The one thing holding back climate action
Too much carbon, too little empathy.
Good morning! And welcome to Planet Days, a green newsletter for a greenwashed Planet. Thank you to Sam Liptak for editing this week’s post.
If you’re new to Planet Days, every other week (or so) I send out three-minute reads on what it means to go green. Previously, I’ve written about topics from gas stoves and recycling bins to lawns and electric vehicles.
This week, I’m diving into a trait we could all use a little more of.
Austin, Texas, has a shortage of bike lanes but an abundance of pickup trucks. I realized this last fall on a city bike tour, dodging traffic in a city known for its weirdness, but apparently not its bikeability.
That bike tour, however, was a good learning experience. I was with several people from California, and despite complaining earlier about traffic caused by bike lanes in their respective cities, their tune changed once they saw things from a cyclist’s perspective.
In other words, the bike tour was a lesson in empathy — and how a little bit of it can help shape a greener, more livable Planet.
Unfortunately, empathy is lacking in many parts of the country. Too little empathy has historically driven some of the most disastrous policy decisions in the United States, from plowing over neighborhoods for highways to cutting social service programs, like public transit and affordable housing.
Such decisions tend to create a carbon-heavy world.
For example, too little empathy crushes emerging technologies like e-bikes or electric scooters, which serve as more affordable, greener transit options. Despite e-scooters’ ability to get people out of cars, many cities are banning them altogether, as residents complain that scooters clog sidewalks and endanger pedestrians.
But coins always have two sides. I’m guilty of lacking empathy every time I visit an American city not named Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, or San Francisco — judging my friends’ car-centric lifestyle as a reflection of their morals, when in reality, decades of policy decisions have created an environment that requires everyone to have a car.
Beyond differences in geographies or transportation ideology, though, this inability to empathize may be rooted in other factors, many of which push us further apart.
In our tech-heavy world, we’re isolated behind screens, talking via apps, trolling people online, and participating in social networks that largely validate already established beliefs. And our politically charged and divisive landscape worsens things, making it extremely difficult to see issues with two sides and, therefore, ensuring things stay the same.
Whatever it is, without empathy, we cannot build a greener, more equitable future. And even though empathy is rooted in lived experience, it can also be created.
My partner and I often joke that driver’s tests should make drivers bike on the same road they drive on, so that they understand the plight of the cyclist and drive with more caution. But absent that policy, simply trying to understand one another and talk through these differences is a good place to start.
Of course, talking only gets us so far. We also need macrosolutions, like the Biden administration’s new national transportation blueprint, which slashes transportation emissions and aims to “provide equitable, affordable, and accessible options for moving people and goods.”
It’s much easier to put up blinders than it is to change our behaviors, or at the very least, our mindsets. And it’s much easier to see the future as an extension of the present — with all its comfortable flaws stuck to it.
But until cyclists get in cars and drivers get on bikes, we’ll never shake these flaws for a better, greener future. Instead, we’ll let charged rhetoric take over, as division turns into gridlock and gridlock turns into disaster.