Local opinion: Cooperative effort needed to fight climate change

Leaders urge us to dig deep. Fight climate change and water resource depletion. You can do it! Stop eating red meat; take shorter showers; buy solar panels; buy an electric car; choose paper over plastic; it’s all about you all the time. You can do it! It’s the American West spirit of rugged individualism.

But it’s 2023 not 1776. You can’t do it alone. If tomorrow you became a vegetarian, bought an electric car, took shorter showers, bought solar panels and always chose paper over plastic (or better yet brought your own recycled shopping bags!) you’d hardly make a dent in global warming. For sure it could help but it could more likely be counterproductive as you patted yourself on the back for your consumer spending choices, vanquished your climate guilt and didn’t do a damn thing more.

Want to make a significant reduction in greenhouse gas emissions? You actually can do it. But it’s a bit more complicated than paper or plastic. First you need to understand just where the really big greenhouse gas emissions are. Numbers coming courtesy of Hal Harvey and his book “Designing Climate Solutions” duly footnoted. Please stick around. You can do it! Here goes: seven countries in the world produce 50% of the world’s carbon emissions (U.S., Russia, China, Japan, India, Indonesia and Brazil.). Add in 13 other countries and you’re closer to 75%. Of that 75% of the world’s emissions, energy combustion and industrial processes account for 93% with energy combustion alone accounting for 74% of that 93% figure due to the combustion of coal, oil, gas and biomass for power generation. (Transportation, buildings — their energy use — come next.)

Without government or administrative policies that reduce emissions from the elephant in the room energy sector, we’re pretty much s.o.l. and we will never ever make an impactful dent in global warming. It’s as simple and as complex as that.

You alone are only free to choose if given a choice. If electric cars are too expensive too bad. If you’d like to use renewable energy but Tucson Electric can’t provide it to you, too bad. If you’d like to be able to choose someone other than Tucson Electric to supply you with renewable energy, like in a Community Choice Energy plan, too bad — the Arizona Corporation Commission or the Arizona Legislature won’t allow it.

If you’d like building construction around here to be world class energy efficient too bad — developers and the real estate industry will fight you tooth and nail.

As an individual you will be spitting in the wind if you think you can make a difference. Yes, yes, I get it: your individual vote counts — but it only really counts when you act with many others who also prioritize reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You can vote out the gatekeepers in the Arizona Legislature who actively block greenhouse gas reduction legislation — Rep. Gail Griffin, Sen. Sine Kerr and the Freedom Party members of those committees. You can vote out the climate do-nothings on the Arizona Corporation Commission who actively block real greenhouse gas reduction rules — Nick Myers, Kevin Thompson and James O’Connor. You can join any number of local Tucson organizations that are 100% passionately fixated on reducing carbon emissions and in implementing strategies to effect the changes necessary to keep hope alive: Citizens Climate Lobby; Tucson Climate Coalition; Sierra Club; and Sustainable Tucson.

You cannot do this alone. You never could. Your precious time has to be prioritized to do the most good if we as a community and as a nation are to do the most good. It is the fight for our lives whether you’re 75 or 7. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and unless you act united with others it will blow us all down.