Grist - Heather Smith
A few months ago, the U.S. and 195 other countries signed this thing in Paris in which all parties involved
kind of sort of agreed to stop messing with the world's climate. It was very exciting.
So what if we, as Americans, were going to join in as individuals in
order to help the U.S. meet its emissions goals? What would we do
differently? Two researchers at the University of Michigan's
Transportation Research Institute, Michael Sivak and Brandon Schoettle, recently set out to answer those questions. (
Here is the abstract
of their report.) Their conclusion: The largest single source of
greenhouse gas emissions is making things (industry, clocking in at 29
percent of greenhouse gas emissions). After that, there's moving people
and things around (transportation, 27 percent), then the energy we use
at home (17 percent) followed by the energy used by non-industrial
businesses (17 percent) and the energy used in agriculture (10 percent).
Most of this energy is stuff that you don't have any control over: If
you are looking at a row of lawn chairs at the store, you don't have
any way of knowing how much energy it took to produce each one. You
cannot, on a personal level, decide to have your contact-lens solution
delivered to your local pharmacy by cargo bicycle instead of long-haul
trucker.
So, given the imperfections of this world, what is a lone wolf such
as yourself to do? Here are some conclusions gleaned from this study:
1. Buy the most fuel-efficient car you can afford, then drive it as little as possible
You might notice that Sivak and Schoettle don't even consider the
option of going without a car — even though their own graph suggests
that, if having an efficient car is good, having none at all is even
better:
To be sure, many people live in cities and work at jobs where
living without a car is virtually impossible — and these are the people
who this report is written for.
Currently, the average car on the road gets about 21.4 miles per
gallon. If that went up to just 31 mpg, Sivak and Schoettle claim that
the amount of carbon that the U.S. emits would drop by 5 percent — as
long as we didn't go crazy and drive a lot more. If the average fuel
economy rose to 56 mpg, total U.S. emissions would be reduced by 10
percent.
That said, I would like to see Sivak and Schoettle have a
conversation with my (very nice) Motor City-born mom about why she
should get the most fuel-efficient car she can afford when she loves her
damn Jeep and gas right now is less than $2 a gallon. Since they both
live in Michigan, maybe they have already.
2. Drive your fuel-efficient car until it's so old that it
turns into dust — actually, use everything you own for so long that it
turns into dust
The average age of a car on the road right now
is 11.5 years. The average 3,000-pound car takes the equivalent
of 260 gallons of gasoline to
make. It's not like you can compare among different manufacturers to
see which one is the most energy-efficient carmaker any more than you
can compare lawn-chair makers or cellphone manufacturers.
But unless you're trading it in for something that is significantly
more energy efficient than what you have already, keep the old stuff
around. That goes for cars, clothes, shoes, remodeling your kitchen, and
so on and so forth. There is no law requiring you to buy a new
cellphone every two years, and though that's what we do in the U.S., in
other countries people
keep them much longer.
3. Drive your fuel-efficient car like it is a leaf on the breeze
According to Sivak and Schoettle, frequent hard stops and rapid
acceleration have a dramatic effect on fuel efficiency. They assume that
the average driver can reduce overall fuel consumption by 5 percent by
chilling out a little while driving. Also: Since engines don't use
gasoline efficiently past a certain speed, a hypothetical driver could
reduce emissions even more by never driving faster than 61 mph.
I will also say that, based on my experience growing up with a dad
whose default driving speed was about 60, driving at that speed on many
U.S. highways and backcountry roads is going to piss a lot of people
off. They will honk, tailgate, flash their brights at you, and jokingly
and not-so-jokingly pretend like they're about to run you off the road
when they do pass you. It's a little harder to maintain zen composure
under those circumstances, but that will just make those times that you
do accomplish it even more impressive.
4. Fly coach
Or, well, don't fly at all. But when taking a train from SF to NY
takes four days, and flying takes about six hours, it's not hard to see
why a lot of people fly. In some cases,
flying can produce less emissions than driving (if you drive alone — not if you take a train or the bus).
There's also some information out there about
which airlines are the most fuel efficient. (Spoiler:
This more or less correlates precisely with which carriers pack flyers
in like sardines and make them pay extra to check their bags.)
5. Fly nonstop
Planes use a disproportionate amount of fuel during takeoff,
so minimizing the number of takeoffs is relatively easy (if more
expensive). If you need to take a connecting flight, choose the option
that gives you the least number of miles traveled.
6. Turn down the thermostat
Right. And put on a sweater. While people who use air conditioning inspire
all those summer energy conservation think pieces,
according to Sivak and Schoettle's stats, it's heating the air and
water around us to a temperature that we like that is the greater
problem.
7. Eat low on the food chain
Sivak and Schoettle cite stats (
published in Climatic Change
in 2014) suggesting that the average vegetarian diet produces 32
percent lower emissions than the average omnivore diet. Are there ways
around this? Sivak and Schoettle don't get into this, but yeah, it gets
complicated. Some processed vegetarian food has a pretty hefty carbon
footprint, and if you live somewhere with an abundant white-tailed deer
or
squirrel population, you've got some low-carbon meat nearby. Still, this is about averages, not your
Hunger Games lifestyle.
