A Taylor expansion of effort
I’ve recently been reading Greta Thunberg’s ‘The Climate Book,’ a collection of articles by climate experts and also Thunberg herself on the climate crisis and what we can do to help.
My existing view is that the world is heading on a a collision course towards disaster, the warming across the globe that leads to an increase in natural disasters, which will destroy homes and habitats for people and animals. It sometimes seems that what I can do, as an individual, is completely imperceptible, compared to the corporations and institutions that control the world, its energy supply, and the systems that people live in.
It’s like how our habits as a consumer, is controlled by what’s on discount, what’s shown to us on ads, and what the norm is.
What makes this book powerful is that it acknowledges this fact, that individual action is miniscule, but states that some individuals tend to have more power than others in shaping the future.
As a person living the global North, who gets on a plane for quite a few times each year, my ‘carbon footprint’ is already disproportionately larger than billions of people around the world. This means that my choices as a consumer already have a markedly bigger impact than maybe 90% of the world’s population.
Above that, as a physicist, I can contribute to the technology needed to produce renewables, capture carbon or replace materials with high carbon emissions.
As a person with a voice who’s not living in a cave, I can influence the people around me to adopt better practices.
And if enough people do this, there’s bound to be a person sufficiently connected to me in a position of power, whose actions can truly shape the environment.
If we expand a person’s (positive) impact \(I\) as a function of effort \(E\), it’s clear that consumer actions lead to a linear impact. However, building useful technologies, doing useful research, adding to the climate discussion, contributing to education and advocacy, can have lead to superlinear effects.
\[\text{Impact} = \frac{dI}{dE}\Delta E + \frac{d^2I}{dE^2}(\Delta E)^2 + \frac{d^3I}{dE^3}(\Delta E)^3 + \text{higher order terms}\]This perspective was empowering to hear.