Is ‘Living Green’ All That Good?

David Owen, a New Yorker writer, exposes some hypocrisy, fallacy, and interesting facts about green choices in a new book, The Conundrum.

It is based on a compelling premise that the more efficient an activity gets, the more people do it, therefore, canceling out environmental benefits. This is based on a proven economic principle called the “rebound effect” (“the behavioral or other systemic responses to the introduction of new technologies that increase the efficiency of resource use….generally expressed as a ratio of the lost benefit compared to the expected environmental benefit”).

The examples he provides are compelling:

  • Owen keeps a 1940s aluminum beer can on his desk. It weighs five times more than today’s can of Bud Light. Efficiency gains made beer cans cheaper to produce, transport, and dispose of. The cost of popping a brew declined so that more people can do it, using up more aluminum, not less
  • Owen cites statistics showing that as government officials have moved to increase automobile fuel efficiency, our gas consumption has gone up, not down. We simply drive more miles as a species. He also disses HOV lanes, traffic-control systems, and even smartphone apps for finding a parking spot as “counterproductive from an environmental point of view because they make drivers even happier with cars than they were already.”
  • Air conditioners are more efficient and cheap; ergo, more homes are now air-conditioned.
  • The more affordable lightbulbs get, the more they’re left on. 
  • Airplanes are more energy-efficient and faster than at any point in history, and therefore cheaper to fly longer distances. 
  • In terms of eating local, organic food, well-meaning consumers will drive minivans long distances to buy small quantities of organic food at urban farmers markets supplied by growers who make the schlep in trucks loaded at farms well beyond the suburbs. “If all the world’s groceries traveled from farm to fork in minivans, two bags at a time, we’d have exhausted many of the world’s resources long ago,” the author writes.

The author offers some interesting ideas for how to make changes that truly benefit the planet. It is well-worth the read.