Why Focus on Consumption?
by Jamie Abelson | April 16th, 2021
I chose the concept of consumption as the guiding phenomenon for this project because I was searching for an inspirational idea that would help me stay proactive when considering my own responsibility in the fight against climate change and environmental injustice. It is incredibly easy (and almost impossible not) to be overwhelmed by the hundreds of facets of the climate crisis and to be sidetracked by questions such as: ‘but what about this?’, and: ‘that doesn’t apply to this particular situation,’ and: ‘it's complicated!’ In an attempt to stay focused, I have come to believe that the word that is the most important to consider for citizens of high consuming nations is this one: consumption. Whether you are thinking about electricity, coal, natural gas, food, land, minerals, air, water, garbage, war, housing or money, the injustices that our standard of living perpetrates upon the world all come down to the reality of how much (of everything) we consume.
Energy Creation is Not a Zero-Sum Game
While it is imperative that we transition our global energy systems away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy technologies, this shift will have no impact on climate crisis mitigation unless we also greatly decreased the amount of energy we consume. Even to use the term ‘energy transition’ is misleading and obscures the reality of the situation. While the amount of renewable energy we use in the US may be increasing, and the percentage of our energy that comes from renewable energy might be increasing (11.5% in 2019, so let’s not be too pleased with ourselves), the total amount of energy we are consuming is also increasing. This chart from the EIA helps us to visualize the problem in terms of total consumption:
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We have to remember that the climate crisis will destroy our planet if we do not rapidly decrease the amount of Green House Gasses we are emitting into the atmosphere. The crisis is not about percentages, it is about totals, and totals can only be addressed by lowering consumption. Simply put by Bella, Daggettb, and Labuskic, “rather than replacing older sources of energy with new ones, adding new energy sources has simply facilitated continued growth of overall energy consumption” (p.1).
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Renewable Energy is Not Made from Renewable Energy
Even if we were to presuppose our ability to transfer our energy system to 100% renewable energy, we would still need to find a way to meet in the middle between energy production and energy consumption. Taking solar power for example, it has been estimated about 22,000 square miles of solar panels would be needed to supply the current level of US energy demand (energy.gov). This is about the size of Lake Michigan or the Mojave Desert. As of 2020, the US is deriving about 90 billion kilowatt hours of electricity from solar energy (eia.gov). This is about 2.4% of the 4,009 billion kilowatt hours of electricity that the US uses each year (eia.gov). Even if we could produce enough solar panels to meet current energy demand, the production of solar panels is only made possible by burning enormous amounts of coal and "generating the required technologies and infrastructure will drive an increase in the production of many metals, creating new mining threats for biodiversity" (nature.com). We need solar panels, but due to the rapidly diminishing carbon budget we have left to burn to avoid climate catastrophe, the less solar panels we need the better. This means lowering energy consumption.
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Photo Credit: Jamey Stillings for TIME
The same goes for the creation of wind turbines. As Alexander Dunlap describes, “These turbines require significant amounts of mining. But every stage of the mining process, from extraction, processing, manufacturing, transport, construction and, to some degree, operation, requires a large expenditure of fossil fuels, a fact that is often neglected in the ecological accounting of wind energy” (Dunlap, 2018). Beyond solar and wind energy, there are also environmental implications related to other types of renewable energy such as “the fertilizer needed to cultivate crops for biofuels, the fugitive methane emissions linked to manufacturing hydrogen, or the widespread environmental impacts of uranium mining for nuclear power” (Sovacool, p.3). While this article is focused on the implications of energy consumption, these arguments do not even begin to address environmental justice issues related to land-grabbing by the Global North in order to construct renewable energy technologies on the land of the Global South. All of this to reiterate the fact that we cannot transform our energy production systems without also limiting our energy consumption.
We Need to ‘Get Over’ Growth
We need to let go of our fantasy that technological advances will somehow allow us to continue to grow economically and consume virally without destroying the planet and condemning millions of people to displacement and starvation. This will be impossible without sacrificing our most precious deity: GDP. That’s right, GDP…which means… Gross Domestic Product…which means…ummm…give me a second! Ok, the internet tells me that GDP means something about how much stuff we make, sell and somehow that tells us how happy we are. There are of course an infinite number of ways to measure happiness, but one example will show how subjective this exercise really is. As measured by the World Bank, the GDP per capita of the United States ranks 13th among countries, and Costa Rica ranks 79th. According to the “Happy Planet Index” created by the New Economics Foundation, Costa Rica ranks 1st and the United States ranks 108th. The difference between the two ways of measuring “quality-of-life” is that the “Happy Planet Index” divides a country’s well-being indicators by that country’s ecological footprint. If you don’t think that ecological footprint should factor into this equation, then you should probably just stop reading this article. However, just for the sake of argument, if you remove the denominator of ecological footprint and isolate the HPI ratings for just “wellbeing,” Costa Rica still ranks higher than the United States (10th vs. 18th) and the same goes for life expectancy (30th vs. 31st). Here is a map tracking the HPI index:
Bella, Daggettb, and Labuskic point out that “Feminist and other critical economists have long argued that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is not a useful measure of the well-being of a nation because levels of inequality, poverty, health, pollution, land degradation, and educational attainment are not reflected in GDP calculations” (p.5). At some point I guess we just have to ask ourselves the question: “are we happy?” And if we're lucky enough for the answer to be “yes” we have to ask ourselves this question: “are we happy knowing that our happiness is only made possible by the current deaths of hundreds of thousands and soon to be millions of people?” And if considering global climate catastrophe is too overwhelming, just think of what will happen when thousands of wealthy New York City and Miami residents are driven from their homes due to rising sea levels and move to your city (around the year 2050). If it bums you out to think of yourself as a gentrifier, just imagine how crappy it will be to be gentrified. If we want to avert climate catastrophe, we cannot just think about ‘green-growth,’ we need to urgently commit to ‘de-growth.’ As Magdoff and Foster point out, “what needs to be reduced is not just carbon footprints, but ecological footprints, which means that economic expansion on the world level and especially in the rich countries needs to be reduced, [or] even cease” (Magdoff and Foster, 2010).
