Introduction
It would be wonderful, in terms of decreased carbon footprint, if more people used fuel efficient cars and LED light bulbs, or rode bikes to work and to shop, or if more local political jurisdictions adopted climate change mitigation and adaptation measures. It would be even better if most Americans lived in houses that produced more energy than they used, rejected energy- and carbon-intensive 21st Century lifestyles, and returned to residential and consumption patterns typical of 1950. But, other than making people feel better about prospects for their future, the question should be raised as to whether voluntary individual environmental virtue makes a difference in today’s world of climate change.
To be upfront, on this question I am a pessimist and do not believe what individuals or individual local political jurisdictions do voluntarily to cut carbon use makes a significant difference in terms of climate change. This statement is made despite my understanding that cities are engines of economic activity and as such generate the far greater majority of greenhouse gas emissions and are critical elements in climate change mitigation/adaptation strategies. The following materials help explain why I hold that conviction.
For sake of argument, let’s assume if every American and all local political jurisdictions practiced voluntary environmental virtue, on average that practice would reduce carbon dioxide use to quantities last recorded in 1950[1] when residential air conditioning was practically unknown, houses were much smaller, suburban sprawl was in its infancy, and cars, although larger and fuel inefficient, were significantly fewer in number and people traveled less. If everyone and all local political jurisdictions in the U.S. would change their lives and operations to conform to that assumption, personal production of CO2 would drop to about 8.5 tons annually and the country-wide total would fall to the general neighborhood of 2.65 billion tons.
Obviously, the critical part of the above sentence starts with If and leads to the question of what is the real world probability of getting 313 million Americans and the more than 30,500 counties and incorporated cities to make that great leap backward to 1950 in terms of energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) production. Let’s start this inquiry with a number of social-cultural factors that influence judgments and decisions.
Social-Cultural Aspects of Pro-Environmental Behavior
Research over the past several decades in psychology (Weber and Stern 2011) has established evidence that indicates individual and collective decisions are more influenced by worldviews, values, and affective processes than they are by analytical processes, which are characterized by formal logic, mathematics, and probability (Weber 2006, 2010). As a pertinent example, risk perception research by Kahan et al. (2011 and 2012) determined that when scientific information conflicted with shared ideological values and beliefs (notably conservative political worldviews), those communally shared values were affirmed and the science was not. That situation may also be explained in part by the Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Festinger 1957), wherein people will avoid information that causes feelings of uneasiness (dissonance) and add new “information” that is compatible with their existing belief system.
Critical to this discussion of pro-environmental actions are the roles political ideology and values play. McCright and Dunlap (2000), Dunlap and McCright (2008), and Dunlap and Jacques (2013) analyzed American denialist challenges to environmental problems. They determined that the disagreement stemmed from collaborative efforts by a powerful conservative political movement composed of right-wing foundations, think tanks, and environmental skeptics aligned with the Republican Party. McCright and Dunlap (2011) presented additional evidence that between 2001 and 2010 the views of the American public on environmental issues have become increasingly polarized along both partisan (Democrat versus Republican) and ideological (liberal versus conservative) positions. That evolution has certainly affected the way cities and urban planners operate with respect to environmental issues.
Another significant social-cultural problem that affects individuals, organizations, and cities is inertia, or the innate human resistance to change, especially to change that is interpreted by many as not in evidence but that is predicted or anticipated (Zárate et al. 2012). Naturally, cultural inertia affects institutions and political jurisdictions as well as individuals. As humans, we tend to value things with which we are familiar far more than things that are either unfamiliar or are not yet extant. As a result, we have cognitive biases against getting rid of things we should discard based on pure rationality, whether they are outmoded technology, ineffective politicians, or incorrect views of the future. It is not that people or jurisdictions are stupid or simply too lazy to change but that their actions are strongly influenced by a set of psychological short-cuts that our brains take without us realizing what is going on, short-cuts that make what is familiar and seen much more comforting and reassuring and difficult to dismiss than what is unfamiliar and unseen.
For large-scale organizational change to occur, some type of system-wide failure must overcome our innate cultural inertia and precipitate that transformation (Weick and Quinn 1999). In the case of climate change, if between 41 to 64 percent[2] of the U.S. population rejects scientific evidence that a system-wide failure—human caused global warming—has or will occur, then inertial resistance to the need for widespread socioeconomic change will be high. Many, if not most, Americans and local political jurisdictions are either comfortable with their present energy- and carbon-intensive lifestyles and operations to willingly change their environmental behaviors or their mindsets are too focused on ideologically-based skepticism (McCright and Dunlap 2003 and 2011) to accept scientific evidence that human caused failure of the climate system is here and appropriate action is required now if our culture, as we know it, is to survive.
