Most Consumption is Industrial, Not Personal
July 11th, 2010
Forget Shorter Showers: This article presents a sad truth, which I have suspected for a long time: decreasing individual consumption does very little for the environment, because the overwhelming majority of consumption is at the industrial level.
Even if every person in the United States did everything [An Inconvenient Truth]suggested, U.S. carbon emissions would fall by only 22 percent. Scientific consensus is that emissions must be reduced by at least 75 percent worldwide.
[…] More than 90 percent of the water used by humans is used by agriculture and industry. The remaining 10 percent is split between municipalities and actual living breathing individual humans. Collectively, municipal golf courses use as much water as municipal human beings.
[…] Municipal waste accounts for only 3 percent of total waste production in the United States.
The article laments the fact that we’re reducing individual consumption at the expense of organized political resistance against the real culprits of environmental damage. We’ve been brainwashed into thinking that turning off a single light bulb equals meaningful change.
The article gets more and more extreme in the end, discussing things like getting rid of electricity and even that the ultimate attempt to reduce consumption should logically end in suicide. But the general message is clear: as much as we love the idea of making an individual difference, reducing emissions, waste, and environmental damage has to be large-scale political resistance.
But, I wonder, isn’t industrial consumption driven by personal consumption? If we all stop drinking water in plastic bottles, this article assumes that doesn’t matter because the plastic bottle factory keeps right on pumping them out. But wouldn’t lack of demand put it out of business? So, couldn’t reducing personal consumption “bubble up” and affect industrial consumption?
The Onion has a couple articles related to this, presenting opposite viewpoints: