Hi,
So here are some things I’ve been thinking about this week:
So it turns out there’s always low hanging fruit
As I’ve alluded to previously, much of my “let’s go fight COVID” energy is at loose ends now that the COVID fight has transitioned into its current phase, and as the volunteer efforts I was involved with have ramped down. As some of you Friends of the Stack know, a potential area for that energy to settle is fighting climate change.
(After all, if I got frustrated by a fight that was “over too quickly”1…why not pick a fight that will last for at least the next hundred years?2)
One theme that immediately becomes clear as you look at fossil fuel emissions is that, well, they’re woven into everything.
Indeed, a key theme of Daniel Yergin’s3 The Prize, which I am currently rushing through and expect to write a detailed review of in these pages, is how the energy density, transportability, and sheer usefulness of fossil fuels (especially oil) imposes a centripetal force on all sorts of human activity. Entrepreneurs just show up at markets with literally the first oil they have ever pumped in that country, and apparently your local consumer goes, “Awesome! This burns, but doesn’t smell of dead whales!” and buys it with surprisingly few follow-up questions. And this continues, with occasional bumps as oil refiners have to come up with things to do with these weird useless waste products, like gasoline or plastic; innovation goes especially fast in wartime. For over a hundred and fifty years, fossil fuels pulled more and more kinds of behavior in, because things were just easier to do with fossil fuels.4
So, one very simple toy model for how you can think about this problem is that everything you own and do has a hidden sticker on it that says, “add or subtract this many greenhouse gas emissions” to use it.
Some of those stickers are small (see Impossible Burger , previously), some are large (see, well, your flight to some tropical paradise), and some are negative-ish (see, e.g., planting a tree).
While radical, rapid action is needed to stop burning carbon and pull it it out of the atmosphere, there is also a lot of low-hanging fruit by getting people to switch between fairly analogous purchases with very different hidden stickers. For example, when I go to my employer’s travel site to book passage5 from DC to NYC, a banner pops up telling me that I can save 85% of my carbon emissions by taking the Acela instead of the American Airlines shuttle.
This is actually a highly salient fact! I once was on a project based in DC, working with two guys living in NYC. One of them was a plane guy, the other was a train guy. And you have NEVER seen friendly-but-passive-aggressive competitiveness6 like two Type-A consultants who are convinced that they have the One True Travel Plan.
So of course, they’d race.
They’d leave the team room at roughly the same time, and head to their respective points of departure.
First one to get home would email the team.
In eight weeks, they tied, 4-4.
***
So, there’s always low-hanging fruit. If you have a cost that you don’t even know, you can’t make trivial changes to optimize for it. And now we are starting to know. You’ll see lots of nudges that are trying to shape behavior, like Google’s new efforts to show you greenhouse gas costs of picking different flights. But that isn’t enough.
This is the fight of a century. You have to, basically, take every single thing we do as a society, re-examine it, and upgrade it. If this was a movie, this would be the part where we did the really cool montage as we cracked the problem and did lots of cool science.
You can live that montage for the rest of your life, on this or any challenge you choose.
Despite all this, we live in an age of minor miracles
Recently, a dear friend passed a major professional milestone, and I wanted to celebrate it. They live in another country, across an ocean. It took about 10 minutes to successfully place an order-for next-day delivery of some champagne. I never spoke to the wine store, and they never spoke to me; I gave their website an address and a credit card number, some back-end algorithm somewhere decided the risk I was a fraudster was acceptably low7; and 24 hours later, bubbles were delivered, with a photo in my email of exactly where the delivery man carefully placed the bottle.
We have many, many, many things broken in this world. But we live in an age of unparalleled wonders, of outstanding champagne, and of people whose hard work deserves it.
Let’s not forget it.
May these elephants bless your timeline
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or my cat.
I may on occasion use Amazon Affiliate or similar links when referencing things I’d tell you about anyways. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases; I donate the proceeds to charity. While Substack has a paid subscription option, I don’t have any plans to use it at this time and anyone who gets this newsletter now surely won’t be ever paying for their subscription.
Again — not that I think the war is over, but my battle in it has wrapped up.
STARES IN PLANTAGANET
Oh, and disclosure, I guess; like many Friends of this Stack, I knew one of his kids in school. This feels like the lowest-impact disclosure ever.
Note that I do not say, “better.” Destroying SW DC’s communities to put in the Beltway wasn’t better.
“Book passage”? What am I, Billy Crocker trying to get tickets for the SS America?
They made savage personal attacks about boarding procedures and seat pitch on the other’s preferred means of travel.
Am I also obsessing increasingly with how cool identity and antifraud tech is for making people safer on the internet, even as I am terrified of its implications? I sure am!