Living Green

It would take five Earths to sustainably support the lifestyles of the people of the United States. For over a century, we have been the biggest contributors to climate change. But there is only one world, and we need to change.

Corporations absolutely deserve some share of the blame, but corporations profit by selling to us the products and services they think we want, and would go out of business if we didn’t buy what they had to sell.

Government can help. It can regulate the content of products, the by-products of the processes by which they are produced, and the truthfulness of the advertising to which we are exposed. Government can step in when we and our corporations refuse to exert the self-discipline that is required to avoid catastrophe, and can create and enforce fair and practical rules that everyone must follow so that no one “gets ahead” through irresponsible behavior. It can fund research into healthier and more sustainable alternatives. And it can prevent monopolies that deprive us of choices.

But the reality is that it is We The People who are eating our way out of house and home — by which we mean our planet. The climate crisis is the consequence of billions of people making hundreds of billions of individual decisions about what we eat, what we buy, how we get around, the size of house we live in, what we wear, what we plant in our yards, and much more.

This point was driven home to me recently. One of my relatives decided to have a “destination wedding”. It was in a place to which I was fortunate to have traveled for my tech job, and I really wanted to take my wife there. This seemed to be the perfect opportunity. But just as I was thinking through my plans, the United Nations released a report revealing that the world is on track to increase our CO2 emissions by about 10% by 2030, when it is vital that we actually DECREASE them by about 48% to have any chance of keeping global warming below 1.2˚C and avoid the worst effects of climate change. I knew that flying is a quick way to double or triple my climate footprint, and it occurred to me that if no one decided to fly there, then no airline would fly there. It is the desire of hundreds of people like me to take a trip there on THAT DAY that makes it profitable to burn a plane load of fuel (actually, probably two plane loads, given it is a 2-hop trip) to get there.

Analogous decisions occur every day — what am I going to eat for dinner? How am I going to get to work? When am I going to buy my next iPhone? Where do I set my thermostat? It is these many small things in each of our lives that add up to a big thing, and that big thing is multiplied by millions of people living a similar lifestyle, making similar decisions.

The purpose of this part of my website is to provide a place where we can share the things we have done to reduce the negative impact our lifestyles has on the world, and if possible actually make it a better place, so that our children and their children can lead healthy, happy lives. I am going to get it started with the things I have done, but I welcome inputs (through my Comments page) on what you have done.

Discussion

There are a number of good, concise whitepapers on the topic of consumer behavior and climate change. I am extracting a few of the salient points, below, from ScienceDirect and Columbia University studies, among others.

  • Carbon footprint increases with income — those with the highest income have the highest climate impact. The richest one percent of the global population emit more than twice as much as the poorest 50 percent. A typical American’s yearly carbon emissions are five times that of the world’s average person. In 2009, U.S. consumers with more than $100,000 in yearly household income made up 22.3 percent of the population, yet produced almost one-third of all U.S. households’ total carbon emissions.
  • 45 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions comes solely from the production of the things we use and buy every day. Increased consumption, in general, drives climate change. Consumption (and to a lesser extent population) growth have mostly outrun any beneficial effects of changes in technology over the past few decades.
  • Transport has the highest carbon footprint. The biggest impacts come from air travel, followed by the type and volume of automotive travel, in particular via internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, and especially large, fuel-inefficient vehicles.
  • Food choice has the second highest impact, especially the choice of eating meat from ruminants (cows, sheep, goats. Food waste also plays a surprisingly big role.
  • Choices regarding housing have a major impact, particularly in such things as insulation and building envelope (windows, doors, sealing), HVAC (heating, ventilation and air-conditioning), water heat, and appliances.
  • Packaging, especially food packaging but also packaging and wrapping of all types of products, from consumer electronics to clothing to office supplies, are a major contributor not only to carbon emissions (through their production, including oil extraction) but also to plastic pollution.