Climate change is the crisis of the century. It’s the result of our capitalistic economy, which runs on fossil fuel. This message is mostly accepted by everybody. What is interesting however, is how it is interpreted.
The media and most people frame the problem of excessive consumption as a lifestyle issue. Switching to EV, traveling less, eating less meat, buying less, should address the problem. It’s true that our lifestyle and consumption habits are part of the problem. But the problem is also a lot more fundamental that this.
The infrastructure that we use to live, transit, or work have needed gigawatts of energy to be built. All this isn’t “lifestyle”. It’s mostly what we call “progress”. If we want to address climate change, we will need to reduce fossil fuel consumption everywhere, which goes deep in the fabric of modern society.
Focusing only on lifestyle misses a large part of the challenge of climate change. The whole society runs on fossil fuel. Significantly reducing our footprint can not be achieved by changing our lifestyle in the current society. It needs changing the society itself.
The chart that we should learn and discuss is this one (from ourwordindata.org):
Every good or service that that we use in our everyday life embodies gigawatts of energy to exist.
For centuries life was organized locally. People built house with local material and obtained food from local farming or husbandry. We now have a global economy with goods shipped around the globe. These goods are produced using many intermediaries, each transforming simple products into complex products. Most of us support in some direct or indirect way this global chain of production with our work (I for sure, working in the transportation industry).
There’s fundamentally only two ways to reduce our footprint: degrowth or decouple (or both). With “degrowth”, we reduce consumption and reduce intermediaries. With “decoupling”, we decouple consumption from (dirty) energy usage by electrifying everything and using clean energy source.
Both degrowth and decoupling represent radical changes to society. With degrowth, we obviously need to reinvent a society based on locality and less consumption. With decoupling, we need to rebuild our industries (house eating, factories, transportation, etc.) to embrace clean electricity.
A sound narrative about climate change should go beyond lifestyle issue. The awareness is still not there at the moment, but it will come.
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