In 2004, we were living in Toronto, and I was just becoming interested in climate change. I was waking up to the impact it was going to have on our future, and the future of the child we were then expecting.
That year, the annual Green Living Expo was taking place at the convention centre downtown and out of curiosity I took a look at the exhibitor list. I was expecting to see permaculture designers, zero waste enthusiasts and Passivhaus architects.
Instead, it was a seemingly endless list of people offering slightly greener versions of products that most people used every day.
Slightly greener laundry detergent and home cleaning supplies, despite the homemade recipes for earth friendly versions that had been circulating in my dad’s Mother Earth News magazines for decades.
Portable cutlery sets you could take with you when eating in a food court (because apparently taking a spare set from your cutlery drawer and putting it in a small bag is too complex).
Mixed in were the occasional solar power system installers and folks that could put in heat pumps, but the vast majority of exhibitors were just selling greener consumption.
In the intervening years this situation has not improved. The market is awash with slightly lower carbon items, with the current trend being towards replacing plastic items with those made of wood, bamboo, or beeswax coated cotton.
Capitalism, it seems, has figured out that there is a lot of money to be made by allowing people to think they’re part of the solution by selling them something. As my son said the other day, “We have so much stuff that we broke the world.”
Unsurprisingly, it turns out the solution to climate change is not just one of replacing our current consumption with slightly lower carbon forms of consumption. It involves reducing our consumption all the way back to 1950s levels.
In 2011, Victoria University (New Zealand) researcher Carmeny Field touched off a storm of debate with her paper comparing the energy and natural resource consumption and garbage production of Wellington residents in 2006 with those in the 1950s. Her conclusion was that returning to those earlier levels of consumption was the only way forward out of the climate crisis.
Since then, a large body of research has pointed the finger for the heating of our planet squarely at the world’s most affluent. The more money you had, the more you likely contributed to the problem. Except in these studies, affluence was measured on a global scale. This means a comfortably middle class Canadian or European, while maybe not affluent by their nation’s standards, was still responsible for many times more carbon emissions than someone living in the developing world.
So what do 1950s levels of consumption look like?
It was radically different in the 50s from an energy and consumer goods perspective. People’s resource consumption was much less than ours is today.
Field found that the average Wellington resident’s fuel consumption for transport had doubled since 1950, an era when most people commuted by public transit and air travel was a rarity.
In Canada, similar rises in energy consumption have taken place. In the 1950s, 1000 square foot homes were the norm. Seventy years later and the average has ballooned to over 2500 square feet. Larger homes need more energy to heat and cool, need more furnishings, and require more maintenance than smaller homes. All of which contribute to an increased carbon footprint.
Similarly, in the 1950s most people ate fresh produce only in season, and canned or frozen produce the rest of the year. Fresh fruit in the winter in Canada meant apples, or bananas and citrus, which could handle long shipping by train and boat. Now the number of kilometres food travels (sometimes called food miles) has grown exponentially, with products such as apples and asparagus now regularly traveling over 20,000 km to reach our grocery stores at times that those foods aren’t in season locally.
A similar lengthening of supply chains has happened with virtually every product we buy, with the offshoring rush that began in the 1980s now adding thousands of kilometres of product travel to the average consumer’s life every year.
All of these things – larger homes, more private automobile use, greater food miles – put carbon into our atmosphere in a way we have never done before. There is likely no way to reduce the environmental impact of living the way we do to a sustainable level. We need to change our lifestyle.
It’s important to draw the distinction between lifestyle and quality of life however. Leaving aside the racism and homophobia that were so prevalent in the era along with its other social ills, 1950s neighbourhoods were far from the rustic “cabin in the woods” many climate change deniers insist that environmentalists want to return to. Homes had central heating, transit was plentiful and easily accessible and there was a wide range of consumer goods in the stores.
There was, however, much more of a sense of what we now call “mend and make do.” Items were repairable, clothes were stitched up or patched, those with backyards often grew some of their own produce, all things that are rapidly coming back into fashion now.
A return to 1950s levels of consumption doesn’t mean giving up every luxury, but it does mean being more conscious about what we consume. Asking before every purchase “Do I need this? Can I repair the one I have? How long will it be useful? What will happen to it when I don’t need it anymore?” can lead to more use of repair cafes and shops, second-hand shops and online trading and give away groups. In a society that is awash in stuff, much of it stuff that can be fixed, or that our neighbours own and don’t use any more, it makes less and less and less sense to pay someone to extract earth’s dwindling resources and burn the carbon it takes to manufacture something new.
In some ways though, it will also mean doing without. Doing without asparagus in Ontario in February for sure. And doing without that sudden trip to Cuba when a great travel deal comes up. Likely doing without buying a new smart phone every few years, and perhaps doing without owning a car at all – if you can – and taking a bike, bus or LRT.
Now it seems like an inconvenience, but if the alternative is a planet that looks like California and BC do right now, or New Orleans will for the next few weeks, it is a sacrifice worth making.
Reforestation – Simple Carbon Capture Technology
Climate Brief has released a nice map outlining the counties around the world that are doing a good job of reforesting in an effort to combat local and global climate change impacts.
This assessment considers a stand of trees to be ‘newly planted’ if at least half of the trees their came about from deliberate sowing or planting seedlings.
It should be no surprise that China is way out in front on this issue. Chinese leadership is heavily pursuing both mitigation and adaption strategies, and the northern part of the county is struggling with serious desertification issues, which trees do a good job of addressing.
Of course, not cutting trees down is far better than planting them, but it’s encouraging that many countries are seeing the light about reforestation.
Fossil Fuel Divestment in the Insurance Industry
The Star reported last week that the insurance industry is turning sour on fossil fuel extraction.
In the past three years, dozens of insurance companies have enacted policies limiting their exposure to that industry, with many also divesting their investment portfolios from oil extraction companies as well.
The insurance company has long been a leader in sounding the alarm over fossil fuel driven global warming. And no surprise, considering their losses due to extreme weather have risen more than fourfold over the last decade to over $2.4 billion. That’s without factoring in the current round of Western wildfires and this year’s hurricane season.
In the end, this kind of economic pressure from institutional investors – which some call sustainable finance – may be the thing that drives change while governments drag their collective feet.
Adaptation Saves Lives in New Orleans
Despite a storm that was almost as powerful as Katrina hitting New Orleans almost square on, the death toll in Louisiana has been mercifully low.
As the storm approached, Governor Jon Bel Edwards insisted that things would be different this time. The levies had been built higher and stronger, and a variety of other flood controls – including those that utilized natural wetlands – had been implemented or enhanced.
Thankfully, this turned out to be the case, but it hasn’t been cheap. New Orleans has spent $14.5 billion since Katrina in flood prevention, to mitigate against just the type of storm that hit this week.
The most recent IPCC report said we have more of this in store, even if we stop burning carbon today, so it’s reassuring to know that with smart, targeted infrastructure investment, people’s lives can be spared from the worst of what a warming planet can dish out.