Lesson 1 - Important, But Why?

Let’s start with the idea of your carbon footprint and the importance of your carbon footprint. The quote that I have on the slide here is:

“The most powerful weapon we have is the ability to control our own carbon footprint.”

I would suggest to you that that is entirely incorrect. There are a whole series of reasons that people are telling you that. It may sound logical because at the end of the day, you do have at least some control over your carbon footprint, and you may not feel like you have control over a lot of other things. But does that mean that your most powerful weapon is your carbon footprint? That's really what we're going to be digging more deeply into in this module.

The real point is that our collective footprint is critical. We collectively are emitting tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide equivalent to the atmosphere every year. That is a huge deal. That’s critical! That's very different from talking about our individual footprints and asking the question, what could we all do that would tackle climate change, or what can I do that would make a difference in tackling climate change.

What's going on here is something called the fallacy of division. At the level of 10 billion people, 8 billion people, we're emitting 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide. If we divide that by 8 billion people, we come up with an average number. If we all were to reduce our emissions by 80 or 90%, then we would have collectively reduced our emissions by 80 or 90%. But we're not all going to do that. The fallacy of division idea is that we think, “let's take a global number and divide it by a global population and come up with a per capita number and then work with that number.” But that's just not the right way to think about this given that people are going to respond to this in very different ways.

Does that mean that individual footprints don't matter? No, they do matter -- but not for the reason that you might think. In fact, there's a real Catch 22 involved that we'll come back to in a later lesson.