Climate change

I find that people often think of climate change as something for other people to do something about – usually the government or technological innovation. While there’s nothing wrong with trying to change the government or pursue technological innovation, I don’t believe either of those will be sufficient to stop climate change. To see this, look at the numbers. If you assume that our current level of pollution is too high for our survival (which is basically what climate change is saying), then logically, to survive and/or to avoid being responsible for deaths, we should each have a carbon footprint of less than the current world average. Now, the world average is about 4 metric tons per year (https://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-average-carbon-footprint.htm) – much higher than the Canadian average. The activities, in no particular order, that cause a lot of pollution are common everyday activities for Canadians:

-Driving a car
-Eating meat, especially from the grocery store
-living in a big house that’s heated and/or cooled
-having children
-buying lots of stuff, especially disposable stuff or stuff with a short lifetime -traveling, especially by plane or car

If someone does /any one/ of these 6 things in “average” Canadian amounts, there is no way to have a carbon footprint that’s less than the world average. If you don’t believe me, do the carbon footprint calculations for each activity for an amount that you consider “average”. Keep in mind, I’m just stating facts, so don’t shoot the messenger.

Now, people have a few different attitudes when presented with this information. Some people are like “I can’t give up those 6 things without abandoning civilization and living a primitive lifestyle” – an “all-or-nothing” mindset. But that doesn’t follow – it’s possible to drastically reduce one’s impact in all 6 areas, still participate in civilization, and have a carbon footprint less than 4 metric tons. Everybody can bike / walk / take a bus, everybody can eat a plant-based diet, everybody can sell their house and live in a small space, everybody can adopt children (well, they can at least apply), everybody can reduce / borrow / repair / build / buy used / buy durable / buy reusable things, and nobody needs to travel all the time, especially not by plane or car. People with the “all-or-nothing” mindset might wonder why they’re reading this on a computer screen, or might turn off the lights during a climate discussion, but that misses the point – electricity from computers and lights have a minor impact and can be acquired from solar panels or nuclear energy. To survive, we have to reduce those major impacts, for which solar and nuclear won’t save us.

Other people would instead see these changes as unthinkable, or not on their radar. They do what they can easily do for the environment – recycle and turn off lights they aren’t using – but climate change is a peripheral concern in their life. This is because they can’t conceive of making major changes to their life that they don’t see people around them making. Hence, they look for someone to blame who is causing more pollution than they are – big corporations and / or the government. Yes, the government should stop subsiding oil etc. etc., but people think the fact that it isn’t doing so absolves them of personal responsibility and puts the blame on the government (or on corporations, etc). I predict this trend will continue to grow as time progresses, with people increasingly blaming either their own government, or foreign governments / people who are causing such and such environmental problems, or such and such a corporation. As resources get more scarce, eventually there won’t be enough for the government to physically be able to provide people what they need to survive at all, yet people will continue to scream at them to do something about “capitalism” or “communism” or whatever. Or maybe this has already happened?

But why do people see it as unthinkable to make major changes in their life? It is absolutely possible to turn your life upside down, for 2 reasons:

(1) The /majority/ of people already live a worse life than that, because they’re poor! In fact, throughout the /majority/ of history, /everybody/ had no choice but to live a worse life than that!
(2) Many people have had total life transformations when they chose to follow a religion. For example, Jesus called people to give up all their possessions and follow him and live a simple life, and there have been many people who have done so. Why then would it be unthinkable to do something similar in order to survive and/or to avoid being responsible for deaths?

That’s why I don’t believe climate change can be solved by checklists of efficiency improvements, or by better government regulations, or by new technology, or even by ending capitalism. But the numbers show that it could be solved with a new way of life. The religious term for this is to “repent” – to turn back from the current thing that you’re doing and do something totally different. To give up the life you wanted to live. A person doing so could at least be absolved of responsibility, and enough people doing so could even save us. And the interesting thing is, the way of life that’s required isn’t even much of a sacrifice. A life that avoids those 6 harms is very similar to the life described by the Early Retirement Extreme philosophy (http://earlyretirementextreme.com/) – i.e. it enables you to get a lot of money very quickly. Granted, someone with a mindset who wants the things that people usually want money for would be unlikely to be able to save money that way, leaving the question of what you would do with all that extra money. But not having to work still sounds like a pretty good deal to me. I know in my life it’s enabled me to leave my office computer world and do what I love (teach children), and that’s had a huge positive impact in my life.

Just as you might be able to blame the government for being the biggest cause of (or, in some cases, not even believing in) climate change, and I might be able to blame you for being worse than me, so someone from a poor country with a much lower carbon footprint could just as well blame me (since I’m still approximately at the world average of 4, not to mention my past lifestyle). You could also argue about which of those 6 is the worst source of pollution, and blame people who do that one. But instead of blaming anyone, or throwing up our hands and saying it’s hopeless, why not focus on what we as individuals can do? Instead of focusing on what we can’t control, why not do something about what we can control?

Real estate for single people

It seems like real estate for the long-term really isn’t designed to accommodate single people. For families with children, it’s a no-brainer: buy or build a house of the appropriate size for your family. For couples, renting an apartment is reasonable. But apartments for single people are only a little bit cheaper than apartments for couples, and about the same size, meaning we have to pay almost double the rent per person if we want to live alone. Buying a house and living in it alone is even more expensive (because of the opportunity cost of investing the money you would spend on the house). Many single people end up sharing a house or apartment with strangers, even though they prefer to live alone, simply because that’s the only way to pay the same low rent per person that everybody else pays. We often have money to invest in a house or would like to build equity in something we own but there isn’t anything to buy that’s practical for single people.

So I started looking into whether I could build something that’s practical for single people. The obvious practical answer would be a tiny house, because that’s the amount of space that a single person needs. But it seems you’re not allowed to add a second dwelling on a someone’s property in most cities. So of course, just buy a plot of land and build a tiny house on it, right? No – apparently the minimum house size allowed in Fredericton is 70 square metres, which is as big as an apartment, i.e. an appropriate size for at least 2 people to live in. Next I got the idea of building a house divided into 2 units, with one unit being the right size for a single person (“granny suite”) and the other one the right size for a family, so I could live in the small one and rent out the big one. But apparently most of the residential land for sale in Fredericton is classified as R-2, which means duplexes aren’t allowed on it. No wonder there aren’t many options for single people – they’ve mostly been outlawed!

Any other ideas would be welcome, but anything practical seems to involve jumping through hoops. I guess the best I can come up with at this point is to buy land, build something that is indeed 70 square metres, but make some of that floor space be a greenhouse which is unheated, plus maybe an unheated garage or storage area. The glass from the greenhouse and the fact that it’s attached to the house would actually transfer some heat to the house too and save energy compared to its absence. The actual heated floor space would be small. This idea seems like quite a stretch just to get a small living space, and I strongly suspect that the stupid city still has some stupid law that would disallow even this idea. Plus, a single person would still be needlessly occupying a whole plot of valuable city land, when you could easily fit 2 such small houses on the same plot of land.

More to the point, there’s just no good reason for this mess. You can physically divide space into whatever size each person or group of people requires. Why should single people have to pay for twice as much space as they need? Why should the environment have to suffer the heating up of a bunch of empty, wasted space? Why should the law be trying to /prevent/ me from reducing my carbon footprint to a sustainable level, let alone do nothing to try to stop climate change?

I’ve spent years trying to think of solutions to this problem, when the government could easily solve it by fixing its stupid laws. At one point I thought a mini-home was a good solution, but they’re still the same size as an apartment and still end up costing the same amount, so again are more appropriate for 2 people. I’ve considered building a smaller and more efficient house in the country, but why should single people be pushed out into the country, and what if there are still things we want to do in the city? I’ve even considered moving to a poorer country where appropriate-sized houses are commonplace. There’s simply no other word for it: such laws are discrimination against single people.