A large number of ideological conservatives and right-wing organizations, as well as local political jurisdictions directly or indirectly influenced by conservatives, are convinced climate change, sustainability, New Urbanism, smart growth, livable cities, traditional neighborhood design, and related planning ideas are U.N. sponsored, liberal-socialist conspiracies designed to strip individuals of their property rights and their freedom.[3] If we eliminate those core conservatives from the universe of Americans who would voluntarily return to energy and material consumption patterns characteristic of 1950, that step removes a certain percent of the population and would allow an assessment of how many Americans would voluntarily change their lifestyles to produce less CO2. The question is how that percent can be calculated since this paper does not contain a sophisticated and expensive sampling procedure that was part of a national survey that asked appropriate questions.
To overcome that difficulty, I assume that Republican and Democratic Americans are proportional to the numbers of votes cast for Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the 2012 Presidential Election and that independents are relatively equally split between both parties. I realize that assumption is not accurate but it provides a reasonable base from which to calculate percentages in the absence of more exact information. The results of recent national Gallup poll (Saad 2013) that examined concerns about global warming by political party are used to determine the percentage of Americans willing to decrease energy consumption. The poll found that 25 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans did not worry a great deal about global warming. Multiplying the numbers of Presidential votes cast by party by those percentages and adding the totals result in 41 percent of the total American population who would likely reject calls to reduce energy consumption and carbon production to 1950 levels. For purposes of this assessment, that group is labeled Core Conservatives #1.
Another part of that 2013 Gallup poll asked party members if they thought global warming was a serious threat in their lifetimes. Fifty percent of Democrats saw no threat as did 82 percent of Republicans. Multiplying the numbers of Presidential votes cast by party by those percentages and adding the totals result in slightly over 64 percent of Americans who do not worry about global warming. That group was labeled Core Conservatives #2. If we eliminate both sets of core conservatives from the universe of Americans who would voluntarily return to energy and material consumption patterns characteristic of 1950 to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change, that step removes somewhere between 41 percent and 64 percent of the population.
Another percent can be eliminated that would never entertain the thought of living in a non-air conditioned house containing only 983 square feet, which was the 1950 average, or consider basically throwing away their investment[4] in a large-lot single family suburban residence to move into a smaller home in a more densely populated city. Based on my experience as a practicing urban planner and knowing the size of the average new house in 2012 was about 2,500 square feet, that number might even be higher than 75 percent of the total population, especially if we include those who do not yet live in such a spacious residence but aspire to. If we assume two-thirds of that 75 percent is already accounted for in the previously cited 41 to 64 percent (since Republicans are more suburban-oriented than Democrats), we have somewhere between 66 to 89 percent of the population disinclined to leap backward into the future to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change.
Next, we have to consider that segment of the population that enjoys a low-density suburban lifestyle and would not willingly abandon it. Let’s assume that percent not already accounted for would equal five percent of the population (admittedly a guesstimate). The remaining 6 to 29 percent of the U.S. population constitutes a relatively small number of environmentally virtuous individuals on which to hang national hopes of averting potentially catastrophic effects of anthropogenic climate change.
Scale, Local Jurisdiction Governance, and Climate Change
Individual and jurisdictional pro-environmental behaviors typically involve multi-scalar and cross-boundary issues, e.g., CO2 produced in one jurisdiction or at a specific site does not remain within jurisdiction boundaries or at the local scale. Therefore, it makes sense to examine the climate change challenge from viewpoints familiar to all planners: geospatial scale (Sayre 2005; Wilbanks 2007) and governance.
Climate changes build collectively from micro-scales to the global scale (Wilbanks and Kates 1999), the largest organizational level with which humans deal, astronauts and astroscientists being exceptions to that generalization. But most people typically live the majority of their lives at much more constrained geospatial and temporal scales that are defined by personal action, which can range in geographic extent from as small as a homeless person’s shelter on the street to larger than the metropolitan areas in which much American life takes place. It should be evident that many hundreds of thousands or even millions of small-scale, voluntary pro-environmental actions by individual people, local political jurisdictions, and industries must coalesce to affect global conditions, which is obviously the case in terms of climate change.
On the global effects level, humans inject around 35 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere each year.[5] On the national level, about 5.3 billion tons of CO2 are produced annually in the U.S.,[6] which in 2012-2013 at the personal level of detail means each American is responsible for producing about 17 tons of CO2. Based on information developed by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center of the U.S. Department of Energy, CO2 use by Americans doubled from 1950 to the present (Borden et al. 2011).
If we stay on the national level scale, we have to consider what has happened in terms of CO2 emissions in the U.S. from 1950 to the present. Over that interval, the U.S. share of global emissions has declined from 44 percent to about 15 percent, a paper decline largely due to increasingly higher production of carbon by non-Western countries—e.g. China and India—as well as a recent slight actual decrease in carbon use by Americans, which is probably due to power generating plants switching from coal to natural gas.[7] The obvious question is, if individuals in developing countries like China and India, are rapidly increasing CO2 production, which they are, what global benefit would result if between six and 29 percent of the U.S. population drastically changed their lifestyles and cut their CO2 production in half? The answer should be obvious.