Sivak and Schoettle also suggest that we all try reducing our
collective caloric input by 1 percent, eating 25 fewer calories a day
(if we're men) or 20 fewer a day (for women) — about
a tablespoon of hummus, or a single egg white, if you even think measuring things in calories
makes sense
(I don't). Their excuse? "Given that 69 percent of American adults are
overweight (CDC, 2015), most of us could safely lose some weight."
Dudes. Really. The low-carbon agricultural revolution will not come any
faster because you fat-shamed America.
So: I have read a lot of reports like this one before. This one is
particularly weird, though, because it focuses so much on personal
choice, and ease of that choice. And because its definition of "ease"
makes no sense.
As Sivak and Schoettle put it:
This study did not exhaustively examine all possible
actions that an individual can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
The emphasis was on selected actions that do not require substantial
effort and time, do not require much in the way of changing
one's lifestyle, and are relatively easy to quantify in terms of their
effects. Examples of actions not considered are increasing home
insulation (takes both substantial effort and time), eliminating the use
of drive-through banks and restaurants, and thus eliminating
the associated idling (requires a change, albeit small, in one's
lifestyle), and buying locally sourced products (effects are not easy to
generalize because they vary from product to product).
I'm not quite sure what to make of the fact that the
study's authors have somehow decided that going vegetarian, or figuring
out how to consistently eat a tablespoon less of hummus than you usually
do, is less arduous than parking your car, getting out of it, and going
into a building to order food.
Let's take this study at face value. What can a
hypothetical person do to cut emissions easily, when they are not trying
very hard to do anything? The answer to that question is, by far and
away, this one: Buy a more fuel-efficient car.
But here's the thing. The only reason we have
fuel-efficient cars to buy is because of political pressure, rather than
individual choice — the first Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE)
standards
were created by Congress in 1975.
The newest CAFE standards, which are intended to get the average mpg up
to 54.5 mpg by 2025, were the result of hard bargaining — and an auto
industry that had been weakened by the recession. At the time that the
standards were finalized in 2005, only two cars (the Chevy Volt and a
thing called a Ford Focus BEV FWD) met that standard — even the
much-hyped Toyota Prius didn't qualify. Now there are a handful
that get nearly double that — but the average mpg of cars sold
actually fell slightly between 2014 and 2015, probably because of lower gas prices.
Meanwhile, for way too long, the low-income people with long commutes
who would have the most practical incentive to drive a fuel-efficient
car
have been locked out of the market for one, even as the current housing status quo pushes them
farther out into the suburbs. Individual
choice only goes so far: Sometimes you need the whammy of regulation to
change the available options before you can get to the point where you
have a choice.
On paper,
it's totally possible for the U.S. to transition to lower carbon emissions and
still have a strong economy. But looking at the numbers alone leaves
out the huge political and social obstacles — angry oil barons,
stick-in-the-mud utilities, car companies that would rather roll out old
models than develop new tech — that have to be overcome to make that
happen. You can't buy fuel-efficient vehicles until companies are under
pressure to actually make them — and to make them affordable. You can't
reduce the amount of time you spend driving unless your city or suburb
actually has the infrastructure (sidewalks, transit, zoning that allows
jobs and housing and shopping to coexist) that makes such changes
possible.
Climate change is not something that we can conserve our way out of individually or easily. As
Maggie Koerth-Baker put it in her excellent book
Before the Lights Go Out,
if we Americans were going to conserve our collective way out of
climate change, we would have to reduce our emissions to less than one
ton per person. While one ton seems like a big number,
getting to it is much harder than it sounds:
One ton of greenhouse gas emissions buys a year's worth
of heat for one average home in the United States … That's not including
electricity, clothes, food, or transportation. Do you travel a lot for
business? Maybe you could spend your one ton of emissions on airline
flights instead. On that yearly budget, you can afford to fly 10
thousand miles in coach. Of course, again, that leaves you with no food
to eat, no clothes to wear, and no house to come home to.
Getting to less than a ton per person — in the U.S., anyway — would
involve a level of change that hasn't been seen since WWII. Back
then, tires, automobiles, typewriters, bicycles, gasoline, sugar,
coffee, meat, cheese, butter, firewood, and coal were all rationed.
Factories stopped making consumer products and concentrated on the war
effort.
The national speed limit was set to 35 mph to conserve fuel. All
forms of automobile racing were banned. Driving for "sightseeing" was
banned.
Special courts were set up
to deal with those who broke the law — people who were found to be
driving "for pleasure" had their gasoline rations taken away.
I'm not suggesting we go full WWII on climate change. (For one thing:
We had more trains then. For another thing: We could get a lot done
with
just a Cold War approach.)
What I am saying is that, yes, we can change our individual ways — and
we should. But with a problem as big as climate change, we shouldn't
pretend that we can go it alone.
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