And Let’s Not Forget the Moral Imperative
We cannot become inured to the fact that the climate crisis is our fault. Yes, of course, there are other countries contributing to the problem, but since World War II (and historically), we, Americans, have been by far the largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions. Our glutinous energy, food, and consumer consumption habits are literally sucking the resources out of the entire earth. What does the world get in return? Tons and tons of greenhouse gasses and a climate crisis that disproportionately affects those least at fault for causing it. Here are a few points to help remind us that wealthy countries in general, and Americans in particular, are at fault. A Worldwatch Institute study estimated that if everyone on earth used the biocapacity of the average American, the Earth’s resources could only support 1.4 billion people. Put another way, it would take five Earth’s to support the current global population if everyone consumed as much as we do. As Magdoff and Foster brilliantly put it, “The primary problem is an ancient one and lies not with those who do not have enough for a decent standard of living, but rather with those for whom enough does not exist” (Magdoff and Foster, 2010). While we often want to deflect our responsibility to tackle our consumption onto developing countries with rising energy use, it would be humbling to remind ourselves that “Americans, on average, consume about ten times more energy per capita than those in India, Nigeria, or Peru” (Bella, et al. p.6). Here is a chart showing the American share of world energy consumption in 2015. Keep in mind that in 2015, the US population made up about 4.4% of the world population.
But at this point we might say to ourselves, “what's the big deal? So, we consume a ridiculous amount. Our consumption leads to growth and growth is great and a rising tide lifts all boats!” When we are tempted to resurrect this tired and discredited theory, we must remind ourselves that we aren't talking about the economy or stock prices, we are talking about climate change and the ability for our children and our children's children to survive on this planet. Our consumption comes at a great cost to real humans, right now. For instance, “80% of the undernourished reside in developing countries that produce over 70% of global food supply” (Gonzalez, 2015). Imagine if you and your family were one week away from starving, literally starving, and someone came to your house and asked you to pack up all of the food in your pantry and load it into their SUV even though their trunk was already filled with enough food for 5 families. Would you just hand it over? No, because what they are asking you to do is unfair, it’s criminal, it’s dangerous, and implies that they think that their extra comfort is worth more than your life.
Preparing for Change
It is not clear that there is a potential future that looks even remotely like the present that we hold so dear. One thing is clear, if there is to be such a future, we need to make some major changes right now. Finding ways to lower our energy, food, and resource consumption will put us in a better position to adapt to the coming climate crisis when (not if) it arrives. Here is a laundry list of possible solutions as they pertain to consumption: not building overly large homes, letting go of vacation homes, decreasing the amount of wasteful food we eat (meat is the worst), eating locally grown food, letting go of leisure activities that involve long distance driving and flying, centering our lives around sustainable consumption corridors to limit transportation energy use, telecommuting for work, expanding renewable energy, electrifying cars and public transport, increasing the lifespan of goods, repairing old goods rather than buying new ones, and retrofitting our homes for greater energy efficiency (Wiedmann, et al. 2020). The information on this website attempts to help people address the above arena of solutions in order to A) attempt to adapt our society into one that we can sustain without destroying the planet and B) to begin to prepare ourselves for the coming struggles in the likely event that we fail. In the best-case scenarios, we can easily expect periods of energy and food rationing. Examples of rationing in the Western world from the Great Depression, to World War II, to oil shortages in the 1970’s should remind us that rationing is a realistic solution during times of global crisis. The energy and food crises we can expect from climate change and the severe weather events it causes will easily dwarf in scale anything we have seen in human history. Finding ways to lower our consumption now will better prepare us for energy and food rationing whether it be temporary or permanent.
Cars in Brooklyn, New York, line up for gas in January 1974. In October 1973, an oil embargo imposed by members of OPEC led to skyrocketing gas prices and widespread fuel shortages. Allan Tannenbaum/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
To consider a more drastic scenario, the World Bank has estimated that by the year 2050 we can expect that 143 million climate refugees will be driven out of three areas alone: Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (Rigaud, et al. 2018). Just a quick reminder that this is our fault and that these refugees are victims of our selfishness and not enemies to our freedom. Assuming that we will need to provide for a large number of these refugees, it would behoove us to streamline our energy and food consumption to prepare for this reality.
No Time Like the Present
There is really only one reality that I can imagine that does not involve us tackling our patterns of consumption. This reality would involve walling off the entire United States, taking over the few remaining viable food producing areas of the world with military force, forcing the world's population to work as slaves on these food producing compounds, and waging a global campaign of terror and repression against anyone questioning this new reality. If this dystopian nightmare sounds like a good solution to you, I doubt you have made it to the end of this article. If, like me, you don't want to be idly complicit in the creation of this future, let's get to work making the necessary changes to the way we consume (and overconsume) the precious gifts from our one and only planet. Our lives, and the lives of all humans, literally depend on it.
References
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