Dear Hank, In a video from this year, you said that the fact that people toss (100 companies release 71% of carbon emissions) is a way of oversimplifying things. Can you elaborate on this to help me understand? Thank you
These 100 companies produce fuels used by every industry. So you can blame just the oil company, or you can also blame the car companies and the plane companies and all of the companies (and governments) that depend on fossil-fuel-based international and inter-state shipping infrastructure (which is, I think, pretty much all of them.)
I am less interested in who is producing the fuel and more interested in who is holding us back from progress. For clarity, those are almost always the same companies and the fossil fuel lobby has been extremely effective in slowing our reaction to climate change and holding back governments from investing in renewable energy. But the frame of “it’s just 100 companies” makes it feel like this is something that just 100 people are subjecting the other 7 billion to. In fact, pretty much every company benefits from our dependence on massively subsidized fossil fuels.
I think the “71% of carbon emissions come from 100 companies” is a valid reaction to the “we can save the world as long as we all buy organic produce and drive Prius’” personal responsibility message of the 2000s which is, yes, complete crap. I think that pushing that narrative to the side makes complete sense. I also don’t always think over-simplifications are evil or anything, it’s just that this is an oversimplification.
To me, it sounds a little like, “If these 100 companies would just stop being bad, everything would be ok.” But, we can’t just switch tomorrow. If those 100 companies stopped producing fossil fuel tomorrow, I wouldn’t be surprised if most people were dead within 12 months. So we have to invest heavily to begin the transition right now because it’s going to take a long time.
It also feels a little hopeless. Like, how do you get a company to stop making money voluntarily? I can’t say, “Company, you must stop making money!” But I can say, “Government, you must stop giving that company subsidies, you must tax them and give the proceeds to create better mass transit and help people who can’t afford their heating oil. You must invest in renewable energy infrastructure.”
I know this might sound nitpicky, but the story that makes sense to me is that our governments decide how they want to subsidize clean and dirty energy, and every dollar that subsidizes dirty energy digs us and our children deeper into an already very deep hole, and every dollar that supports clean energy begins filling that hole in.
Anonymous asked: Not really a question, but I'd love to see a video from you about billionaires, philanthropy, and public perception. I recently watched Why Billionaires Won’t Save Us segment from The Patriot Act, and read Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas, I know John has made a video on things getting better, but I recently saw an article (Progress and its discontents from New Internationalist) that makes me doubt even the claims of progress, and I'm feeling pretty pessimistic.
It’s impossible to argue that things haven’t been getting better in a lot of measurable ways. The number of children dying has dramatically decreased, for example, and children dying is always bad. Literacy is up, starvation is down, we’ve eliminated a lot of diseases and decreased the impact of a lot of others. But there is no way in which this story is simple.
I am frustrated by two parts of this conversation:
1. I am frustrated by people who paint this as a result of markets and capitalism and billionaire interventions, as if the decrease in child mortality is something a bunch of billionaires did. In fact, this is a result of people working hard and caring about each other. Treating people as capital has done TREMENDOUS harm and continues to. Global trade has helped and it has hurt. Painting this progress as an inevitable effect of capitalism is just incorrect. The place where Partners in Health is building their Maternal Care Hospital is the place where diamonds come from. But no one in that country makes money from those diamonds, the government sold a 100 year lease to finance their civil war, so right now the place where that luxury originates is also a place with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.
2. That being said, I am also frustrated by people who say that all of the good that has been done is just lies, and actually things are worse now than they ever were. Not only is that misinformation, it also belittles the massive amount of work done to make life on earth better. That includes work by aid workers, but it mostly comes down to the people who live in those places working to make life better for their families and their communities.
In short, things have gotten better, but the whys and hows are complex and not always clear. The people I trust to have the best handle on those questions are the people in the communities where these problems exist and, secondarily, the people who work directly with them.
That’s why John and I decided to work closely with Partners in Health, and why John has gone to Sierra Leone to learn from healthcare workers there. The vast majority of PIH’s employees are from the places that they serve. Partners in Health isn’t about swooping in and saving people, it’s about enabling communities to build sustainable healthcare systems.
None of this is ever going to be perfect or without fault. We are never going to have a perfect global system, and I will certainly not defend the current system, which is often literally disgusting. But there are people who are alive right now and helping others because someone helped them, and that’s worth celebrating. Likewise, it’s a chain that’s worth continuing, and that gives me hope.
I just got a call from a reporter and answered questions about Tumblr and the one thing I said that I think was good was, “Just because someone mega-corp doesn’t think Tumblr is a good way to make money doesn’t mean it’s not valuable.”
I hope I didn’t fuck that interview up too much…
Oh, also, they kept referring to “Tumbling down Tumblr” my “Tumblr Musical” and it’s for radio…so, like, I am prepared for terrible embarrassment. Please send help.
