Adapt, Chapter 5 – When best efforts and intentions fall short, and actually make things worse.

Personal parables are like a regular parables, but they come from modern media and tend to be oddly specific to yourself. See my whole collection.

It’s not every day that a film changes your life; especially not a film that is largely a PowerPoint presentation. But that is what has just happened to Geoff.

Geoff is a straightforward kind of fellow: twenty-six, single, lives in London, works in an insurance office and until twelve hours ago, had very little interest in climate change. 

Last night, Geoff agreed to let a crush on his friend’s new flatmate, Jude, influence his judgement. Jude is a tree-hugging environmentalist – albeit a very cute one – and she showed Geoff Al Gore’s documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

And this morning – having slept fitfully, amid dreams that he had set up home with Jude but the crumbling Antarctic ice sheet was about to submerge it in a terrifying wall of water – is the first day of the rest of his life: A life as a born-again environmentalist.

Geoff starts his day, as he always does, by filling the kettle for a coffee. But then he remembers that the kettle is an energy-guzzler, so he has a cold glass of milk instead.

He saves more electricity by eating his usual two slices of bread untoasted. As he leaves the flat – pausing to unplug his mobile phone charger – he picks up his car keys, then thinks again and walks to the bus stop instead.

By the time he hops off the bus by his office, the lack of morning coffee is getting to him so he pops into Starbucks for a cappuccino. At lunchtime, he quizzes the local deli owner about the provenance of ingredients and opts for a cheeseburger made with locally reared beef.

There’s a slow period in the afternoon so he surfs the internet, ordering himself a brochure about the Toyota Prius and arranging for an installer of rooftop windmills to come round and give him a quote. He’s tired at the end of the day and absent-mindedly leaves his office computer on standby before he heads for the bus stop.

Back at home late, after waiting ages for a bus, he drives to the supermarket – just a short trip, and he remembered to take his own plastic bags – where he buys a pack of energy-efficient light bulbs and a box of phosphate-free washing powder so that he’ll be able to put tomorrow’s work clothes through the washer-drier.

He picks up some local organic lamb, local tomatoes and potatoes, and a bottle of wine (not shipped halfway round the world from Chile) for dinner.

Having eaten, he saves more electricity by eschewing the dishwasher and doing the washing-up by hand. He decides to install his new energy-efficient bulbs, and then rethinks as that would involve throwing perfectly good light bulbs into the trash; so he puts them in a drawer, to replace the others as they fail.

That night Geoff enjoys the sleep of the just, dreaming of Jude laughing happily, her hair tossed in the breeze of the open sunroof as she rides in the passenger seat of his new Prius. 

You have no doubt guessed that Geoff’s eco-friendly day was not quite as successful as he would like to think.

Let’s start with the milk, which requires a critical piece of equipment to manufacture: a cow. Cows emit a lot of methane. (I put the matter delicately. If it is any consolation, most of the emission is through the cow’s mouth, rather than the alternative route.)

And methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide: in producing about 250 ml of milk, a cow belches 7.5 litres of methane, which weighs around 5 grams, equivalent to 100 grams of carbon dioxide.

Add all the other inputs to the milk – feed for the cows, transport, pasteurisation – and the 250 ml that Geoff drank produced around 300 grams of carbon dioxide.

By not boiling his kettle, on the other hand, he saved only about 25g of carbon dioxide. His first planet-saving decision, eschewing a coffee in favour of a glass of milk, increased the greenhouse gas emissions of his morning drink by a factor of twelve. Dairy products are so bad for the planet that Geoff would have done better to toast his bread but not butter it rather than buttering it but not toasting it.

As beef relies on the same methane-emitting equipment as dairy products, it should be no surprise that Geoff’s choice of a cheeseburger (2500g of carbon dioxide for a quarter-pounder) was poor. The lamb chops he had for supper (say another 2500 g) were just as bad: sheep, too, produce methane.

Geoff would have done better to choose pork or chicken, which emit about half the CO2 – and even better with fish, especially ones (such as herring, mackerel and whiting) that swim close to the surface and – unlike cod and tuna – remain plentiful.

Best of all for the planet, Geoff could have had an entirely vegan supper, but it’s going to take more than Al Gore and a pretty face to persuade Geoff that this is a good idea.

Geoff was at pains to buy local, organic food. This helped – but only a little. Going organic trims 5 to 15 per cent off the cheeseburger and lamb chop figures.

Buying local produce to reduce ‘food miles’, however, is often a counterproductive exercise. While it’s clearly true that freighting food around the world uses energy, the impact is less than you might think: most of it travels by ship; when it does travel by plane, it doesn’t get a big seat with ample legroom and free champagne (the term ‘food miles’ misleadingly echoes ‘air miles’, with its connotations of business-class indulgence rather than efficiently packed containers); and it was probably produced in a much more sensible climate.

