Christopher Flavelle: Small is good to combat climate change

Many countries have standards of living that are every bit as good as in the US, in terms of income, life expectancy, education and health care. What they don't have is bigness. That makes it easier for them to curb emissions

The good news from Paris is pretty good: Rich and poor countries now agree to emit less carbon dioxide, and have pledged initial targets for reducing those emissions. Here's the bad news: The gap between the pledged targets and what's needed is so big that closing it might not be possible with better technology alone.

If that's the case, then maybe - just maybe - achieving the goals just agreed to with such fanfare will require Western countries to produce fewer emissions in part by consuming a lot less stuff. That's a conversation that hasn't truly started, and one that politicians, probably for good reason, don't seem eager to begin.

The Paris deal calls for keeping global temperatures "well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels". Think about what it would take to do that. Last year, the world emitted 4.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person. Staying below 2°C means reducing that to 4.5 tonnes by 2020, and then to 0.5 tonnes by 2050, according to figures compiled by the Global Carbon Project. No major industrialised country is farther from that goal than the US, where last year each person was responsible, on average, for 17 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

What will it take to drastically reduce carbon emissions? The optimistic answer is that cheaper clean energy, better storage, more electric vehicles, and more efficient buildings and appliances, spurred by aggressive government support and a price on carbon, will be sufficient. That seemed to be the message from political and business leaders in Paris: We can get there if we just innovate hard enough.

But there's a colossal gap between what's needed and what countries actually promised: The pledges "would need to roughly double to keep well below two degrees," according to Corinne Le Quere, director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia and part of the Global Carbon Project. And that gap raises the questions of whether technological changes alone will suffice and whether those changes will come quickly enough to meet the world's huge and growing appetite for energy, transportation, food, buildings and goods without blowing through the carbon budget. After all, just 1.6 per cent of the world's energy now comes from solar and wind.

If technology can't solve the problem by itself, the other solution is decidedly low-tech: Consumers in the US and other rich nations could just produce fewer emissions. (Developing countries, which produce just 3.4 tonnes of CO2 per capita, have less wiggle room.) The most alarming story to come out of the Paris talks may have been The New York Times telling Americans that they could reduce their carbon footprint by eating less red meat, taking the bus more, driving and flying less, owning fewer cars, and generally buying less stuff.

In other words, they could stop being American. It's not hard to appreciate why politicians in the US and elsewhere aren't keen on presenting that as part of the solution. "We've discovered that owning things and consuming things do not satisfy our longing for meaning," US President Jimmy Carter told the nation in 1979. The nation responded that it had discovered no such thing, and elected a president who was less of a downer.

Reducing emissions by changing consumption patterns doesn't mean living in a cave eating twigs. Japan emitted fewer than 10 tonnes of carbon dioxide per person last year, and European Union countries just 6.6. Those countries have standards of living that are every bit as good as in the US, judged by income, life expectancy, education and health care.

What they don't have is bigness. Average living space per person in new US homes has almost doubled in the past 40 years. The average new US home in 2009 was 11 per cent larger than in Canada, 60 per cent bigger than in Greece and 164 per cent bigger than in the UK. Meanwhile, the average weight of pick-up trucks has increased about 26 per cent since 2000 alone. The best-selling vehicle in the US last year was the Ford F-Series pick-up. In France, the best-selling car was something that looks like a go-cart.

Part of the difference stems from density: The US (along with Canada and Australia) has more space, which means more room for bigger houses, more miles to drive to get to them and less appetite for taking the bus. But it also reflects public choices, such as tax policies and state budgets that favour McMansions and freeways over subways and townhouses.

There is no inherent reason why the US lifestyle couldn't more closely resemble that of other Western nations. Nor would such a shift necessarily need to be permanent: As clean technology improves, Americans could resume their supersizing.

American politicians may worry that so much as raising the possibility of changing the way we live, however temporarily, would sour voters already uncertain whether climate change is real, much less whether the government ought to do anything about it. It's hard to think of examples of citizens of a democracy accepting constraints on their consumption outside of wartime. It's a lot easier to keep hoping for better batteries.

© Bloomberg