Stopping global warming by empowering consumers

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Stopping global warming by empowering consumers (4/10/06)

Last week I read about a poll of Americans showing a majority now believe in Global Warming (GW). The article was on Slashdot and one of the comments got me thinking. I think what is missing from the "Solutions to Global Warming" debate is a sense of scale. GW is happening now not because individuals have started in with bad habits, although that is true, but because there are so many individuals carrying on the habits of the past. In many ways those habits have changed and been improved upon to lessen the environmental impact but that process simply hasn't kept pace with the population growth and so there is still a net growth in pollution. And that is what rubs wrong with me: any solution to GW is going to need to be done on a substantial and almost universal basis so as to counteract the growth in population.

Everyone thinks passing a law will be enough to do this, but I don't think it will be for two reasons:

Laws introduce a market barrier which drives up costs. Unless faced directly with death most folks will attempt to get around the barrier rather than pay the new costs. There are a variety of delusions both conscious and unconscious available for people to choose from to enable this. That's just how it is, and our society will never tolerate making people face death directly due to GW until it is too late.
Most laws target a range of specific areas but with the numbers we are dealing with a far more fundamental change is needed, not paying lip service to a handful of specific laws.

That's what freaks me out. What is needed is a far larger change in the basis of our society, on the scale of something like Manifest Destiny. While we cringe at the thought today back in the 1840s Manifest Destiny was a fundamental change in the orientation of the nation, and that is exactly what is needed now. Capitalism is intrinsically bonded to consumption and as more and more people are consuming more and more processed goods the levels of energy generation required to sustain all of that will just keep going up.

Now, if you've read much of this site you'll know I think about food a lot and so I tend to use the food industry as a model for my thinking. A lot of bad stuff was creeping into food products so we required labels on the products and the FDA monitors the quality of those products especially with regard to contaminants. The end result of this is debatable given the rise in obesity but the point is, there is an active debate and process to step through towards addressing the issue rather than sitting around dumb-founded by it, as we are with GW. We could easily pass a law banning products containing a certain percentage of sodium per volume, or an out-right ban on high fructose corn syrup, but since the arguments for doing those things aren't set in stone we can't and don't pass those laws. However, we can and do label those products so people can avoid them and choose products that are healthier for them.

That whole process has sprung a cottage industry up around it. Walk in to a Trader Joes, a grocery store chain rapidly expanding across the nation, and compare their products with those in a Stop and Shop. Far less sodium, and far less high fructose corn syrup. It is actually healthy, costs less, and tastes better too because the flavors are all less-processed and thus closer to the tastes our tongues are made for. I believe the success of Trader Joes and Whole Foods markets is directly tied to informing the consumers about what we eat. Even the regular grocery stores like Stop and Shop have "natural foods" sections because of how important this is to consumers now.

There has got to be a national organization, under the government, mandating and informing us on the use of energy in creating our services and products. We need labels telling us how much energy went in to producing a product and its constituent parts. Producers need labels on those constituent parts so they themselves can choose parts that had less energy used in the creation of those parts so when they label their own products the "savings" will be passed on to the consumers. In this way everyone will be making choices towards more energy efficient products not just for TVs and refrigerators but also with the foods we eat, the clothes we buy, and all of the other facets of our lives. Sounds complicated and far reaching, doesn't it? Yeah, that's the level of scale I'm talking about. It's got to dig into the national character to do any good, and this would do it.

This organization needs to mandate a label using simple units that folks can understand, such as the "kilowatt hours" we are all used to seeing on our electricity bills but not so simple as to totally blow the meaning of them. It needs to be able to ban energy usage above a level the environment can sustain, and ban the usage of energy created through certain types of energy generation processes while allowing others. We'll actually need federally mandated energy audits. And then, just to make this all fair and give the producers a chance of complying with the new regulations, it'd need to do all this and help those who would be hurt to change their ways so the market will stay healthy.

In other words, the DOE needs to be more like the FDA, and quickly.

Update (11/26/06): "Phase Modifiers Promote Efficient Production of Hydroxymethylfurfural from Fructose" appeared in Science, volumne 312, page 1933, 30 June 2006. It details how to make an integral ingredient of plastic out of sugar, rather than oil. I gather it is also the reason making plastic requires oil, so this seems like a significant step in closing the carbon loop. My congratulations go to paper's authors: Yurly Roman-Leshkov, Juben N. Chheda, and James A. Dumesic.

Update (4/17/08): Check out Michelle Kaufmann's "Nutrition labels for our homes"! Exactly what I had in mind. Love it!