. . . Only the birthday cake is a flood

Guerrilla math as a meditation on climate justice.

According to a popular report, the floods in Pakistan have affected about 33 million people so far, and already pundits, policymakers, relief agencies, and advocates alike are quick to acknowledge that Pakistan accounts for only 1% or less of global greenhouse emissions, pointing to the stark inequities of the climate crisis.

Still, I find myself thinking about how often even a pretty thoughtful and virtuous person in the U.S. thinks about their personal connection to something like this disaster — when there definitely is a connection. It made me wonder if there was any meaningful way to quantify the relationship between the carbon footprint of any one individual in the heavily industrialized parts of the world and the experience of any one person who has been affected by something like these floods.

In other words, suppose you were watching the footage of this disaster and you wondered, “Okay. If this is a disaster caused by climate change, what percentage of that climate change was caused by me?”

I started playing with the math on Friday afternoon. Here’s what I came up with. According to Worldometer, humans emitted a total of about 34.5 billion tons of CO2 in 2016. I used 2016 Worldometer statistics because they the first statistics that I found that were easy to copy and paste into a spreadsheet. (I was doing this just to get a feel, and not submit to a peer-reviewed journal, mind you.)

In that one year, 2016, roughly around the time of the floods, humanity emitted about 34.5 billion tons of CO2 (according to Worldometer). Meanwhile, roughly 33 million people in Pakistan were affected by the floods this year. Using those 2016 CO2 numbers, you could say that there were 1,047 tons of CO2 emitted (in 2016) per person affected by this summer’s floods. (Yes, this is mapping 2016 data onto a 2022 event. Yes, it’s also mapping a single year’s emissions totals onto an event that emerges from the effect of centuries of greenhouse gas emissions. Again, I just wanted to get some kind of rough idea of things.)

Why would you do this? Here’s the thinking: The scientific consensus, obviously, is that humans are the major contributors to climate change, and that greenhouse gas emissions are the primary cause of the human contribution. There has been some effort made to calculate the total greenhouse gas emissions in a (relatively) relevant year, and to estimate the per capita emissions (the average) of a person in each country in the world. With these numbers, you can get a ballpark estimate of how much the average person in a given country contributed to the total emissions for the year. Very roughly, you can think of that per capita emissions number as the average person’s “contribution to climate change,” and the grand total of emissions as, roughly, “total climate change.”

Then, when you look at the people affected by the floods, you can think of each of these people as being “affected by climate change.” If you take that “total climate change” number and divide that number across the number of people affected by the floods, you can get a rough number for how much of “total climate change” was borne by each person affected in Pakistan during the floods. Comparing this number to the per capita contribution to climate change numbers, you can get a rough estimate for how many people in any given country contributed to the portion of climate change borne by an individual in Pakistan.

It’s a rough way to do the math, but I don’t think it’s inapt to get a ballpark idea of the scale of the issue.

It might be easier to explain the reasoning using an analogy. (Just don’t forget that we’re talking about the climate crisis, so you won’t be jarred when we switch back from the analogy at the end.)

Suppose the whole world decided to buy 33 million people in Pakistan a birthday cake. And suppose Pakistani people liked very, very expensive birthday cakes, so each of the 33 million birthday cakes cost $1,047. It’s easy to imagine that people in various parts of the world would be giving different amounts of money to buy the cakes. According to Worldometer, in Qatar — where per capita “cash output” is particularly high — people on average would be contributing $37 per person to all those birthday cakes, while in the U.S. — where “cash output” is also high, but not quite so high — everybody on average would be giving $15.

In France people would be “outputting” more like $5 per person. In Brazil, $2. In Somalia, it turns out each person contributes about $0.10 — a U.S. dime.

Once you got $5 from every person in France, and $0.10 from every person in Somalia, and $17 from every person in the U.S., and so on, you’d have enough money to purchase all 33 million of those birthday cakes, and you could give them to 33 million Pakistani people, one cake per person.

