Notes

From Lowbrow: What We Can Do about the Climate Crisis in our Far Corner of the World

Much of the environmental damage that's happening in the world right now radiates from 3 industries: energy, transportation, and heavy industry. And from the three, the great majority of that responsibility rests on the shoulders of big countries like the USA, Brazil, and China.

If you really wanted to lose weight, you'd start by targeting the biggest source of your calories; and if you really wanted to save the environment, you'd go straight to the most egregious sources of carbon. Being a tiny country in the middle of the Pacific, the absolute environmental impact of the Philippines doesn't make a major dent on a global scale. If we keep on polluting, ravaging, and buttfucking the crap out of the seven thousand islands that we have, the world will move on business as usual.

The hard truth is that none of our individual efforts matter. So what's the point of trying when we're doomed anyway?

It's tempting to just succumb to the whims of destiny and fatten ourselves till the dawn of the apocalypse; but if you choose to follow that line of thought, might as well just drink a glass of cold bleach to end your suffering. There's some truth in saying that life is inherently pointless; but the irony is that the point is to try to not make it so—it's the trying that makes all the difference.

Of course not all trying is the same. You could try biking across the ocean but it won't bring you anywhere. Unfortunately, thousands of people who want to help the environment end up doing just that due to having wrong information and getting carried away by their emotions.

One of the most painful videos I've had to watch about the environmental damage of plastic was the one where some divers had to pull a plastic straw out of a sea turtle's skull. The straw entered the little guy's nostril and possibly pierced sections of his head. The divers were attempting to not-so-gently (they had no choice) pull it out with a vice grip with while the turtle braced through the immense pain.

You just cannot watch a video like that without getting a blood rush. And it's also impossible to go through that without going through fifty stages of guilt. WE WANT ACTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE RIGHT FUCKING NOW. Ironically, that's where it turns from a rightful cause to an aimless protest.

Fueled with equal parts passion and rage, the vast majority of well-meaning environmentalists will just grab at anything to shed their guilt. "Oh I'm having a delicious burger but the whales are eating plastic, how insensitive of me! Let me buy a tote bag and pick up trash on the beach so I can feel like I'm doing my part." But it's counter-intuitive—a lot of the feel-good environmental initiatives we support don't actually do anything helpful.

There's no evidence that disposable bamboo cutlery reduces our carbon footprint compared to plastic. Paper straws could potentially be worse for the environment because they disintegrate quickly so people have been found to be using several at a time. And to make cotton tote bags a better choice than plastic, you would need to use it 20,000 times—and who uses tote bags that long?

Because unlike heavy metal mining or electrical efficiency, tote bags, Klean Kanteens, and paper straws are visible and concrete; you can touch them and you can feel them. It's an illusory magic trick where you deceive yourself into thinking you're doing your part even though evidence doesn't confirm it.

That kind of thinking also fuels our obsession with plastic.

If you ask a random Twitter activist about an issue they want to see resolved, you will without doubt, get P L A S T I C. Because it's the most real thing that we see clogging our oceans and killing sea turtles, we hastily push it to the forefront of the environmental crisis. We praise restaurants that announce their efforts to reduce plastic use when there's no evidence that the alternative they implemented actually did a better job for the environment.

We need to stop thinking about our climate crisis as a revolution against plastic. Plastic is an enemy, but it's not the final boss.

We keep on clamoring for immediate change, but we often overlook the fact that even seemingly positive change has plenty of trade-offs. When restaurants use reusable ceramic dishes, they waste precious water for dishwashing instead. With supposedly cleaner paper bags, people often tend to waste more than plastic because they feel less guilty about it. When you want to fly to New York to attend a climate conference, the jet fuel you'll be running on will release dangerous carbon into the air. In most cases, a benefit on one side is detrimental to the other. We have to broaden our thinking about solving this problem.

Painful and shocking images stir up people to focus on the wrong things to help the environment.

I know everything sounds bleak and depressing but that's not the point. There's plenty we can do and we're getting to that right now.

The key is to triangulate all support on solutions that will have sustained, lasting impact. These solutions exist in 3 critical areas: science, government, and business.

