Forgive us, environment, for we have sinned

This last weekend that emptiest of empty gestures, Earth Hour, was held for the second time. In dishonour of it we are re-posting NEW IMPROVED HEAD's 2007 article about Live Earth.

No sooner are we finally willing to admit that God is dead than we’re lining up to worship a new one. Atheist books are finally showing up in the bestseller lists and the churches are collapsing under the weight of the damages they have to pay to people they’ve abused, but people are lining up to worship at the altar of the Environment.

Last weekend (July 7, 2007) had Live Earth, where musicians preached to us about how we need to be more responsible stewards of the environment. The musicians at Live Earth wanted everyone to sign the following commitment:

• I will change four light bulbs to CFLs (compact fluorescent lights) at my home.
  
• I will ride public transit or carpool one or more times per week.
  
• I will shop for the most energy efficient electronics and appliances.
  
• I will forward a Live Earth email message to five friends.
  
• I will shut off my equipment and lights whenever I’m not using them.

You know, you musical types could conserve more energy than that commitment ever will just by committing to holding one less concert a year, eh? Funny how that never got into any commitment.

Well, as Ambrose Bierce once wrote, a Christian is someone who follows the teachings of Christ insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin. It appears that to Live Earth an environmentalist is someone who follows the teachings of Al Gore insofar as they are not inconsistent with a life of mindless consumption.

I mean, look at that “commitment.” Order your Escalade with an energy efficient radio and you are virtuous. Change four crummy light bulbs and you are SAVED!! The environment will be HEE-YULLED!! It’s the old religious con: follow these easy rules and you’ll be saved some time way in the future; in the meantime, give us money. But instead of putting money in the plate you just keep on buying CDs as if you were going to listen to them on a solar-powered player.

Environmentalism even has its own form of that Roman Catholic institution, the indulgence. In the old days rich people used to establish orders of monks and nuns in their wills on the condition that the monks and nuns spend all their time praying for their benefactor’s soul in purgatory. Some bright spark in the Church realized that with all those monks and nuns it had lying around, it could sell prayers to those without the cash to endow religious orders, and the indulgence was born. Even today, to get someone’s soul prayed for by the congregation at a Roman Catholic church you slip the priest a little cash.

The environmentalist equivalent of the indulgence is the carbon credit. In their original form, carbon credits made sense. Countries assigned quotas to businesses establishing the amount of greenhouse gases they could emit. Businesses which were able to reduce their emissions below their quotas were then allowed to sell the unused part of their quotas to businesses who were having trouble reducing their emissions.

In its original form the carbon credit was a sensible way to deal with the inevitable errors in estimating reasonable quotas, and with differences between industries in the difficulty of reducing emissions. It encouraged companies to cut emissions and increased the probability that the country as a whole would meet its target for emissions. It wasn’t going to save the atmosphere all by itself, but neither is forwarding a Live Earth e-mail going to.

But the indulgence-sellers quickly got into the carbon credit business. Now you can issue carbon credits if you promise to plant trees. The idea is that if someone emits a tonne of greenhouse gases, he or she can pay a company to plant enough trees to remove a tonne of carbon dioxide from the air – assuming that the trees don’t die and aren’t cut down (for the new high-tech headquarters of the tree-planting company, for example). And assuming that they actually get planted.

Carbon credits like these of course paid for a large part of the anti-environmental excess which was what Live Earth was in practice. The performers travelled a total of something like 200,000 miles by jet to get to the concerts, and corresponding indulgences were purchased to save their environmental souls.

Salvation is easy! that's what the religious are always telling us, anyway. You want to go to heaven? Then just stop making them graven images. And cut down on that coveting. You want to save the environment? Then change four light bulbs. Or light four votive candles and save both your soul and the environment.

Given that the religious haven’t even managed to keep their simple promise not to make graven images, I don’t see much hope for any huge surge in public transit ridership as a result of all those commitments people made at Live Earth.

Making life tolerable is hard and requires courage, but religion tells people that if they don’t worry about this life but instead worry about the next one, everything will be peachy in the end. Improving the environment is hard and requires dedication and a willingness to live with the idea that our standard of living might have to be reduced, but the religion of individual environmental action tells us that if we don’t worry about the environment as a whole but only about the mundane trappings of our daily individual lives the environment will be peachy in the end.

Religion’s had a long and successful career, but we’re still pretty sinful. Promising to be good isn’t going take carbon dioxide out of the air, either.

Forgive Us, Environment, For We have Sinned © John FitzGerald, 2007