Emily Atkin, a staff writer at The New Republic, argues that the government must force us to give up our consumer culture in order to save us. Because science.
C40 Cities, a network of 94 of the world’s biggest cities, released a report on Wednesday estimating how much consumption habits drive the climate crisis. The results were staggering: In those nearly 100 cities, where a combined 700 million live, the consumption of goods and services “including food, clothing, aviation, electronics, construction and vehicles” is responsible for 10 percent of global greenhouse gases. That’s nearly double the emissions from every building in the entire world.
If consumption-based emissions in those big cities continue on their current track, they will “nearly double between 2017 and 2050—from 4.5 gigatons to 8.4 gigatons per year,” the report says. That means the cities would not be able to achieve reductions necessary for the world to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming, which the scientific community says is necessary to preserve a livable planet. In fact, they would use up their budget for that target in the next 14 years.
Certainly, preserving a livable planet is a goal on which we can all agree. Then again, food, clothing, housing, and transportation are pretty significant contributors to livability.
For cities to do their part to limit global warming to 1.5°C, the report says, they must limit their consumption-based emissions by 50 percent by 2030, and 80 percent by 2050. That will be extremely challenging. It will require changes in how goods and services are produced on the industrial level, which will likely require policy intervention by national governments. Scientific advancements must be made as well, including “sweeping decreases in the carbon-intensity of industrial processes such as the making of steel, cement and petrochemicals,” the report reads.
“Extremely challenging,” indeed. It’s not obvious from the summary whether population growth has been factored into these calculations.
There will be little incentive for businesses and governments to make these changes, however, if the people who support them—with dollars and votes, respectively—aren’t also making change a priority.
“Individual consumers cannot change the way the global economy operates on their own, but many of the interventions proposed in this report rely on individual action,” the report reads. “It is ultimately up to individuals to decide what type of food to eat and how to manage their shopping to avoid household food waste. It is also largely up to individuals to decide how many new items of clothing to buy, whether they should own and drive a private car, and how many personal flights to take.”
I’ve already foreshadowed the next part:
And this individual action must occur collectively. Put more bluntly, it will require personal sacrifice from our entire society. We will have to fly less, drive less, Uber less. We will have to eat less red meat, drink less dairy, waste less food, and generally buy less crap that we don’t need.
A lot of Americans won’t want to do this! So, our government may have to compel it, whether through the Green New Deal or some other legislation. Some countries are already taking small steps to address “throwaway culture”: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Monday that Canada will ban single-use plastics as early as 2021. But if the world is to stand a chance, the U.S. will have to take even bigger steps—nothing short of a wholesale rejection of modern American consumerism itself.
That . . . simply isn’t going to happen.
I’m persuadable that the main idea behind the Green New Deal—a massive investment in research and development—is both good policy and politically feasible. The American people might even be persuadable on some restrictions on our throwaway culture, including such things as banning single-use containers, so long as reasonably convenient substitutes are found. But we’re simply not going to put up with laws or regulations requiring us to give up our automobiles, airline flights, and most other aspects of consumer culture.
The good news, for those favoring government compellence along these lines, is that most people living in the C40 cities live under authoritarian or otherwise much less liberal regimes. Most of the megacities are in communist China. But I suspect that even those people aren’t going to be all that keen on giving up their aspiration to a middle class lifestyle.
How all of this squares with preserving a planet suitable for human habitation remains to be seen. But I think we’re going to have to figure out a way to save the planet that doesn’t require moving backwards.