In terms of pro-environmental decision-making associated with local scale, those of site and local political jurisdictions, widespread change initiated by individual jurisdictions as well as by coordinated and collaborative cross-boundary pro-environmental behavior or governance also seems problematic. A number of reasons have been advanced by planners for the failure of local political jurisdictions to adopt more environmentally responsible plans in terms of smart growth, sustainability, or ecological planning, which I regard herein as surrogates for mitigating the adverse effects of climate change.
When opportunities in U.S. cities were examined for obstacles to climate change mitigation using the example of the Cities for Climate Protection Program, Betsill (2001) found that institutional barriers—such as inappropriate bureaucratic structure, lack of administrative capacity, and budgetary constraints—made it difficult for municipalities to implement targeted policies and actions. The question her research raised was whether local initiatives could make meaningful contributions to climate change mitigation in the absence of substantive governance changes at the state and national levels; for similar conclusions, see McCann (2003).
Downs (2005) addressed the issue as to why few cities have adopted smart growth principles. His research centered on numerous practical difficulties in changing long-established powers and authority of local government as well as in changing, in a short time period, existing cultural preferences—such as residential land use patterns characterized by low-density and high demand for vehicular transportation. Much like Betsill, Downs argued that the political resistance at state and local levels to such changes would be extraordinarily difficult to overcome.
Analysis of barriers to the adoption of urban-ecological planning techniques by Berke (2007) provided several observations pertinent to governance similar to those proposed by Betsill and Downs, particularly that local governments have built-in difficulties that hinder such adoption. One specific problem Berke (2007, p. 68) raised is that the level of detail required by local governments in gathering data that would be incorporated into traditional planning tools is inadequate for ecological management, which requires far more detailed and complex information. Another, even more critical barrier Berke identified was the spatial mismatch between the local scale characteristic of non-state political jurisdictions and the regional to national scale of ecological issues (including climate change mitigation), making multi-scalar and cross-boundary relationships very difficult to address in an ecologically sound manner, especially since local American government is not structured to deal with multi-level decision-making challenges, a conclusion shared by Betsill (2001) and Downs (2005).
Other research on key challenges concerning the powers of local government and conflicts between local goals for economic development and climate change mitigation have demonstrated the restricted ability of local actions to affect climate change (Bulkeley and Betsill 2003). Related research focused on environmental issues in England, including sustainability and climate change mitigation, found that forms of governance required to address those issues stretched across geographical scales and beyond urban boundaries (Bulkeley and Betsill 2005, 42). They argued that the ‘urban’ governance of climate protection involved “relations between levels of the state and new network spheres of authority which challenge traditional distinctions between local, national and global environmental politics.” When Betsill and Bulkeley (2006) analyzed how U.S. cities in the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) Program might be conceptualized as part of global environmental governance, they found that only by taking a multi-level, multi-scalar perspective could the social, political, and economic processes that shape global environmental governance be captured.
Research in the U.K. by Wilson (2006) addressed the difficulties of adopting spatial planning policies at the local level in terms of mitigating or adapting to climate change. She determined that, other than the issue of climate change’s contributions to local flood risk, the wider implications for biodiversity and water resources are not yet integrated into plans. She attributed that failure to a “lack of political support and lack of engagement of the planning profession with climate change networks” (Wilson 2006, 609). But she also pointed to local level difficulties in acknowledging the need to react to climate change, stemming in part from the relatively short-term perspectives of local plans being out of sync with the long-term implications of climate change, a governance issue similar to those raised by Betsill (2001), Downs (2005), Bulkeley and Betsill (2005), and Berke (2007).
Although relatively few U.S. cities have adopted specific climate change action plans, Tang et al. (2010) examined 40 such plans in terms of local jurisdictional efforts to mitigate climate change. Their study focused on plan quality as expressed through local awareness and analysis that led to actions. Tang and colleagues found high levels of climate change awareness, moderate levels of analysis, but limited action approaches, part of which the authors attribute to the lack of enabling legislation or directives generated by state government that would put pressure on local jurisdictions to enact effective mitigation policies and implementation measures, another governance issue.
Perhaps the best summation of the present situation with respect to climate change governance is provided by Shove (2010, 1283), when she writes: “. . . that [climate change] policy, as currently constructed, is necessarily incapable of conceptualizing transformation in the fabric of daily life on the scale and at the rate required.”