Now, obviously the 33 million people in Pakistan would be grateful. So suppose all of the Pakistani people who received a cake each wanted to individually thank the people who had contributed to their personal cake. And so, in response, each country counted up the number of people it took to buy just one birthday cake, and they’d put that number of people in a room with a person from Pakistan who’d received a cake, grouping people this way until all the Pakistani people who’d received a cake had a chance to thank some group of people.

In Qatar, where people gave the most — $37 per per person — it took 28 people to raise the money to buy one birthday cake. So the people of Qatar would divide up into groups of 28 people, and each one of those groups would meet one Pakistani person, who would thank that group for their birthday cake.

In the U.S., it took 67 people to raise the money to buy one person in Pakistan a birthday cake. So the people of the U.S. would divide into groups of 67 people and, if those people could all stand together without getting into some kind of multi-pronged civil war, or without some number of people getting kicked out of the group for taking off their shoes or fighting with the flight attendant, each group of 67 would meet one Pakistani person who received a birthday cake, and the Pakistani person would thank them for the cake.

In France, contributors would divide into groups of 200, because it took 200 French people to raise the money to buy one of those 33 million birthday cakes.

In Brazil, they would divide into groups of about 500. Each group would meet with one Pakistani person, and the Pakistani person would thank them for the birthday cake they received.

In Somalia, you’d need many large arenas to do this, because each birthday cake was purchased through the combined funding of 12,000 people.

Once you divided up the whole world population this way, you’d have every Pakistani person who received a birthday cake standing in front of the number of people who raised the money to buy their birthday cake. And again, sometimes those cake-receivers would be standing in front of a very large number of people, like the ones who received a cake from people in Somalia, and sometimes the cake receivers would be standing in front of small numbers of people, like the ones who received a cake from people in Qatar.

Does that make sense?

I don’t mean does it make sense that I spent a nice, sunny, late summer Friday afternoon doing all of this. I mean, does the basic math — of groups of global cake-buyers each being paired with an individual from Pakistan who received a cake, and the reason why the groups would be different sizes — does that make sense?

If so, we can move into reflection: I wonder what those encounters might feel like? It seems to me that the smaller the group, the more significant the encounter would be. In the case of the Somali people, it might be a weird-but-cute, silly gesture to have one person stand in the middle of an arena and yell, “thank you” to 12,000 people.

But as the groups got smaller and smaller, the encounters would increasingly really mean something, I bet. Having one person stand in front of sixty-seven people, and thanking them? Sixty-seven people is the size of a small-ish wedding, including guests, for instance. That’s pretty intimate.

Okay. Now. Having explored all of that, suppose that we’re not talking about people receiving birthday cakes anymore, but we’re talking about people receiving one of the worst disasters in the history of Pakistan, and one of the most superlative events to have been squarely pinned on anthropogenic climate change to date.

And suppose we’re not talking about people contributing money for cakes, we’re talking about people contributing CO2 emissions that promoted the weather conditions that caused 33 million people to be affected by this disaster.

I try to imagine 12,000 Somali people gathered to bear witness to one person affected by the flooding. What would that feel like?

Then I try to imagine 67 Americans gathered to bear witness to one Pakistani person affected by the flooding. What would that feel like?

Here’s another way to look at it. If you live in America, every time you watch someone in Pakistan being interviewed on the news about the impact the flooding has had on their life, you could imagine that all you’d have to do is find 66 other people, and you could say (arguably) that that group was very personally connected to the person talking — because that group would conceivably be the number people who contributed, proportionally, to the kinds of climate change that promoted that person’s share of this climate disaster.

Maybe it’s a little heavy-handed. Also, I think it’s reasonable to say that maybe it isn’t. At this point, it seems to me we simply must admit some relationship between the CO2 our lifestyles put into the atmosphere, and superlative weather events — and to imagine that those relationships have some kind of quantifiable aspect. So why not try to quantify with something like this? (This example being, admittedly, a very rough draft.)

