Confessions of a Consumer Addict

admin April 25th, 2010

I’ve previously written in this blog and on my web site that there is a major misconception about “the fix” for our environmental problems. Actually I believe it is a misconception of mythical proportions that will do us a lot of damage in the years to come.

The myth is this:

We will be able to solve our environmental problems such as global warming with judicious use of new technologies such as solar and wind power, electric and hybrid cars, more efficient appliances, and so forth. This, then, will relieve us of the necessity of having to use less energy and buy less stuff, i.e., we will be able to go on living as we always have lo these many years, without having to give up anything.

“Oh I can buy all the toys I want and not worry about the power problem… they’ll think of something! We’ll be just fine!

My response to this has always been that there is no way that technology can dig us out of the hole we’ve dug for ourselves for several basic reasons:

1. The technologies we will need in order to make a substantial difference require, in and of themselves, even more non-renewable and renewable resources and power to design, test, manufacture, distribute, and maintain them. These costs are considerable, especially when most of these technologies use rare and expensive metals such as the rare earths, the mining of which are highly polluting, often mined in the third world under unjust working conditions, and many of which are only available through unfriendly governments. Even though these technologies may operate more efficiently than conventional technologies, their environmental and fiscal costs are in addition to the existing, huge infrastructure that will have to support our old stuff for many years into the future.We might use less oil and coal as a result of new technologies while freeing ourselves somewhat from our Mexican knife fight with the oil producing nations, but we will only have become much more dependent on other untrustworthy governments for these exotic new materials.
2. New technologies take a very long time to develop and get into mainstream usage. Some of them are twenty or more years into the future before they come on line as practical applications, and when they do, adoption by a majority of people will take even more years. Given the scope and severity of our problem, this is a day late and a dollar short.
3. Even if the new technologies were wildly successful in every way, we have to contend with human psychology which is perversely designed to defeat such efficiencies as we always have in the past. We are all like the dieter who eats twice as much because he/she is eating a special low calorie food. “Oh I can have another order of fries because I’m drinking Diet Coke!” And as soon as we have the electric, hybrid, or hydrogen car, we will immediately begin driving even more miles because we think we think it’s free. We will then not have reduced our energy consumption even after years of effort and billions of dollars in sunk costs. There is also the issue of broad-scale acceptance of the technologies by the public. A significant number will not be accepted as has also been the case in the past. For instance there has already been a large public outcry against wind farms at a number of locations across the country.

Adoption of many technologies will not be fast or certain, and we are running out of time.
The real solution, of course, is that we do in fact have to give up some things – actually a lot of things. There is no free lunch. We cannot have it all at no cost to ourselves. And having done so much damage already, we now have to pay the piper and we simply cannot escape him by hiding behind technology.

Our situation demands simple living of all of us.

I’m not naïve enough to believe that in our overheated consumer society there will be a sudden, massive switch to simple living, but I think it is entirely possible that a shift will occur incrementally over time as more and more of us get the message and make the commitment to make a real difference in the world.

But it could also be that the shift to simplicity will come suddenly and massively as our society hits the ecological/resource wall at some point in the not-too-distant future, and we are forced to live simply as we did during the great depression and WWII (if we’re very lucky).

I saw a glimmer of hope that the incremental version may be gathering steam even now, from a very unlikely source.

Robert Bryce, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, wrote a piece in the 4/25/10 Washington Post entitled 5 Myths About Green Energy. Of course he was probably trying to make the case that many of our green energy strategies are bound to be much less successful than predicted and we should therefore abandon such tree-hugging strategies and just let businesses do their jobs using whatever methods they see fit to use (my interpretation, not his words). But in doing so he made an excellent case for living simply as I outlined above.

His (condensed) points:

1. Solar and wind power have serious drawbacks. They “require huge amounts of land to deliver relatively small amounts of energy, [while] disrupting natural habitats.” This land demand led to the Nature conservancy, an extremely green organization, criticizing “energy sprawl” in its paper last year. He went on to provide even more statistics to bolster his point that these technologies aren’t going to give us the bang for the buck that we assume.
2. Green energy technologies will not reduce our dependence on foreign imports and erratic foreign governments to sustain our power needs. We have a choice among about 20 countries for obtaining our oil and natural gas supplies, but the rare earth necessary to build and maintain new power technologies are only available from… China, not the most reliable of partners in any weather. This will only make us more dependent on a country we desperately wish not to be dependent upon.
3. We talk a great deal about the new green jobs that will be created to support green technologies, however Bryce points out that we have the same problem here as we have had with shoe manufacturing – high American labor costs compared to many other Third World or emerging countries like, again, China. We simply will not be able to compete with them and we will therefore create far fewer green jobs than has been advertised.
4. Electric cars will not substantially reduce demand for oil because of the physics involved. Gasoline has about 80 times the energy as the best lithium-ion batteries which are famously finicky, short-lived, and which take hours to recharge. Although the electric motor is much more efficient than the internal combustion engine, the process of getting power to the electric motor is not, and there is little on the horizon to make us more optimistic along these lines.
5. America has actually been a leader in moving toward green technologies and has improved its energy efficiency as much as or more than, all other developed countries except Switzerland and Denmark. Bryce’s point here is that since American industry is already doing such a terrific job, we should just let them continue doing it.

   However I would apply another interpretation to this data: if we have done such a terrific job and we have hardly moved the needle after all these years of trying, then at best, it will be a very long time before our technology will even come close to solving our problem, if it ever does.

So I thank Robert Bryce and the Manhattan Institute for so brilliantly and so publically making my point for me even though they wouldn’t ordinarily cozy up to advocates of simple living like me!

Tags: Commentary, Information

• Coping With Consumer Culture , Environment , Living More Simply
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