Cover image credit: This image was generated by DALL-E, an AI model developed by OpenAI.

When it comes to the climate crisis, most of us feel powerless to do much about it individually. Sure, we can try to not use plastic bags, which are extremely bad for the environment, and purchase organic or other eco-friendly products when we can afford it to do our little bit for the planet.

But is that all we can do?

Sharing resources

We’ve all probably been told at some point in our childhood “sharing is caring”. However once we grow up, we tend to not really apply it to our lives.

One of the most powerful ways to apply this motto is to sharing resources. A classic example of sharing resources is public transportation. When you use public transportation to get to your destination, you’re essentially sharing the means of transportation with others who are also headed in the same direction. Even when it’s not feasible to use public transportation to get to your destination, in most places you can still use ride-sharing services. In this case, too, you’re sharing a resource, in this case someone else’s vehicle, with other people¹ instead of your own private vehicle.

The first obvious advantage of sharing resources is the cost savings it affords you.

It’s almost always cheaper to use public transportation for your transportation needs than taking your own vehicle – and the difference becomes more stark when you consider all the various costs of vehicle ownership, e.g., maintenance, fuel, insurance, etc. Even ride-sharing services are cheaper to use than using your own vehicle.

Of course, you may argue that it’s much more convenient to have your own vehicle for your private use, rather than relying on public transportation or ride-sharing services. However, you may want to consider the actual cost of this convenience from the point of view of some other not-so-obvious advantages of sharing resources, such as the ones discussed below.

Consumer capitalist economy

The world we live in today is dominated by consumer capitalism. This system incentivizes businesses to produce whatever products and services, a.k.a., utilities that are in-demand by consumers, e.g., private vehicles. So every time someone purchases a utility, e.g., a vehicle for their own private use, they’re essentially sending a signal in the system to produce more of this particular utility.

However, the production processes of most utilities that businesses employ have a significant negative environmental impact, e.g., producing a car requires extraction of metals from ores, as well as a host of energy-intensive operations to make the final product². The by-products of most industrial processes pollute our environment on a massive scale, and is actually one of the leading causes of the climate crisis.

It follows that resisting the urge to buy utilities for your own use when you can make use of a shared resource, you’re directly helping tackle the climate crisis.

This is because if less people demand a utility, businesses will be less incentivized to produce more of it, thereby eliminating the environmental impact associated with producing that utility.

Interdependence

Thus we see that in a very real sense, sharing is caring – not just for your own personal finances, but also for environmental stewardship. If you’re still not convinced about the necessity of sharing when possible, here’s another reason.

Whether we like it or not, we’re all interdependent on each other for satisfying our reqs in the modern world, e.g., very few among us can grow our own food, provide water for ourselves, build our own house, etc. The most concrete way we express this interdependence is by spending our money, i.e., financial capital that we have earned in exchange for our lifetime capital to acquire the utilities necessary to satisfy our reqs.

Because we depend on others, it behooves us to try, as much as possible, to take care of them. Just giving someone your money is not enough to take care of them as the true cost of producing something is not usually reflected in the price of that utility. For example, if you pay 100 LCU to acquire some rice, a portion of that money goes to the rice farmer who grew that rice, but not enough to compensate them for all their labour, since market dynamics (supply and demand) play a major role in determining the price the farmer gets, and most of the money goes to the middlemen anyway. Furthermore, the environmental impact borne by the farmer as a consequence of rice farming as well as other related industries is never considered in the total price paid to the farmer.

Lastly, the climate crisis affects not just us, but also all other living beings on this planet as well as the future of our successive generations.

However unlike all of them, only we have the power to get our preferences heard since only through our spending prowess.

Therefore, it is our responsibility to act on their (and our own) behalf by putting our money where our mouth is, and support climate-friendly businesses, and away from the others. Our best hope to ensure a liveable future for ourselves, our fellow flora and fauna that we share our planet with, and our future generations is that a critical mass of people, such as yourself and your loved ones, awaken to the immense power you can wield through your spending decisions everyday to alter the course of our civilization’s future.

Thus, you can see that sharing resources is one of the most powerful actions you can take at an individual level to mitigate the climate crisis on behalf of all those who aren’t as economically empowered as you are to have a say in our consumer capitalist society.