You could go further. In 2020, the Institute for Economics and Peace estimated that 1.2 billion people live in countries that are not resilient to the threats from climate change and so, by 2050 or so, they could be devastatingly affected by a climate-related disaster.

Suppose you run the same birthday-cake/room scenario again for 1.2 billion people. Now, every 400 or so people in Somalia might conceivably be connected with someone who has been affected by extreme weather. (Though, in reality, many of the Somali people would probably be among the affected.)

People in Brazil might gather in groups of about thirteen, each of those groups accountable to one person affected by extreme weather events. (Though again, some of the people affected might be Brazilian themselves.)

People in France would gather in groups of six, which would each meet one person in the world who had been affected.

In the U.S., every two people would eventually be able to meet with someone who had been affected. In each of those groups, there would be two Americans and one person from elsewhere in the world, the latter having been substantially affected by climate change.

It seems to me that the two Americans could genuinely say to the other person, “Your life has changed because of how we have lived.”

And again, another way to look at it would be that whenever someone who has been majorly affected by climate change is interviewed on the news, if there were two people in the room watching, they would always have the chance to say, just once, between now and 2050, “This is it. This is the one person who has been affected because of how we have lived.”

Again, is that heavy-handed? It’s certainly true that people in Pakistan have been affected by a crisis that has been caused by humans, and the Pakistani people weren’t really the main humans who caused it, and that I and people I see on the street are much more a part of the main group of humans who have.

It’s certainly true that this is just one of a number of coming disasters with the same dynamics. It feels important to get a handle on the scale of this, and if that scale intrudes rudely on our daily sensibilities then, to some extent, it seems to me that those intrusions are important and necessary.

Frankly, on some level, if we give ourselves the dignity of having the moral capacity to know better, maybe it’s even appropriate that the intrusion is rude.

There is, after all, a whole “let them eat cake” dynamic to all of this, no? Only it’s not an apocryphal story, it’s a real one. And this time, we are the royalty.

I watched a segment on PBS NewsHour about Pakistani people in relief camps tonight — in need all manner of aid, complaining that officials come for the publicity but they don’t do anything — and then the video returned to an American news anchor — crisp, poised; dressed nicely and wearing makeup; a citizen of the part of the world that will probably not do very much compared to what’s needed — and I just can’t escape the feeling that there is something that ought to intrude, rudely, into our consciousness about the whole thing.

To be clear, I am that crisp, nicely-dressed person, too. I mean to say, we all are.

Extreme weather of today and of the future is not a function of one year’s greenhouse emissions, but of cumulative totals of emissions. If you try to work with those numbers, some countries would be far less culpable, and some countries far more. The U.S. was responsible for about 14% of CO2 emissions in 2016, for example, but cumulatively the U.S. is responsible for about 25% of all global emissions historically — by some measures, the largest contributor by far.

There’s reason to be compassionate with ourselves: We talk about passing a climate-affected world on to our children. But we didn’t really start this, either. We are inheriting a crisis, too. Pretty much everyone alive is an heir to a can that has already been, to no small extent, kicked down the road by other people.

But we still can be the ones to end the crisis.

I think it’s likely that, one way or another, people will talk about the environmental choices made in our lifetime, for thousands of years. How much better to make the difficult journey now — intentionally, with sensitivity, courage, and will. And, thereby, be the stuff of reverent legends to our successors in return.

Then we Americans could all could be sitting two people to a room, watching a news story about a person prospering in the more vulnerable part of the world. And for any one story like this, we could choose to quietly acknowledge: “Here you thrived because of my choice.

“I made a sacrifice that spared you the ravages of me. Please have a little bit more of the kinds of things that I have here on Earth.

“Brother, sister. I happily give up some of what I have, so that you can have a little more.”

And now . . .

How would that feel?