The World Is In Crisis. Is It My Fault?

Micah Williams

In mid-March of this year, I woke up to an email from Larry Bacow, President of Harvard University, declaring that school was cancelled. We had just five days to move out of our dorms and return home, so I packed my bags, called my parents, and booked a flight home. Before the end of the week, I was headed back to my home state of Hawaii.

My flight from Boston to Honolulu was, according to Air Miles Calculator, just over 5,000 miles long and emitted more than 1,300 pounds of carbon dioxide per passenger into the atmosphere. I returned to a state that burns coal, natural gas, and trash (yes, actual garbage) for power: one of the silent underbellies of a life in paradise. 

This is not to discount Hawaii’s valiant ambitions to run on 100% clean energy by 2045. As of 2018, the 10th anniversary of the Hawaii Clean Energy initiative, Hawaii is running on 27% renewable energy. However, it is pointing an honest finger at a state that has not yet cleared the biggest hurdles of a renewable energy future– intermittency and storage, replacing baseline generation, decarbonizing transportation– and a particular individual that has made even less progress: myself. 

After my flight home landed, I rode 16 miles home in my family’s gas-powered car. The TV was on, as it is at almost all hours of the day. No one was watching. I flipped on the lights (with electricity from the grid), opened up the fridge, and cooked dinner with beautiful local ingredients from the farm down the road. Just kidding, almost everything we eat here comes from thousands of miles away. I hope the cargo ship didn’t burn too much heavy fuel oil on the way over. 

I’ve watched a few documentaries since returning home from college. Jeff Gibb’s Michael Moore-sponsored documentary Planet of the Humans paints a bleak picture of the world’s transition to clean energy. It seems to uncover millions of dollars spent on greenwashing energy projects, explain the decisive creep of fossil fuel interests into the environmental movement, and expose the clean energy fallacies that many people accept as truth: most notably that the concept of “clean energy” exists at all. All of these claims should not be taken purely at face value. In the days following the release, multiple people shown in the film including Bill McKibben and Richard Heinberg have rebuked its claims. It’s true that renewables have flaws, but in contrast to the documentary’s claims, research shows solar, wind, and other sources of renewable generation produce much lower levels of emissions over their lifetimes than natural gas, oil, or coal would to produce the same amount of energy. However, the documentary’s main claim is one that sticks: there are too many people using too many resources. We can’t produce enough energy to feed our addiction to consumption without destroying the planet. And I, as a consumer thoroughly addicted to energy, am part of the problem.

The Patagonia-produced documentary Artifishal is barely more optimistic than Planet of the Humans. The film follows the story of salmon in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, and shows the grave conflict between wild salmon and salmon hatcheries. American waterways, increasingly blocked by dams and other developments, are stocked with artificially-bred salmon from hatcheries, under the assumption that more breeding will bolster the stock of fish in the rivers and benefit both natural ecosystems and the people that rely on them for food. The documentary shows that in reality, the opposite is true. Fish stock collapses, and hatcheries reduce the genetic diversity of the species. Artifishal describes this as “reversing evolution.”

Both of these documentaries, while educational and thought provoking, inspire feelings of despair. It’s easy to feel hopeless when massive, fundamental flaws in society are laid bare in front of your eyes. What role can I possibly play in a world where entrenched interests push their agendas backed with billions of dollars? How can I protest a food system that, while disgusting and destructive, is responsible for feeding billions of people around the world? What can I do to reduce the impact I have on the world? These are the questions that we, as inhabitants of a deeply broken world, are responsible for facing, whether we have the answers or not. 

Should I boycott flying and sail back to school in August, following the lead of climate activist Greta Thunberg? Should I tear up my family’s backyard and commit to only eating food of my own hands? Should I rip the wire from our house and disconnect from Hawaii’s carbon-fueled electric grid? Should I protest Harvard’s continued investment in fossil fuels? Should I picket at the state capital, or go door to door to gather votes? Should I study STEM to engineer the world I want to live in? Should I go into finance, and funnel capital to the people that are fighting the good fight? What should I do?

I hope that my remaining time at Harvard will guide me one step closer to finding answers. I hope that my newly-minted license as a member of the American educated elite will grant me the platform and skills that I will need to help tackle the most important issues ever faced by our people and our planet. But most of all, I hope that I can maintain clear eyes in a world where the black and white become more gray every day– a world where the status quo is immensely profitable, the cost of dissent is high, and the odds of reversing our course are low. 

The world is moving with incredible inertia in the wrong direction, and I am along for the ride. Until I make real change in my life– until we all make real change in our lives– we are complicit in Earth’s destruction. We can’t be held responsible for not having all the answers, but we can and should be held responsible for not, at the very least, asking the questions.