Excessive consumption in first world countries
Research shows that it’s still possible to avoid the worst of climate and ecological breakdown. But this year we spent a record amount over Black Friday.
Production of goods normally requires both releasing emissions and ecological destruction for resource extraction. Most products end up in landfills where any plastics or chemicals used in their production leach into the land, air, and water and harm the ecosystems we rely on for our health and survival.
Because of our excessive use of earth’s resources to create products, we are overshooting what earth can regenerate earlier and earlier every year. Even if we stop burning fossil fuels, if we keep using earth’s resources at this rate, earth will become increasingly unsafe and uninhabitable.
Understanding the climate and ecological crises, knowing the suffering that vulnerable communities are already experiencing and what our children will experience, hasn’t been enough to slow or stop our wish for excessive personal comforts. This drive for consumption might be universal, but people in first world countries are more likely to have the means to excessively consume.
In 2022, when emissions need to begin rapidly dropping, fossil fuel emissions hit a record high. Recent research has shown that tipping points, which would lead to runaway heating that would spiral out of human control, are being reached more quickly than scientists predicted. Any further emissions increase the likelihood of triggering these tipping points.
Even if well intended and socially sanctioned, keeping up with the latest trends and buying lots of gifts for family and friends over the holidays is no longer humane.
Read a roundup of the headlines:
“In fact, our consumer habits are actually driving climate change. A 2015 study found that the production and use of household goods and services was responsible for 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Not surprisingly, wealthy countries have the most per capita impact. A new U.N. report found that the richest one percent of the global population emit more than twice the amount than the poorest 50 percent; moreover, the wealthier people become, the more energy they use. 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.
As more people around the world enter the middle class and become affluent, the problem is worsening.
After basic needs are met, consumers begin buying items for social status; as people try to acquire more and more status, more and more expensive status products are needed. Producing all these things generates climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions..”
Colombia, How Buying Stuff Drives Climate Change
“When it comes to effects on wildlife, climate change is more like a mule, slow and plodding. Yes, a warmed atmosphere is projected to be a significant factor in the extinction crisis in future decades, but what’s destroying species today is habitat fragmentation and loss, overhunting and overexploitation, agricultural expansion, pollution, and industrial development…
Overshoot is a product of both excessive numbers and rising affluence. Access to the things that create what we call quality of life, like indoor lighting and temperature controls, especially air conditioning; more diverse dietary choices, especially meat; and greater access to transportation, especially air travel — all signs of rising affluence, all delightful if you are a human, yet all demand more energy and material inputs that involve scouring and denuding more wildlands and animal habitat to feed, clothe, house, and energize burgeoning humanity…
It may be that solving the climate crisis, because we will solve it with bold technologies to maintain ourselves in overshoot — as opposed to practicing humility and restraint with an eye toward contraction of the human enterprise — will accelerate extinctions, due to the demands for space and minerals to drive the technologies…
Ashe suggests that conservation biologists cease the empty claims about “saving the planet” with climate mitigation and start speaking truth: There is at present no plan, in any country, anywhere, on a global or national scale, to address extinctions, biodiversity crash, and habitat loss. The dismal reality is that with a green build-out, we will be saving not the complex web of life on Earth but the particular way of life of one privileged domineering species that depends for its success on a nature-ravaging network of technological marvels. Only once this truth is understood can honest decisions be made about what kind of world humanity wishes to inhabit in the age of ecological disorder.”
The Intercept, Addressing Climate Change Will Not “Save the Planet”
“According to a report released last month by the Global Carbon Project, carbon emissions from fossil fuels in 2022 are expected to reach 37.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide, the highest ever recorded. That means that despite the continued fallout from the coronavirus pandemic — which caused emissions to drop by over 5 percent in 2020 — CO2 emissions are back and stronger than ever.
In the immediate aftermath of the pandemic, some experts thought the world would take a different tack. Countries vowed to “build back better” and inject clean energy spending into their stimulus packages. But the result was not as green as might have been hoped. According to one analysis, only 6 percent of the stimulus money spent by G-20 nations went to areas that could cut emissions. And as people returned to flying, driving and making stuff, emissions bounced back.”
Washington Post, Scientists thought carbon emissions had peaked. They’ve never been higher.