marklynas.orgA better way to live 10 July 07
You'd be forgiven for thinking that climate change means we'll have to sacrifice our creature comforts. But it doesn't have to be that way, says Mark Lynas.
This article was first published in the Independent, EcoLife supplement, on 7 July 2007.
Everything you’ve been told about global warming is wrong. Not the stuff about greenhouse gases heating the planet: that basic science has been settled for decades. I mean this idea that we all face a difficult future – one of austerity and sacrifice – as we struggle to reduce our energy consumption to accommodate this new scientific reality. Rubbish. This is a convenient untruth for politicians and business leaders who are against change because it affects their self-interests. Instead, the reality is that a future where we use less energy, where we generate it cleanly and where we use it more sensibly, is going to be a future where most of us will live richer, more fulfilled lives than ever before.
Let’s start with some of the hair-shirt ideas you often hear from environmentalists. Turn down your thermostat by one degree, they say. Don’t heat your living room to more than 18 degrees in the winter. Wear an extra jumper if you start shivering. Have a short, lukewarm shower or a shallow, shared bath. It doesn’t sound very attractive. Personally, I like a temperature of 25 degrees in my living room on a dark winter’s evening. And I can have it, without burning fossil fuels – we have a wood-burning stove, and I cut logs locally, often by hand. It’s physical exercise for me, which is good because it stops me getting fat, and the fire looks wonderful blazing away there in the stove. Where’s the great sacrifice?
That’s the low-tech end of global warming solutions. The high-tech end means that it is now quite possible to build houses which are so well-designed and insulated that they need no heating or cooling at all to maintain a comfortable living temperature all year round. So why don’t more of us live in them? Because house-building firms are too stuck in the past to adopt these new techniques, and are worried that doing anything new and innovative will hit their profits. Instead, they’d rather carrying on sticking red-brick Barratt boxes in the floodplain and raking in the short-term profits, just as they’ve always done. It isn’t our comfort that these building companies are so scared of reducing, it’s their share price.
When you start to look at it, almost every area of change that is needed to tackle global warming would actually increase the quality of life for most people. Take energy. Most of our electricity at present comes from huge power plants which either produce enormous quantities of pollution (coal and gas) or leave a nasty legacy of radioactive waste (nuclear). If we replace much of this centralised power generation with decentralised power: solar, wind, micro-hydro and other generating sources owned and operated at a small scale, something rather remarkable will have happened – energy will have been democratised, and power, in a very direct sense, returned to the people.
Or take food. There has been a huge resurgence in farmers’ markets in recent years, as people start to take pride in shopping locally. They get to know their nearest producers, and learn a little more about where food comes from. Instead of everything being shrink-wrapped and shipped, trucked or – still worse – flown thousands of miles, the food on our tables can come from just a few miles down the road. We might even have helped pick it ourselves, if the producer has opted for ‘community supported agriculture’. We might even have grown it ourselves, on an allotment or in a back garden.
It’s difficult to know where to start in listing all the benefits of this kind of model. After BSE, genetically modified crops, foot and mouth and now avian flu, it is clear that both for our own health and the health of the planet, the globalised food system is very bad news inded. Agricultural producers are suffering as the supermarkets continually screw down farm-gate prices. Switch to a local food model, and you cut out the middleman, giving a better deal to farmers and allowing much more diversity in the food system. Food may be more expensive to the consumer, but that’s because it reflects the true cost of producing it, instead of being artificially cheap because of the external costs (from fossil fuel use, transportation, chemical residues and so on) that are offloaded onto society and the environment.
Indeed, the only people who suffer in a local food model are the big guys, the globalised corporations who have managed to capture so much of our food industry in recent years. Local shopping is very bad news for Tesco’s, but good news for just about everyone else. Supermarkets operate a model of retail that is so highly centralised that it depends by definition on huge inputs of energy. I heard of one supermarket chain recently which flies chives to South Africa, where they are tied by hand and then flown back again. Potatoes are often trucked through the Alps to be washed in Italy and then returned in sacks. A company like Tesco’s depends on a centralised distribution network of huge warehouses, which are all connected by lorries thundering up and down the country’s motorways. This is the opposite of local food, where orchards in Herefordshire are grubbed up because the supermarket buyer can get apples cheaper from Chile. Supermarkets may make noises about buying British and increasing their local food ranges, but their very model – of milking profits from economies of scale – precludes them from ever taking this beyond tokenism and PR.
And if supermarkets begin to lose ground, then fewer car journeys need be made, as people shop in their local areas, on foot or by bike. It’s better for jobs, as local shops create more net employment than do supermarkets. It’s better for the environment, because traffic emissions fall. It’s better for communities, because of the important role local shops play in being the centre of the community. In my village, if you don’t shop locally, you’re going to miss out on a lot of what’s going on. You don’t stop for a chinwag at the checkout of Sainsbury’s. Many supermarkets now have no staff on the checkouts anyway – you have to swipe your own goods before loading them into plastic bags and trundling them all out to the car. Could shopping be made a more lonely, alienating experience? I doubt it. Again, abandoning this corporate, inhuman model of grocery retail is not going to be a sacrifice for most of us – unless we happen to be shareholders in Tesco or Morrisons.
