Think of arriving at your doorstep, back home after a trip.
You turn the key and open the front door. And turn on the hallway light. There is a rush of the smells of home. And you see everything there in front of you just as you left it. Even the air feels the same.
But you know that you’re a slightly different person for the few days away.
Do you ever get that?
I love that feeling.
Because it reminds us that every day we are adjusting and changing and evolving. Just like when we were seven, and a grandmother comments on how much we’ve grown, and we didn’t even notice a millimeter of new height.
Even in the tiniest of ways, we evolve with the daily experience of life.
The feeling can be obvious when you’ve been away for several weeks. But I’ll feel it too after a long weekend away or even a really eventful day trip.
I love that feeling of opening up the front door, and realizing that I’m a tiny bit different.
So when I was asked this week about one thing that comes to mind in terms of how the world is changing, I had a flashback to those moments at the front door.
And I thought about that kind of moment this week when I dropped in to the Equilibrium San Francisco office to check on the plants.
My eyes panned across desks and belongings, a whole room frozen in time on 16 March 2020. Some unopened boxes of face masks and shields and hand sanitizer, that became unnecessary because as we all stopped working there. A water glass rinsed, cleaned and still dry on the side of the sink, for a year.
And I started to think about the trip that the world has been on this last year, since February and March 2020.
The world is more than slightly changed, as a person, from the trip it’s been on. The world has been transformed and everything is different.
So we have an interesting factor to consider as we re-build. How Can We Leave Behind Some of Those Emissions Behind Forever?
The phrase Never let a good crisis go to waste would bounce around in my head at times in the last year, and I had to look up whether this phrase had a source. It was Rahm Emanuel, who had been White House Chief of Staff to President Obama and then Mayor of Chicago,
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. I mean, it’s an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”
To which I ask: how can we build back with less emissions?
Let’s look at one fascinating chart. Did you ever wonder what happened to greenhouse gas emissions in the last year?
The chart shows average daily emissions per year back to 1970 – including the plummeting red line for April 2020. The chart on the right shows an estimate of daily emissions in the first five months of 2020, from modeling energy consumption in six key sectors. Source: Nature, 2020 – whose methodology is fascinating, and worth a skim or deeper read.
Underneath our production system is an energy system. And along with that comes our polluting system.
As we return to working “in real life”, we’re all more than a little bit changed.
A year ago, the video conference was a clunky novelty. The world started to Zoom and I don’t think I have heard the expression GoToMeeting since. Sitting in a car, bus or train for an hour or two was an accepted part of working life. Today many of us are questioning whether we will ever choose that again. People like me – a white collar professional in finance probably in the world’s top 1% of emitters – will fly to a city for a few meetings, and back the next day. I do that to raise large sums of money for greenhouse gas reducing investments but still question it on every trip. And I’ll use that (with full guilt) to justify hopping on a plane for a weekend break to see the world beyond the Bay Area from time to time.
So much has changed, we all know.
And like returning from a trip and opening the front door the moment that we return, how can our polluting system re-open its doors a little changed forever?
How can we leave some of those emissions behind permanently?