Geoff’s choice of British lamb over New Zealand lamb might well have released more carbon dioxide four times as much, if one team of academic researchers (admittedly, based in New Zealand) is to be believed.

The figures are debatable but the basic insight is not: it takes more fossil fuel to produce lamb in the UK than in New Zealand, which has a longer grassy season and more hydroelectric power, and this should be weighed against emissions from transport.

Geoff’s choice of British over Spanish tomatoes was certainly misguided: the carbon dioxide emitted by road-hauling them from Spain is utterly outweighed by the fact that Spain is sunny. whereas British tomatoes need heated greenhouses.

As for avoiding Chilean wine, shipping wine halfway round the world adds only about 5 per cent to the greenhouse gas emissions involved in making it in the first place.

Geoff was pleased he took his own plastic bags to the supermarket, but a plastic bag is responsible for only about one thousandth the carbon emissions of the food you put in it.

This didn’t come close to compensating for the indulgence he allowed himself of driving to the supermarket, which would have generated over 150g of carbon dioxide per mile even if he’d already been driving his coveted new Prius.

Even that number will be flattering because it assumes an uncongested journey, which is unlikely to be the case in London; and whatever some Prius fans may believe, it turns out that Priuses do have a corporeal form, and a Prius in congested traffic will cause more emissions indirectly by slowing other cars down than it will emit directly.

Still, let’s at least give Geoff some credit for taking the bus to work. But not too much credit. The typical London bus has only thirteen people on it, despite the city’s size and enthusiasm for public transport.

Cars carry on average, 1.6 people, and at that occupancy rate they actually emit less carbon dioxide, per passenger mile, than a bus at its typical occupancy.

Some claim this is irrelevant because the bus was going anyway, and therefore Geoff’s contribution to greenhouse gases was close to zero.

By the same logic Geoff could enjoy a guilt-free long-distance flight because the plane, too, is going anyway. The point is that Geoff’s purchase of the long-distance ticket would contribute to the airline’s decision about how many future flights it should run on this route.

Unless bus routes are entirely insensitive to passenger demand – which is, one must admit, a possibility – then the same argument applies to catching the bus.

Geoff was, of course, planning to drive alone rather than with 0.6 other people, so by taking the bus he probably saved about 100g of carbon dioxide per mile – say 300g on a three-mile round trip commute. Unfortunately, he then wasted about the same amount by boiling his potatoes with the lid off.

Geoff did well to buy the energy-efficient light bulbs, but erred in waiting to install them: the old ones waste electricity so quickly that it’s more eco-friendly to chuck them out immediately.

He shouldn’t have scorned the dishwasher, which is more carbon-efficient than the typical hand-wash – arguably, many times more efficient.

The phosphate-free washing powder might be good news for the health of nearby lakes, but when it comes to climate change what matters is that Geoff should have used a low-temperature wash and left enough time to dry his clothes on a line instead of relying on the tumble dryer – thus using 600g of carbon dioxide rather than 3300g.

Jude is likely to be unimpressed by all of this. But perhaps Geoff’s windmill plan will save his as-vet-imaginary romance? It is unlikely.

A small rooftop windmill in an urban environment generates an average of 8 watts, so Geoff would need twelve of them merely to run a standard 100W light bulb; one of these toy windmills will save Geoff just 120g of carbon dioxide a day.

He wasted five times as much as that by thoughtlessly leaving his desktop computer on standby in the office – which is easily done even by the most committed environmentalist, as I can see by looking across our shared office to the computer my wife forgot to turn off this morning.

What about the mobile phone charger Geoff unplugged as he was leaving the house? That draws about half a watt, a hundredth of a computer on standby: even the windmill could cope with that. Unplugging it saves a magnificently puny 6 grams of carbon dioxide a day.

To summarise: despite Geoff’s good intentions and passing familiarity with the kind of stuff that causes greenhouse gas emissions, he made some decisions that saved much less carbon than he imagined and others that were actively counterproductive.

It couldn’t be simpler? Not unless you devote your life to studying carbon emissions – and perhaps not even then. 

Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure. Chapter 5 , Climate change or: Changing the rules for success, Part 3. By Tim Harford

This story has been lodged in my brain since I read it in 2016. Rereading now, I can see a number of details that I expect have changed, and a number of areas where Harford is probably exaggerating to make his point, but I feel that the message holds up.

It’s really hard to adjust behaviours and make good intentions add up, to more than our accidental and occasional bad behaviours detract.

This feels almost like a wicked problem in its own right. How do we significantly change enough behaviours to cause positive effect or at least better reconcile when our conscious good behaviours are not outweighed by our equally conscious bad behaviours?

(I’ve tentatively added the Personal Parables category to this post, as while it’s not exactly like the others, it’s doing a similar thing in my mind. Recurring again and again in different situations and effecting how I reflect on certain situations).