Rethinking Lifestyle

The news media these days, is giving increased attention to climate change. This is good. One hopes this trend will continue. The climate and resource crisis is real and increasingly eminent. The COP conference has drawn attention to the climate crisis, but the increased attention would probably have been there even without that conference.

But there is a serious problem with this attention. The focus is on finding ways of maintaining our lifestyle without reducing our consumption. The suggestion is that we alter what we consume, but don’t reduce our consumption – on switching to electric cars, but not on driving less; on switching to wind and solar energy, but not on using less electricity. These switches are good, but it’s not enough.

As we have argued in this blog, we need to learn to live well while consuming less. I’m convinced this can be done, but not by following the “business as usual” model.

In 2019 (just prior to the pandemic) the GDP per capita in Canada was $44,958. Nineteen years earlier, in 2000, GDP per capita was $34,121, so we’ve had an increase of $10,837. GDP is a measure of consumption. This means that over that nineteen year span we increased our per capita consumption by one third. Did our quality of life improve that much? Surely not. Each one of us has to answer that for him or herself. The answer will depend on what we consider to be important.

I don’t have any data on what we consumed more of, but let me guess. There’s the non-renewable consumption, where we consume the resource and it’s gone. I’m thinking of travel, both by car and by air; bigger homes, bigger homes requiring more heat; and the things we discard ranging from the single use packaging of all kinds to the demolition of buildings we don’t want, hauling the material off to the landfill.

There is also consumption that does not deplete the earth’s resources or contribute to Green House Gasses. I’m thinking here of education, health care and the arts. Unfortunately the data does not distinguish between the two kinds of consumption.

But if we focus on consumption that is not renewable and return to 1999 levels of consumption, would our quality of life actually suffer? I think not. But what would get us to actually reduce consumption? True, electric cars and energy from sun and wind will help, but it will not be enough.

We need to develop a culture that treasures what we have, rather than celebrating consumption. We need to cultivate active transportation – walking and cycling, not only because this reduces the production of green house gases, but also because this contributes to better health and better community. We need to take pride in our ability to reuse and recycle.

We need government policy to encourage that kind of behaviour. The current tax we have on carbon is a step in the right direction because it taxes consumption. Not only that, it taxes undesirable consumption. But we need more. We need a tax system that will incentivize people to consume wisely.

We need to send this message to government. Governments will only implement progressive policy if they know that the people will support them.