Your Lifestyle Off The Cliff

Posted by Sonja Ebron

Grist.org has a great piece today on whether American lifestyle changes are needed to address climate change. Apparently, some folx believe we can simply change our light bulbs and drive hybrids, and all will be well! Since some of us would rather let the planet boil than give up our iPods, we should pretend there’s no need to change the way we live. Yeah, like Wile Coyote off the cliff, some of us will get the memo too late.

wilecoyote

The whole notion of “lifestyle” implies a choice, one that excess energy makes possible. But the world economy just ran smack dab into global energy limits and lost big time, and our lifestyles are adjusting accordingly. Not that it matters…

Truth is, to avoid severe climate change, we have got to stop burning fossil fuels — all of them — now. There’s something like a 50-year lag between emission of a greenhouse gas and its impact on the climate. I think we are already on the cliff’s edge 30 years out, so the only question is how bad things will get after that. That means the lifestyles of most Americans ought to be criminalized.

There’s no way around it. No new technologies, no fuel efficiency standards, no changes in behavior that merely “reduce” energy consumption, are going to allow us to maintain our wasteful ways. We need to do all the above, but also simply have to do more with less.