Now let’s look at mobility. We are constantly told by politicians that we live in a flexible labour market, and that we must constantly be ready to uproot ourselves to suit the needs of any prospective employer. The result is that British households move once every five years on average, and on a daily basis many workers commute large distances – at great cost to their family lives and personal health, as well as to the environment. Reducing mobility might be bad news for big firms, but it would be good news for communities, which build stronger ties between people when they stay longer in one place. We might have more integrated family networks, too. At the moment many of us have our closest relatives on the far side of the country, or even the far side of the world – not much use when you need some urgent childcare or just to get together for Christmas without a major travel undertaking. With family members able to support each other more, we may see less need for the commercialised contracting-out of care for the elderly or disabled, and single people may experience less of that intense loneliness that comes from living in a place where you didn’t grow up, and know no-one.
As to cars, they are a perfect example of how something which may benefit an individual can become extremely costly for society as a whole. The disbenefits of driving are not experienced so much by motorists, but by pedestrians, crammed onto narrow pavements by roaring traffic; cyclists, who are at great risk of being killed or injured in any collision with a vehicle; children, excluded from playing in the street, and kept as virtual prisoners in their homes (in Mayer Hillman’s memorable phrase) because of the danger from cars; the poor, who may not be able to afford cars of their own, and are therefore excluded from amenities which require a car-based lifestyle; and communities, who find themselves bisected by traffic, and suffering blight from noise and dangerous behaviour by ‘boy racers’ encouraged by an advertising culture which glamourises speed and danger. Add to the 3,000 people directly killed by or in cars each year the 40,000 who die cancer, lung and heart disease caused by air pollution. So why is reducing car use so impossible for most of us to contemplate?
Imagine how much pleasanter our cities would be if we could walk freely through them, or sit outside in cafes without being blasted by noise and fumes. Imagine how we might reverse the trends in childhood obesity and behavioural disorders by allowing children more freedom to roam and play on their own without having to worry about the ‘stranger danger’ from motorists, who currently kill or injure 2,100 children each year. Imagine how local shops and rural post offices might start to thrive again as people travel less and therefore demand more amenities which they can reach on foot or by bike. Any shift towards local shopping would be another blow to supermarkets, and another boon for the local food economy. In my opinion, motoring is essentially a state-sanctioned form of anti-social behaviour. That is why I feel so underwhelmed with all the hype about hybrids, biofuels and even electric cars. None of them are a patch on getting rid of the blasted things altogether.
But what about flying, the great bete-noire of climate campaigners? The truth is that there not even the remotest prospect of a techno-fix to allow us all to continue flying away for weekend breaks, scuba diving retreats or even visits to far-flung family members overseas. Hydrogen planes won’t work, and in any case, there is no ready source of hydrogen without causing emissions somewhere else in the chain (most hydrogen is currently produced from natural gas, releasing CO2 in the process). Biofuels in planes would be just as much a disaster as biofuels in cars – with millions of acres of rainforest currently being destroyed to make way for palm oil plantations in east Asia or soy cultivation in the Amazon, it is already abundantly clear that in this case the cure is worse than the disease. For flying, the truth is hard to swallow: we’ll have to largely stop doing it. A reasonable carbon ration might allow perhaps one long-haul flight a decade, but no more.
Here you could certainly argue that giving up flying is a significant drawback to tackling climate change. People value travelling a great deal, and the newspapers are crammed with holiday tips and the ‘50 wonders of the world’ that you must see before you die. But to them I say: did you enjoy your most recent airport experience? Do you really need to travel so far, or to get there so quickly? With not even the remotest spot on the planet left undiscovered by mass tourism, where is the glamour in long-distance travel? To my mind, travelling slowly, by sleeper train across continental Europe far outclasses any plane I have ever taken. I once spent a midnight crossing the Alps, sipping wine with friends in our train cabin whilst the snowy peaks far above shimmered in the moonlight. Beat that, BA. And I still feel, despite having lived in England for most of my life, that I haven’t even begun to discover all the geographical and cultural diversity that the UK has to offer.
Tourism today is just another form of mass consumerism, to add to the relentless consumption of goods and services that for most of us makes up daily life. We talk ironically about ‘retail therapy’, and most of us intuitively understand that wealth does not equal happiness. But the extent to which this consumerist treadmill makes us unhappy and unfulfilled is not yet widely understood, and calls into question the whole rationale for economic growth, about which economists and politicians are still obsessed. As Oliver James puts it in his book Affluenza: “The more anxious or depressed we are, the more we must consume, and the more we consume, the more distubed we become. Consumption holds out the false promise that an internal lack can be fixed by external means. We medicate our misery through buying things…”, a process which the advertising industry uses to great effect.
All of this production and consumption uses huge amounts of energy – indeed it is the main reason why China’s emissions of greenhouse gases are going through the roof: the country makes many of the goods we consume. Countless academic studies now show that once a certain level of prosperity is passed, more economic growth actually erodes personal satisfaction and social wellbeing in most industrialised countries. That is why the richest country in the western world is also the most unhappy and divided: the United States of America.
In contrast, in a carbon-constrained world the treadmill of mass consumerism will come grinding to a halt. Perpetual growth is no longer possible, so instead we can focus on making people’s lives richer and more fulfilled by other means than simply producing more and more stuff. It is a very basic human need to feel attached to landscape and community, to feel valued by friends and family, and to feel secure in all the things that makes life truly meaningful. The fossil fuel economy has turned us all into commodities, human units in the production and consumption of wealth. A low-carbon world, with a slower pace of life and a simpler lifestyle, can reverse this trend, in the interests of all of humanity – and the planet. It is no great sacrifice to give up a style of life which is slowly killing us.