Letters

[Editor's note: Richard Parncutt is affiliated with the Centre for Systematic Musicology at the University of Graz. After sending this letter, he supplied the following reference for further information: https://stay-grounded.org/get-information/#impact.]

Grounding the ICMC

For decades, I traveled regularly to academic conferences, including the International Computer Music Conferences (ICMCs) in 1988, 1990, 1991, and 1997. Conferences were one of the best things about academic life, and the ICMC was one of the best. After all that work sitting alone behind a computer screen, I got to talk to other people with similar ideas, hear some weird and wonderful music, and travel to interesting places.

Back then, few of us realized that flying would become a big environmental problem. As academics and musicians, we were more aware of the role of intercultural communication in promoting world peace. And that was a good reason to fly. Many of us had been concerned about acid rain's killing of forests and about ozone depletion caused by chlorofluorocarbons, but both problems had been largely solved by international negotiation. Previously, in the late 1970s, I had studied physics at two universities in Australia. I don't remember anyone mentioning anything about anthropogenic climate change. That is surprising, given that scientists had been investigating and modeling the phenomenon for decades (history.aip.org/climate).

Global warming is one of a few leading global catastrophic risks, alongside nuclear war and pandemic. A meteorite collision could be more devastating but is less likely. The biggest global protests of 2019 were about climate, suggesting that it is currently humanity's biggest threat. A possible reason is the catastrophic uncertainty and irreversibility of positive climate feedbacks and tipping points (Lenton et al. 2019). Astonishingly, positive feedbacks and tipping points have traditionally been omitted from reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which instead have tended toward conservative predictions and language (Herrando-Pérez et al. 2019). Tipping-point scenarios (e.g., Bathiany et al. 2018) suggest that the probability of human extinction or mass death is higher for climate change than for nuclear war or pandemic.

Global mean surface temperature is now 1^°C above pre-industrial levels and will reach +1.5^°C between 2030 and 2052 (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2018). Even if warming is eventually limited to +2^°C, a billion people could die prematurely as a result (Parncutt 2019)—an unprecedented calamity. For the survivors and their progeny, things will never be the same. A million species could die out (Tollefson 2019), billions of people will have inadequate food and water (Rasul and Sharma 2016), and vast areas will become less habitable, causing mass migration and conflict (Brzoska and Fröhlich 2016). Civilization itself could break down (Oreskes and Conway 2013).

Solutions such as planting a trillion trees or investing enormous amounts in carbon capture and storage will be partial at best and suffer from negative byproducts (Seddon et al. 2019). Similarly, the global environmental impact of aviation can hardly be reduced by biofuels, hydrogen, or electrification (Allwood 2020).

The most reliable solution is the simplest: Reduce emissions. Given the persistent difficulty of forcing governments and corporations to reduce, we must empower individuals to change their behavior and influence government decisions. The moral obligation to reduce is higher for individuals with higher emissions (for practical reasons). It is also higher for the better educated (we can understand and explain the problem better, rejecting denialist arguments), those with better communication networks, and those with more money. The obligation to act is also arguably higher for musicians (if indeed music promotes empathy [Clarke et al. 2015]) and those with useful technical skills (to implement creative solutions).

Which brings us back to ICMC. Flying to academic conferences is a luxury and privilege (Grant 2018; Langin 2019) and must in any case be drastically reduced (Baer 2019). A long flight produces a few tons of CO₂ per economy-class passenger. That's like driving a car for a year or eating meat for five years.

Why then are many of us still flying to conferences, justifying our behavior with misleading arguments...