Sustainability (Steven Cohen, Columbia Climate School)
3. Leading Causes of Death (CDC)
4. Drug Overdose Deaths in the United States, 2002–2022 (CDC)
5. Provisional Suicide Deaths in the United States, 2022 (CDC)
6. Firearm Injury and Death (CDC)
7. NHTSA Estimates for 2022 Show Roadway Fatalities Remain Flat After Two Years of Dramatic Increases (NHTSA)
8. Homicide in the United States (Veera Korhonen, Statista)
9. How your brain stops you from taking climate change seriously (Nsikan Akpan, PBS)
10. ‍Cognitive dissonance (Wikipedia)
11. Car Emissions and Global Warming (Union of Concerned Scientists)
12. Should we give up flying for the sake of the climate? (Jocelyn Timperley, BBC)
13. Heating Buildings Leaves a Huge Carbon Footprint, But There’s a Fix For It (Renée Cho, Columbia Climate School)
14. Extraordinary heat waves have readers asking how A/C affects greenhouse gas emissions (Carolyn Gramling, ScienceNews)
15. Eating Meat Is Bad for Climate Change, and Here Are All the Studies That Prove It (Björn Ólafsson, Sentient Media)
16. How Buying Stuff Drives Climate Change (Renée Cho, Columbia Climate School)
17. Fast Fashion Pollution and Climate Change (Nikita Shukla, Earth.org.)
18. How smartphones are heating up the planet (Lotfi Belkhir, The Conversation)
19. What is climate guilt? (Ecopsychepedia)
20. 25 Fossil Fuel Producers Responsible for Half Global Emissions in Past 3 Decades (Georgina Gustin, Inside Climate News)
21. World's Biggest Banks Continue to Pour Billions into Fossil Fuel Expansion (Ginny Cleaveland, Sierra Club)
22. 80 Percent of Global CO2 Emissions Come From Just 57 Companies, Report Shows (Christian Thorsberg, Smithsonian)
23. UN report card on Paris goals gives 75 governments a ‘fail’ mark (Camilla Hodgson, Financial Times)
24. The Deteriorating Environment Is a Public Concern, but Americans Misunderstand Their Contribution to the Problem (Katie Surma, Inside Climate News)