Rethinking Lifestyle

If you read my post last week, you could be forgiven if you think I am against electric vehicles. I’m not. I think it’s a move in the right direction. However, I am convinced that we need to make many more changes than switching to electric vehicles if we wish to save our planet; if we want to maintain a meaningful lifestyle.

Consumption has always been celebrated. It’s probably part of being human. After all, why do we all seek to become rich? So we can consume more! What’s new in our era is the number of people who are rich enough to consume excessively. Ordinary people today consume more of many items than the wealthiest people of previous eras.

New also is what is being consumed – products derived from non-renewable resources. Our first thought here is of oil and its derivatives, but we are also consuming many other non-renewable resources. In due course, every one of these non-renewable resources will be exhausted, and when that occurs, those of us dependent on that resource will face a collapse of those aspects of our lifestyle dependent on that resource.

Of course collapse is not inevitable. It is only inevitable if we build our lifestyle on the consumption of a non-renewable resource. A lifestyle built on cheap transportation because oil is cheap, will collapse. Shifting to electric cars is a move in the right direction, but if that merely shifts our dependence on gas at the pump to dependence on a huge gas-fired thermo-electric plant, we have not changed that dependency.

If we are to avoid that collapse, we need to find ways of living where we are not dependent on non-renewable resources. We need to use less gas and more solar. We need to stop celebrating our mobility and switch to a lifestyle where we travel less. We need to reuse our beverage containers instead of sending them to the landfill. But we also need to shift our consumption – from non-renewable stuff to renewable stuff. We need to avoid distant trips and take in more concerts. We need to park the gas-powered Ski-doo and use our skis. We need to park the car and get that litre of milk with a bike.

To achieve that shift requires that we all, at the individual level, choose well, but we also need to shift as society which requires government action. Could regulation achieve the necessary changes? If we look at the record – perhaps. We have faced two significant environmental challenges in the recent past, and government has dealt with them through regulation. These challenges have been acid rain and the deterioration of the ozone layer. In both cases science identified the problem and government dealt with the problem through regulation. Regulation worked there, but I don’t think it will work for resource depletion.

There is a simple solution – not simple in the sense that everyone would embrace it, but simple in the sense that it would not require cumbersome government action. It would require that we shift the way we collect taxes away from taxing income and profit to taxing consumption. It would require that as a society we reward desirable behaviour. That we tax undesirable behaviour, that is the consumption of non-renewable resources.

Such a tax would not affect the amount of wealth in society, since the total tax collected would be the same. But it would encourage every one of us to change our lifestyle significantly.