Remarks
This paper began by considering the possibility of most individual Americans and local political jurisdictions leaping backward into the future in terms of energy and carbon use. After some examination it seems that possibility is unlikely unless pro-environmental behaviors on the part of cities and counties, commercial and industrial firms, and the general population are mandated and enforced through new federal policies, laws, and regulations. Short of the U.S. being transformed into the type of command and control political-economic system in existence during World War II (Delina and Diesendorf 2013), it seems unlikely that voluntary actions on the part of individual Americans who are environmentally virtuous could play a significant role in the national or global reduction of carbon.
The reality is the U.S. and other developed nations have sufficient time to avert the worst effects of climate change if they desire (Hale 2010). A necessary condition for that to happen is the populations of those nations must generate the political will to demand that national and international policies be adopted and laws and regulations put in place at all levels of political jurisdiction to ensure climate change mitigation measures are implemented within a very short time period.
Practicing planners are perfectly positioned in that nested jurisdictional hierarchy because the majority of the individual phenomena that underlie environmental processes, resource use, economic activities, population dynamics, and climate change arise at site and local scales (Wilbanks and Kates 1999). The two central challenges in terms of the success of global climate change strategies is controlling local scale emissions and initiating effective mitigation/adaptation policies and actions locally. As Wilbanks (2007, 286) has succinctly pointed out: “Scale matters most because it is directly related to how and where governance decisions are made that affect sustainable development.”
The question then arises as to what practicing planners, whose work is predominantly at the local scale, can do to help stimulate changes at various levels of government that address climate change mitigation. Although the answer is complex I believe planners are well positioned to apply lessons learned from exemplars like Rosa Parks, Rachael Carson, Arthur Marshall and Marjory Stoneman Douglas, and Marjorie Carr, Jack Ohanian, and David Anthony. All were activists who struggled against daunting odds and succeeded in ways no one anticipated. Rosa Parks changed the way Americans understood the battle for human dignity and civil rights (Williams 2002). Nearly single-handedly, Rachael Carson (1962) changed our collective perception of the use of hazardous chemicals in the environment. Arthur Marshall and Marjory Stoneman Douglas fought for decades and were able to save the Everglades from total destruction (Grunwald 2006). And Marjorie Carr, Jack Ohanian, and David Anthony created a grassroots movement that defeated the Cross Florida Barge Canal despite facing staggeringly powerful opposition from the federal government and the State of Florida as well as from wealthy and politically connected canal supporters (Noll and Tegeder 2009).
The combination of highly motivated individuals, determined non-governmental organizations, credible evidence complied by scientists, and sympathetic political leaders at every decision-making level can result in positive change. It is a lesson no one who is concerned about the environment can afford to forget. Research by Chawla and Cushing (2007, 438) demonstrated that lesson is reality-based and not wistful thinking. Their analysis of the world’s most serious environmental problems suggested that the effect of private actions is limited unless they are combined with organizing for collective public change. Although many practicing planners are highly skilled at public organization, the question is whether they, local political jurisdictions, individuals, NGOs, and other stakeholders are sufficiently motivated to act decisively now.
The questions posed by Bulkeley and Betsill (2003 and 2005), Downs (2005), Wilson (2006), and Berke (2007) concerning how the political structure of cities affects pro-environmental behavior raises even more daunting issues. Changes in governance and administrative behavior, especially those that are multi-scalar and cross-boundary in nature, are always difficult. Making those changes in a relatively short time period is even more so, especially if the involved political jurisdictions currently exhibit a nested, hierarchical structure that may need to experience transition (Shove and Walker 2007).
Although for reasons detailed above I remain pessimistic about meaningful reductions in CO2 tonnages occurring in time to avoid potentially catastrophic effects on the world economy and on civilization as a whole, I firmly believe that targeted and coordinated actions by planners, cities, and committed individuals and organizations still have the possibility of success. However, due to the ever increasing rate humans are injecting CO2 into the atmosphere, the time available to achieve positive outcomes in terms of climate change mitigation is limited.
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Notes
[1] Most
atmospheric scientists, the European Union, and the State of California advocate
setting a target for industrialized nations of achieving an 80 percent reduction
in greenhouse gases, based on 1990 levels, by 2050 in order to stabilize CO2
concentrations at about 450 ppm by 2050. Although I applaud that ambitious target,
for purposes of this paper I believe it is more pragmatic for the U.S. to use a
50 percent reduction by 2050 as our hypothetical goal.
[2] See
calculations on p. 5.
[3] For two
informal, subjective, but well researched descriptions of this situation, see Flint
(2011) and Mencimer (2011).
[4] I use
the term “throwing away” since few buyers would be willing to risk purchasing
such a residence or would offer to purchase it at such a reduced price that
re-investment in another residence would be problematic.
[5] http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=CO2ts1990-2011
[6] http://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=CO2ts_pc1990-2011
[7] See The Economist.
“America's falling carbon-dioxide emissions: Some fracking good news.” May 25th
2012: http://www.economist.com/blogs/schumpeter/2012/05/americas-falling-carbon-dioxide-emissions
