One feature of the recent UK General Election was the Tory Government using the country’s admirable decarbonisation achievements so far to attack opponents’ proposals to cut carbon further. This really gets my goat as decarbonisation is not a race against other countries, but a race against time. The atmosphere doesn’t care which country emissions come from – if we are in a position cut more then we should do, not sit on our laurels and wait for others to ‘catch up’.

The climate denial/lukewarmer movement plays a variation on this by parroting the line that the UK is only responsible for 1-2% of emissions, but again the atmosphere does not care where lines on a map are (and of course this claim doesn’t take into consideration our supply chain emissions). A tonne of carbon is a tonne of carbon whether it comes from a small country or a large country.

Likewise, in industry, we often hear executives claim “our sector only produces 2% of global emissions”, but almost any industry could be subdivided down until it sounds insignificant. You only need 50 sectoral divides for all emissions to be categorised as 2%. If we do that and then say 2% is too small to worry about, then we will get no progress whatsoever (See the WRI global breakdown of emissions, most of their chosen sectors are <5%). Everybody will look at everybody else to act, but nobody will.

Yesterday I went down a rabbit hole of psychological definitions to find the technical name of this fallacy. The closest I could find was the ‘fallacy of relative privation’ which is also known as “not as bad as”. So if you are a heavy smoker, you might reassure yourself that you are smoking 10 fewer cigarettes a day than your best mate, but that just deflects from the fact that the 40 a day you are smoking will almost certainly kill you. You’d be fooling yourself with fatal consequences.

There is always an excuse to do nothing and this relative carbon fallacy is an extremely dangerous one.