'Being The Change': How To Spark A Climate Revolution

(MENAFN- ValueWalk) NASA scientist Peter Kalmus explains his personal effort to shrink his carbon footprint.

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While the science behind climate change is solid, there remains a lot of resistance to curtailing carbon emissions because of the perception that doing so will cause the world economy to take a big hit. What if the capitalist system could coexist with a smaller carbon footprint? Peter Kalmus, an atmospheric scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, has written a book on the idea based on what he's done in his own life to have a more positive impact on the environment. He talked about his book, on the .

An edited transcript of the conversation follows.

: Aside from your work, what was the driving idea behind your book?

Peter Kalmus: It was 2010 and I'd been getting increasingly concerned about global warming the more I read scientific papers on it. I was doing astrophysics at the time, but I got increasingly concerned about it. I live in southern California where it's fairly warm, and I don't like heat waves at all. I get really grumpy when they happen.

I took a look at how my actions were translating to carbon emissions, and I realized that one of the biggest things that I was doing to emit carbon was flying a lot. Academics fly a huge amount. They go to collaboration meetings. They go to conferences. Flying had been 75% of my emissions, and that's being really generous to the planes. I was flying about 50,000 miles a year back then. I knew no matter what else I did — I could give up meat, bicycle a lot — nothing would really matter as long as I kept flying that much.

: How did you make the change?

Kalmus: Over the next few years, I just stopped flying so much because I would get on a plane and feel really bad, like I shouldn't be here. What am I doing here? Is the conference that I'm flying to worth the emissions?

'The best step we could take right now to rapidly reduce emissions at a national level would be to adopt a carbon price.'

I learned more about how long this carbon is going to stay in the atmosphere and for how many hundreds of years. The impacts of climate change have several time scales. But the planet is going to be warmer for a long time. The carbon is not going to completely come out for tens of thousands of years. Then there's one final time scale, which is global warming is contributing to a major extinction event. Scientists that look at the fossil record of recovery after the other major extinction events that happened our planet, which also had a climate component. They find that it takes about 10 million years for biodiversity to recover to the same level it was at before the extinction event. That's a very long time scale.

I'd be sitting on a plane and would just feel like, I'll be happier if I'm not here on this plane. I just gradually stopped flying. I try to do good work, write good papers, and I go to regional conferences and try to teleconference when I can.

: These changes could be made by a lot more people because we have the technology to connect digitally with people around the world.

Kalmus: That's right, we have the technology. What I think we lack is the cultural will to do that. If employers and universities started to say, 'We want to do more teleconferencing and less live travel,' and if there were maybe more regional conferences, if there was a shift in culture, it would make it a lot easier. As it is, I take a bit of a hit. There are people that I would know and that would know me if I flew more or at all. But I feel like I've struck a good balance between fast career advancement and following my deeper principles and doing what I know I need to do.

: Is the book also is about how we could still have a successful capitalist culture yet drive the change necessary to get a handle on global warming?

Kalmus: Right. Not everyone is going to gravitate towards voluntary individual reductions. We need systematic, systemic collective actions as well. This is a little controversial for scientists to make any kind of suggestions about what policies we could implement to have that collective change. So, I'd say I'm speaking as a scientifically informed human now.

There's one solution that I think is kind of a no-brainer. If that wasn't the case, I wouldn't make the suggestion. But a lot of scientists agree with this, and a lot of economists agree with this as well. The best step we could take right now to rapidly reduce emissions at a national level would be to adopt a carbon price, specifically a fee and dividend. That would take our system of capitalism and fix this gaping market failure of using our atmosphere as an open sewer without including those costs, the cost to society of doing that in the price of a gallon of gasoline or a ton of coal. If we charged that price, it could increase gradually so it wouldn't be a huge shock on the economy initially. It would incentivize everything from food to transport to how we heat and cool our buildings. It would push renewables forward because fossil fuels would get increasingly expensive over time. Corporations would be able to plan for the future because there would be a predictable price signal.

'I don't think that we can decouple our economy from physical resources well enough to continue indefinite exponential growth.'

The best part about it is if you return the revenue that's collected as a fee — it's technically not a tax if the government doesn't keep it — it could actually provide an economic boost because then you're putting more money in the pockets of everyday people. You're stimulating these various economies as we transition to the new energy economy. It wouldn't be regressive. It would be progressive because the wealthier you are, the more fossil fuel you likely burn. Under this policy, if you were collecting revenue based on how much fossil fuel people burn, you're redistributing it equally. So, 70% of households would come out ahead even if they didn't change their behaviors. And if they did ramp down their fossil fuel use, then they'd come out even more ahead.

: You talk about the idea of whether some sort of border adjustment is necessary. There are companies that do business in countries that don't necessarily follow those philosophies, correct?

Kalmus: That's absolutely necessary. The other good thing about the border adjustment is it would turn a national fee and dividend gradually into a sort of international impetus towards emissions reduction.

We've seen that it's very difficult to do emissions reduction at the international negotiations table, like with the Kyoto Protocol and more recently

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