I'm Hank green. I'm a science communicator, and also just a generalist communicator. So
when I was, I don't know, probably high school-aged I was already pretty fierce lefty. My dad
was super environmentalist and worked for the Nature Conservancy and my mom was like
a community organizer. We were a very liberal household and cared a lot about the environment,
thought a lot about the environment. And I was at my grandparents house on vacation and
down in the basement was like a playroom basically, there's like a pool table down there, and
a model train set and so this was like a place of like happiness for me throughout my childhood.
And I go down there and I see on the wall something probably I’d probably seen like
it dozen times before but a picture of an oil rig, visibly on the side of the oil rig
is my grandfather's name. So I later asked my mom I was like why
is there like a oil rig with Papa's name on it? Sort of something I
knew in mind that my grand I was a businessman. He, throughout his life,
worked for a lot of different companies, but for a while he worked for a small
oil company - but not small enough that they had oil rigs and and he
had an oil rig named after him and that made me feel really weird about my
relationship with my granddad.
That’s Hank Green. You might know him from the internet. I recently went to visit him
so we could talk climate change, and I learned that, like many of us, Hank’s got some complex
feelings about fossil fuels.
I saw fossil fuel companies as like the ultimate evil like they're the people doing the bad
thing. But, like, I love my grandfather and feel weird about the money that I was gonna
use to go to college with which came from my granddad and so how do I reconcile these
things. My granddad who ran a fossil fuel company for a little while and
also is like…nice
I think most of us can relate to Hank’s experience. I don’t mean all of our grandfathers
had oil rigs named after them, because thankfully there’s not that many oil rigs. What I mean
is that those of us who care about climate change and the role that fossil fuels play
in that–they’re most of it–also live in a world made massively better and more
comfortable and more prosperous thanks to fossil fuels.
In other words, hating fossil fuels is easy, but it’s not as easy to hate everything
they’ve done for us. That’s a tough thing to reconcile inside your brain, and it can
bring up a lot of… feeeeelings.
My first emotion was kind of shame I think, and also like a
decreasing of who my grandfather was in my estimation. And that was
something that I took out of that experience and then had to process over
the course of years. For clarity, I'm still worried about how people are gonna
view this now. I’m much more worried about how people are gonna see me be like Hank's
grandfather was CEO of an oil company. now I'm talking about it publicly and I feel like
the only reason I am doing that despite the fact that I am a little bit scared of sharing
it is that like it's important to have complicated views of things, and also it's
important to be like honest about reality.
That reality is that many people think fossil fuels have done a lot of good for the world,
so we should keep using them no matter what, and also many people think we should stop
using them immediately but they don’t stop to consider all the awesome things in their
lives they have because of a century and a half of burning coal and oil and gas. If you’re
in either group, you just aren’t being honest about reality.
But when you do stop and consider how awesome life is because of fossil fuels, and how awful
the mountains of science tell us life will become if we continue to use them like we
do, the next stop is often guilt… or shame. And no one enjoys that. That feels bad.
If it’s just a source of weight and shame and guilt and you can’t get out from under
that blanket, it’s not good, it’s not good for the world. So we have to turn it
outward, we have to think of it in terms of both the thing we feel guilty about and am
guilty of, and the thing I feel grateful for, and like those are the same thing.
There’s this horrible irony at the heart of solving climate change: It will require
people to make difficult personal choices, but one person’s choices have basically
no impact on their own. So we do nothing.
And I think that happens for two reasons: One, the guilt, because we realize that we
have contributed to the very problem we’re trying to solve. And two, we feel powerless
in the face of The System.
Now, it’s natural to feel a little uncomfortable or even guilty when you think about your personal
contribution to climate change. I have certainly felt that way. Because if your values tell
you that climate change is bad and it’s something that we need to solve, suddenly
your behavior conflicts with your values. And that presents you with a choice: You either
change your behavior to be more in line with your ideals, or tweak your ideals to feel
less discomfort. Guess which one people do more often?
But if you do choose to change your behavior, how do you avoid feeling powerless? Maybe
we stop thinking of our personal choices as only our own. Psychological and climate science
research has shown us that when people view themselves as part of a society, they are
more likely to just… GET climate change, and what it will take to solve it, than people
who view themselves as super-individualist. I’m not calling for, like, massive socialism
or one world government or something, I’m just saying consider that even if you are
one person, you live IN society. And what you do, and what you choose, in any area of
life, can improve society as a whole.
If we were able to think a little bit more like the collective society that we are, that
would probably give us perspective that would allow us to be more empathetic to people who
have a harder time making those changes, whether that’s for values or practical reasons.
And I think it would help us realize that we’re not going to solve this one person
at a time… we’re not going to solve this one person at a time are we? [I don’t think
so…]
Hank and I talked about how we are very lucky to even have a choice. One of the benefits
of living in such a rich country, like we do, and like many and probably most of you
do, is that we have the freedom and the ability to choose. We can choose to do things that
are better for our climate and our environment. But then what often happens is we think “because
I chose this thing, I am a good person”
And that’s something that I don’t like, because there are many people who can not
take that action. They do not have the excess labour they do not have the excess capital.
If you are a better person because you have the time and money to shop at Whole Foods
and recycle all of your stuff, are the people who don't have that capital bad people?
If we spent the amount of money that we spend on upscale goods at luxury food stores, like
elitist bread, on like lobbying government and trying to subsidize clean energy I think
the world would be a better place. But we don’t get that feeling of ‘my changed
values have made me a superior human’, and that is a thing that actually makes me pretty
mad.
So a lot of what I came out of eventually years of time after the fact of thinking about
this one afternoon and my granddad's basement was that before we started having electricity
we were burning whales for light. That's not better - so like this is better
than burning whales. And then we had a long period of time where we had, you know, great
luxuries air conditioning and hot water and, you know, being able to fly
home to see our parents. And all of that was created by fossil fuels. It was
created by this dramatic surplus of digging up like captured ancient sunlight
Burning ancient sunlight has given us so much, so many luxuries. But it’s also put power
into the hands of people who don’t have the climate’s best interests at heart
The problem is now if those people use the surplus they have to try and hold on to that
power forever, and prevent us from making a transition
to forms of energy that are much more long-lasting much more sustainable, much better for individual
humans who are alive now and in the future, and
that's good, it's good that we have the surplus because it's allowing us to
take better care of ourselves and to experience a higher quality of life. But
it's also we have to dedicate a portion of this surplus to
getting out from under that system that we have created that is so massive and that we
are so dependent on.
That system has given us power. Literal power, and the power to change how we think about
climate change.
Ultimately it’s not about do I deserve this or what do I deserve, it’s what do you do with the resources you have.
Don’t feel shame, feel powerful.