What Will Consumerism Look Like without Fossil Fuels? Asher Miller, John de Graaf, Annie Leonard, Richard Heinberg Transcript of conversation recorded on June 30th 2016 Our Renewable Future: Transformation requires us to use energy differently, in every aspect of life. What would that look like? Richard Heinberg: Operational vs. embodied energy is an important distinction. Embodied is huge... roads, car, infrastructure, etc. It's going to be much more difficult to embody in infrastructure like highways built out of cement and asphalt, and consumer products, than it will be to just replace our electricity supply. Consumerism didn't just happen by accident. It was a logical and deliberate construct on the part of the economic elites in the early 20th century, who were responding to a problem of the time, one of over-production. Where cheap fossil fuel energy made it possible to produce so much "stuff", so fast, in powered assembly lines, that the economy couldn't soak up all of this production. So the problem was solved with advertising, consumer credit, and a re-orientation of both the economy and government policy, around the idea that "personal consumption," people buying more and more stuff, could be the organizing principle for the entire economy. It's important we start by understanding that consumerism is a systemically interlinked set of institutions, rather than just a greedy proclivity on the part of some people. [BEN: Ref. Ben Hunt's comment on the narrative of one bad apple rather than systemic corruption.] How consumerism works today in energy terms is also important to understand. We can summarize that very simplistically as: China burning lots of cheap coal to make consumer goods that get shipped via oil-burning container ships to American households and stores. So the greenhouse gases are attributed to the Chinese, who are burning all that coal… or they're not counted at all, in terms of the transport/shipping. Which gives us a very skewed understanding of what the current energy and climate situation really is. And its links to consumerism. Annie Leonard: It's a particular relationship to consumption that is totally hyped-out with the availability of cheap fossil fuel energy. And its a relationship with consumption through which we're trying to find our meaning, or purpose in life, or demonstrating our value, or codifying our relationships to others. All through consumption. I want to highlight that difference between consumption and consumerism. Which is this really out of control set of ideological and economic organizing principles. I often talk about the take-make-waste economy. Most of the economy right now is based on taking resources from the planet, using them, chucking them, and taking more resources. That is, of course, linked to massive environmental problems. I think about the portfolio Greenpeace works on, whether it's the oceans that are being completely cleared of fish and are now turning into dead zones, in many places with more pieces of plastic pollution than fish. Whether it's the rainforests around the world, the Amazon, the Congo, Indonesia, being clearcut. Whether it's toxic pollution... pretty much every environmental problem out there is driven, exacerbated and amplified by this excessive consumerism. 1 The one that is most obvious and visible to us every day is waste. When people think of consumerism and the environment, we often think about the waste we create. We create an absolutely disgusting amount of waste in this country; about 4.5 lbs of waste we each throw away each day. But just like there's operational energy and embedded energy, there's also the daily waste and then the embedded waste... because of all the waste created to make that 4.5 lbs of waste we're throwing away every day. That's much, much more. The waste we see coming out of our households is the tip of the iceberg compared with the amount of waste created in mining, drilling, extracting, transporting, processing, all of that stuff which we're going to briefly use and throw away. All of that is made possible by the abundance of cheap energy. So it's really an illusion that this is even remotely sustainable. John de Graaf: Obviously we can see some benefits to consumerism and people, up to a point. We look at Gross Domestic Product, which is the way we measure our success as consumerist societies. When the GDP goes up, the grosser it gets, the better off we're supposed to be. That works for a while. When countries are very, very poor, rising GDP can bring a great increase in wellbeing and in personal satisfaction. But after awhile, and that's been found to be at the level of around $10,000/year in many places, that whole thing flattens off. It's not that people don't get any more satisfaction at all... they do. But it's so flat that they pay enormous costs for those increases, and they could probably be a lot more satisfied without those increases by doing things in a different way. What are some of the costs we pay? The biggest costs in my book we pay socially for constantly feeling like we have to grow and we have to consume and we have to keep this going, is overwork, in a massive way. We've not had a lessening of the work week in the U.S. since the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938. In fact, according to many experts, we're actually working longer hours today than we were in the 1960s and 1970s. The cost of this is very, very high, because that time spent at work is time not being spent in relationship and connection with friends and others; in time spent building community and volunteering and taking care of that community; in time spent appreciating the natural world; all things we know make us more satisfied and happier with our lives. The result is that we see sharp increases in loneliness, particularly as people age in the U.S. AARP and Time Magazine did a study and found that in the decade between 2000 and 2010 alone, the percentage of older Americans (over 45) who could be called "chronically lonely," in terms of their expression of how lonely they were and how they missed out on connection with others, increased in that decade alone from 20% to 35% of that population. That is an enormous tragedy; not only for those people who are lonely, but it's a huge impact on our healthcare system, because it's precisely those older and chronically lonely people who are suffering the kinds of diseases we pay for the most in our healthcare economy. We're spending twice as much money in this consumer-obsessed society which the U.S. is, on healthcare than people in virtually every other wealthy country, with arguably the worst results. We have the lowest life expectancy among rich countries, the highest mortality, the greatest amounts of stress, the highest amounts of anxiety and depression; we're using some 60% of the world's anti-depressants. One could go on and on, but there are other factors socially, too. As all of society becomes marketized, it becomes having social commons in which we can find things that are enjoyable that we do with each other. The Italian economist Stefan Obarcalini looks at the whole idea of GDP and says that where we see rapid GDP growth in already rich countries, this is a sign of decay in the social system, not of dynamism. For example, this rapid rise in GDP results in overwork, resulting in disconnection and loneliness, destruction of the environmental commons we share. What do we do? We sell those things back to people through the market. You're lonesome? Buy this car and you'll have lots of friends. No 2 contact with nature because we've destroyed and bulldozed nature and put up high-rises instead? Fly to a tropical paradise and spend time in a pristine environment for four days. All of that looks great on the books, because GDP rises. But all of that, in fact, is a symptom of the decay of the social order in society. I think that's as important as the obvious environmental damage we're doing by all of this which Annie correctly pointed out. Asher Miller: Thank you for that. We've talked a little already about some of the environmental impacts, the rampant consumerist economic system that we developed that is unsustainable for a lot of reasons. We've also talked about some of the social costs and impacts on society and human beings as individuals as a result of this frenetic consumerism we've created. I want to get back to this question of the relationship between energy, and the transition towards renewable energy. There could be lots of reasons why we might want to shift or want or need to shift away from this consumer-based economic system that have nothing to do with our energy inputs. But I'm curious from the three of you, when you try to imagine the future where there aren't these fossil fuel inputs into the system, what comes to mind in terms of questions, visions, our production of "stuff"? Are there going to be any changes to that system, just based on the relationship and role that fossil fuels have played? AL: It's not a question of 'if' we're going to need to meet our needs beyond fossil fuels, but 'how' we're going to meet our needs beyond fossil fuels.