These changes are real, and very important, so it is not surprising that some MPs Westlake interviewed said that they are more interested in reducing pollution through technological advances than changing behavior. But emissions from things like food, air travel, and our homes seem stubborn—and these are the areas where behavioral change can play the biggest role.
Westlake asked MPs what they thought about encouraging low-carbon behaviour. Two members of Parliament told him they felt it would be seen as a “show of power,” and when asked about reducing emissions, others seemed worried they would be seen as environmentalists. “I’m thinking of trying to set some sort of example but not be too sanctimonious” is how one MP put it.
That anonymous MP is saying something that I think many people feel on an intuitive level. We compare our behavior to the people around us—or people in society—and feel judged when our behavior doesn’t match. If my neighbor has solar panels and I don’t, they must think I don’t care about the environment, right? Faced with these complex ethical questions, it’s easy for MPs—and all kinds of leaders—to preach about things we can do to reduce pollution that don’t require a moral accounting of our behavior.
But this misses something really big. Decisions about climate change and our individual behavior do have a moral component. It doesn’t mean that if someone takes an extra flight each year it makes them a bad person, but our moral obligations to other people, and to future people, should at least be part of the decision-making equation. Westlake says this serves an important purpose—not to punish people for going on vacation, but to direct attention to people whose lifestyles have the highest carbon impact.
I think of this as very flexible when it comes to food, and especially some alternatives to beef, which have more carbon than any other food. Many people hope that making plant-based burgers cheap and tasty will be enough to convert a large number of meat-eaters to the plant-based side. When I sit at other protein conferences, no one wants to talk about the ethics of eating meat, although I suspect that’s the main motivation for many people there. They think the argument won’t work for anyone who converts to pea protein burgers or whatever.
Maybe they are right. But I suspect that if we ignore the moral component of climate decisions, we greatly limit the scope of our desire for climate. It’s not that morality should be a big or important part of our decision-making, and we shouldn’t expect people to be morally consistent. Behavior isn’t the whole story of climate, but it’s not a footnote either.
“The decision-making process of ‘Are you going to take that flight?’ it needs to be normalized,” said Westlake. “It doesn’t mean you stop doing everything, but it means you make decisions based on the impact of the weather.” And that’s part of the reason why leaders—in Westlake’s estimation—really matter. It matters when Taylor Swift approves of Kamala Harris, and it matters when Taylor Swift takes a short hop on a private jet. If you accept that we should all think morally about climate change, then some people should pay more attention than others.
And this goes back to the MPs warning about encouraging behavior change. One of the members of Parliament that Westlake spoke to did not want to discourage traveling by plane, saying that it was wrong to prevent families from having one foreign holiday a year. When behavioral change appears in the press, it is often framed in a specific way—stop eating meat, stop flying, stop driving—and so on. But by dismissing behavior change entirely we lose the ability to focus on the wealthy who bear what Westlake calls a “differential burden” of dealing with climate change. Instead of holding on to behavioral change, perhaps those in power should focus their attention on other leaders.