Science is primarily concerned with searching for technological miracles that will drastically reduce or reverse our carbon footprint. Some fields such as geo-engineering have been making strides in manipulating the climate to stop it from completely blowing up on us. The use of robots in construction has dramatically increased efficiencies in one of the world's filthiest industries. In the near future, AI would be able to predict and manage the flow of food leading to more efficient, wasteless consumption. If you want more evidence that this works, just look at how many trees the internet has saved (sans any form of activism) by turning most of human communication digital.

But science isn't a silver bullet. Hundreds of breakthroughs around the world just wither and die because they can't get any public support. That's where government and capitalism come in.

Governments around the world can redirect the flow of resources. By using taxes, incentives, and policies, governments can shape how we use our energy, how we move around the city, and how we manage our waste. By pumping money in education, governments can teach the public how urgent this crisis is. Through focus, governments can adopt new, cleaner technologies and spread its use. (Unfortunately we don't have a reliable one, but we can still go out there because this is a global problem, not a local one.)

Business on the other hand should be about making environmentally friendly options as accessible and affordable to most people.

Most Greenpeace-style environmentalists mistakenly believe is that nagging people will magically turn apathetic consumers into eco-warriors overnight. Similarly, most people also believe that grassroots movements from small businesses will save the world with good intentions and a P300 bar of sustainable soap. Lies.

For sustained and lasting change, economic interests need to align with the environment. For as long as that bar of soap isn't priced like Safeguard, no amount of guilt-tripping will sway non-believers. When businesses find ways to bring sustainable products to the mass market at affordable prices, cleaner options will thrive—and the change will happen like a wildfire.

There's some recent proof. Vegans have been proselytizing the moral and health benefits of their (usually) bland and expensive food for half a century, but the adoption of veganism has been abysmal. After decades of nagging, vegans remain in the fringes of society because good intentions don't work if your products are undesirable and beyond people's budgets.

In contrast, Impossible Foods, the billion-dollar fake-meat company known for plant-based bleeding burgers has finally found a way to offer their cleaner, more delicious, and slaughter-free meat at competitive prices at Burger King! They sold out in less than a month. At this rate, it should take them less than a year to outpace what veganism has done for fifty. (Adding to the list of envious competitors, KFC also added vegan nuggets to their menu that sold out just as fast.)

To make the largest possible impact right now, the smartest thing to do would be to set laser-sights on spurring change in science, governments, and businesses:
Work at a company that champions these causes in actions, not words.
Stop antagonizing big corporations and instead work with them—they're run by normal people just like you. Due to their size and influence, they have the ability to create a sizeable impact on the environment overnight.
In contrast, recognize that small businesses (like us) don't have much power to create change. People love romanticizing underdog movements from small players, but this is a problem that should be tackled by the big guys better.
Find ways to make environmental options more attractive (design them better and make them cheaper) to people to create demand for them.
Support political candidates anywhere around the world who have environmental platforms.
Spend your money on products from companies who have sustainability at their core. This does not only empower clean companies, but it pressures the competition to follow suit.
Find ways to help scientists (they are always pro-environment) in any capacity.
Speak out and educate people on social media.
Keep on making noise (the right kind) so governments and companies around the world to shape public perception. Keep the conversation around the climate crisis hot and alive for as long as possible.
Use technology whenever you can because the trade-offs are lopsided. E-books are always cleaner than paperbacks. For meetings, Facetime is always cleaner than getting a Grab. When filing documents, Google Drive has a way smaller carbon footprint than a filing cabinet full of paper.
None of these will look as photogenic as your sunset selfie after picking up trash around the white sands of Boracay. Short-term you might still continue supporting the unintended murder of sea turtles. In the next few years, you will still feel existential guilt from eating that unethically farmed cow in your delicious cheeseburger. It will sting, but don't listen to the noise. Just press forward and focus on the big picture.

Finding moments of optimism feels like a workout when you're always reading news about the climate crisis. But despite all the bad press, there are plenty of reasons to believe that if we continue working towards a common goal and throwing our support behind the right people, we'll find a way out of this mess.

—Dwight Co, Managing Partner @ Lowbrow
What is Lowbrow doing then? The most that we're doing is throwing in some rationality into the climate discussion. While we'd love to label ourselves as an environmentally-friendly company, it wouldn't exactly be exactly truthful at this point in time. While we do have sustainability on our minds, we still do not have the capacity to do anything meaningful yet—and that is something we are working towards as we grow. 🌲