An important little post by Amanda Reed at WorldChanging reveals how conventional measures of carbon emissions give consumers a free pass and ignore the greenhouse gas production resulting from global sourcing of consumer goods.
John Barnett of the Stockholm Environment Institute gave a presentation based on his work in the UK and 40 local governments in Europe. He focused on the fact that tallies of carbon output focus on producers, which has the convenient effect of omitting the impact of shipping finished goods to end buyers:
25-30% of emissions come from products and services that are produced in one country then traded to another…
As it stands now, most emissions data focuses on the production side of our consumer society. For example, the factory that makes your gadget in China contributes to China’s emissions count. When that same gadget is shipped to a UK consumer it does not count towards the UK’s emissions count. Barrett showed that the result of this approach has led to what he called “carbon leakage.” He said that as countries become more and more service based, with demand for products and services met by imports rather than production, the overall amount of carbon leakage goes up. “The volume of emissions that are not counted goes up.” This lack of accounting for growing imports of consumer goods shows up directly in the UK’s emissions records…the Kyoto numbers show an overall emissions reduction in the UK, but consumer emissions have actually gone up in the same time period!
Yves here. When this carbon leakage is factored back in, “green consumerism” looks to be an oxymoron:
“Green products” have less impact in reducing emissions than most people think. The growth of green consumption has not reduced emissions.
Gains in emissions reductions from technological advances have been wiped out by increases in consumption as people demand higher levels of affluence.
The UK’s 50-70% of gains from home energy conservation are lost when they’re redirected for other resource consumption, by people buying other goods and services with the money saved.
Yves again. I admittedly have a coldwater Yankee bias, but I continue to be amazed how consumers fail to be attuned to the fact that the job of a producer is to figure out how to empty their pockets. Why has the public so meekly accepted planned obsolescence? All sort of products, from cars to consumer durables to consumer electronics used to have much longer average lives in service. More frequent trade ins/ups seem to have been foisted upon consumers by playing on status-seeking and a desire for novelty. Yes, some new gadgets really do offer better and different functionality, but consider how many things you discard that are perfectly usable (of course, your truly is a real outlier here, since I particularly resent how computer manufacturers and software designers engage in feature bloat to compress product life cycles and take perverse pride in fighting it. I loved my NeXT computer and used it 10 1/2 years; this post is being written on a 8 year old laptop that had more memory and a bigger hard drive added later in its life. And do not get me started on the topic of fashion….).
Barnett addressed related issues:
Barrett said that some economists are exploring one possible solution: a move toward a future of “steady state economics,” in which a high quality of life exists with no economic growth, since economic growth has (so far) driven growth in material consumption.
Others argue that if we want to have economic growth without rising emissions, we need to do a much better job of decoupling quality of life and well-being from energy and resource use. A growing movement of people are looking at land use, transportation, energy and food systems, finding ways of providing a better quality of life in more urban and post-consumer patterns, and re-thinking how we define and deliver affluence at a systemic level away from the consumption of stuff…. The message, in the meantime, is clear: we can’t shop our way into the future.
Yves again. Tell people not to consume? Horrors. Aside from the fact that it would take a generational shift in values, or a Great Depression II to undo America’s addiction to retail therapy, another ugly complicating factor is that emerging economies, particularly China and India, are out to provide larger proportions of their population with middle class lifestyles. That is generally believed to entail owning more stuff.
Since confronting mass consumerism frontally seems unlikely to make much headway, one can only hope that outlier ideas like freeganism which essentially arb the system, wind up having more impact on values and behavior. Before you dismiss this idea as nuts, remember that organic food was seen as equally oddball in the 1960s. From the New York Times (hat tip reader John L):
Freegans maintain that by salvaging waste, they diminish their need for money, which allows them to live a more thoughtful, responsible and deliberate existence. But if they succeed in their overriding goal, and society ends up becoming less wasteful, the freegan lifestyle will no longer be possible.
That would constitute a considerable victory, if you ask me.