Consumption--The Other Side Of Sustainability

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In this post, I want to deviate from my usual discussion about sustainability, corporations, and profits.

I want to discuss something that rarely gets discussed in the sustainability world but which I think is going to be a subject of increasing attention. It's the fact that sustainability is really a two-sided coin. On the one side is sustainable production, which is what all of us in business like to talk about--how companies can get leaner and greener. But on the other side is sustainable consumption, which is something that we don't talk about much.

I want to frame this issues by talking about globalization--not in economic terms, but in environmental and social terms.

One of the most interesting and important aspects of climate change is that it is a global issue with global impacts. If China continues to burn coal at the rate it needs to sustain its economic growth, Manhattan, Boston, and Miami will be threatened by rising seas, and farmers in Kansas and Nebraska will have to switch crops or move. When farmers in Brazil cut down rainforests, the temperature in Boise goes up.

There is no place to run from climate change. Polar bears living at the North and South Poles are threatened.

Globalization has also produced social impacts that are worldwide. We've thrown out most of our toys that were made in China, even after China executed the official who was in charge of product safety. (And we complain about tough government regulations here!) We import so many products from China that their product safety issues affect us directly. To some extent, the same is true for child and slave labor. China's social issues are also our issues, whether we like it or not.

And resource issues have also become global. We are due to run out of oil and a number of metals that we need to feed the manufacturing infrastructure that supplies us with everything from building materials to cutlery.

Water is the most dramatic example of the coming resources crunch. The list of areas that are likely to run out of water in the next thirty to fifty years is scary, and it is already happening right here at home. Las Vegas, the fastest-growing city in the U.S., is built in the middle of a desert, and the lake that supplies it with its water is drying up from the top and silting up from the bottom. Similar things are happening in many large areas of the world.

Andy Liveris, the CEO of Dow, has said that "water is the oil of the 21st century." The Pentagon has conducted scenario planning around the idea that the world will be engulfed in a series of regional wars fought over water in the next century.

But in this globalized world, consumption has not yet become globalized. It's well known that the United States, with only five percent of the world's population, consumes twenty-five percent of the world's fossil fuel. We have only one fifth of the population of China, but we account for more global warming than they do (although the gap is rapidly shrinking).

Jared Diamond recently observed that the average American consumes 32 times as many resources as the average Kenyan. When you consider that a billion people live on less than $1 a day, that my lunch cost probably $20 and I am already thinking about dinner, you'd think the ratio would be even higher.

Now put this in a global context. It has been calculated that if the rest of the world were to start living at the same standard of living as people in the U.S., it would take twelve planet Earths to support our collective lifestyle. When I think about how much stuff I throw out every week, that doesn't really surprise me either. But as far as we know, we only have the natural resources of one planet Earth at our disposal.

The papers are filled with articles about how people in the West are obese, but you don't read very much about the fact that the economies of the West are also obese.

And you certainly are not likely to hear this from corporations that are in the business of selling more stuff. To the extent they are focused on sustainability, they are focused on being more efficient in manufacturing and selling us more stuff. But if you look at the numbers, the kinds of efficiencies they can make are not going to reduce our consumption to a sustainable level, not by a long shot. We can all buy hybrid cars and low-impact fluorescent bulbs, but that only slows the growth of pollution.

The fact is that we need to practice sustainability on both sides of the coin: sustainable production and sustainable consumption.

It's rare to hear companies say, "Consume less," and rarer still to hear them say, "Consume less of our products." A few years ago, McDonald's in France ran some ads saying, "If you have a weight problem, don't eat here so much." The corporate PR guys on Oakbrook Illinois found the people who were responsible and sent them to the (corporate) guillotine.

There are a handful of industries that are just beginning to address the issue of sustainable consumption.

Twenty-five years ago, when I was just getting involved in environmental matters, Massachusetts passed a law that would pay electric utilities for getting their customers to use less energy. Under the new scheme, the utilities would get paid the same, and in some cases more, if they sold less energy by convincing customers to use less, or to use it during off-peak times.

This became a national program called Demand Side Management (DSM). It has the potential to revolutionize the consumption of electricity all over the world. We need to apply this model to other areas of consumption.

Reducing our level of consumption is going to be tough for us in the developed world to swallow, and I frankly don't know how it is going to happen. We have the strongest military in the world, now unconstrained by any opposing force. And we have proved very willing to fight to maintain our life style, with the war in Iraq (motivated at least in part by the desire to guarantee access to that country's oil reserves) seemingly just the latest example.

I think sustainable consumption will come about--if it does--through a combination of five factors:

Market forces. If you've traveled recently, you know that our standard of living is down because of the weak dollar. Imported goods are also more expensive. At the same time, the prices of gas and other natural resource will continue to climb. All of this will tend to bring our standard of living down, closer to that of the developing countries.

Regulation. China legislated only one child per family, and although I don't think we will ever go that far, I do envision more consumption taxes and possibly the rationing of various commodities. We are already going down that road with water use.

Technical innovation. Science may help alleviate the resources crunch. I'm thinking about things like genetically-modified organisms, clean hydrogen or nuclear fusion, and cost-effective water desalinization. But technology will not solve the problem. We're not quite as smart as we like to believe, and there is no technological genie waiting to grant our every wish.

International conflict. The next century will see a lot of battles over resources, and the West is destined to fight a number of wars like the war in Iraq--wars we realistically cannot win. These military defeats may be a necessary evil to wake us up to the need for sustainable consumption.

Redefinition of consumer preferences. This is the hardest one of all. It requires redefining quality of life by understanding that "Less is more." The simplicity movement needs to go from a cult to a mass movement.

I think you can see now why this topic doesn't get discussed much in business circles.

I had the pleasure of being a keynote speaker with Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia at a "net impact" event late last year. He has done as much as any CEO to make sure that his company is respectful and protective of the environment. Yet in front of 100 net impacters, he said (I am paraphrasing), "I have talked to some serious scientists, and most of them believe we have passed the point of no return. We have no hope left to save the Earth."

We all want to think we can go on living this way forever, and that our children should have more than we did. But deep down we recognize that this can't be the case except for a smaller and smaller percentage of us. Not only are there billions of people who want to escape from grinding poverty--and obviously deserve a chance to do so--but in addition the world's population is still growing. By 2050, it is projected to increase from the current six billion to nine billion, and three-quarters of this growth will be in the developing world. So we are going to have a lot more mouths to feed, hands to wash, and people without homes or hope.

I apologize if this message seems like a downer. Maybe I need to find my Prozac. But the issue of sustainable consumption isn't going to vanish just because we prefer to ignore it. I think we're grown-up enough to start talking about it. What do you think?

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