Frugality the basis for GHG reduction?

Zeno Swijtink recently commented,

"There is an earlier tradition of American frugality, of Benjamin Franklin and Henry David Thoreau, that is still alive in this country."

How can this be harnessed to bring about meaningful reductions in GHGs? Are Americans still capable of choosing to "use less" because it is "not right" to consume more than one really needs?

Using resources more efficiently implies that the same work is done with less energy. However, conservation goes to the root of what one thinks one needs or wants, and consciously "using less."

I was in a class one time where we had some Japanese guests from the energy industry. First time visitors to the United States, they were asked for their impressions. One of the responses was that they could not believe the size of the portions of food they were being served in restaurants. It appalled them that they could not finish it all, and it had to be thrown away. This is not to glorify Japanese society, however, it points to a fundamental difference in social constructs between societies.

Comments

[Zeno Swijtink]

Dave,

On this topic of "Enough" I snooped around a little more, encouraged by what I read in this week's issue of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

There is a new book on this issue, The Logic of Sufficiency, by Thomas Princen (MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2005). "Princen, a sociologist at the University of Michigan, has long pondered the norms of sustainable consumption, especially when grounded in moderation, restraint, and thrift" as a reviewer writes in the latest issue of Science, Norman Myers, the coauthor of The New Consumers: The Influence of Affluence on the Environment (Science, Vol. 310. no. 5755, p. 1771).

Princen's home page is at:

http://www.snre.umich.edu/faculty-staff-directory/faculty-detail.php?people_id=22

Princen is my man in our conversation about efficiency vs. sufficiency: "He postulates a principle of consumption sufficiency, which he believes can reach beyond the oft-urged goal of resource efficiency. Efficient consumption of resources is still consumption. If 100-miles-per-gallon cars enable consumers to save sufficient money to buy more of this and that, the efficiency increases consumption and only postpones the day when we consume less while enjoying greater material well-being. (...) Princen starts by reviewing the concept of sufficiency, especially the imperative of sufficiency in an ecologically constrained world. After surveying the "brief and curious history" of the term efficiency, he devotes an entire chapter to the issue of efficiency ratios. The book's first half concludes with a critique of activities undertaken to foster greater consumption through increases in both worker productivity and individual spending."

The reviewer is more of Dave's inclination, and in my view is blind to the macro-economic rebounds of increased efficiency: "If I have a reservation about Princen's views, it is that he seems unduly critical of a strategy that offers vast (though far from all-encompassing) scope for sustainable consumption, namely, efficiency of resource use. Princen rejects that as somehow opposed to sufficiency, yet the two should surely be complementary. Although the reader encounters the efficiency issue at dozens of points in the book, I would like to have seen more on efficiency gurus such as Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, and William McDonough."

In the abstract for an earlier paper, "Principles for Sustainability: From Cooperation and Efficiency to Sufficiency" in Global Environmental Politics (Volume 3, Number 1, February 2003, pp. 33-50), Princen writes:

"If analysts of political and ecological economy take seriously critical trends in environmental degradation and accept social responsibility for contributing to the reversal of such trends, they must go beyond the descriptive and predictive to the prescriptive, beyond marginal environmental improvement to sustainability, beyond cooperation and efficiency to sufficiency.

Cooperation and efficiency principles are useful when biophysical underpinnings remain intact. Otherwise, sufficiency principles — restraint, precaution, polluter pays, zero, reverse onus — address the defining characteristics of current trends, namely environmental criticality, risk export, and responsibility evasion. They engage overconsumption. They compel decision-makers to ask when too much resource use or too little regeneration risks important values such as ecological integrity and social cohesion, when material gains now preclude material gains in the future, when consumer gratification or investor reward threatens economic security, when benefits internalized depend on costs externalized. Under sufficiency, one necessarily asks what are the risks, not just in the short term and for immediate beneficiaries, but in the longterm and for the underrepresented."

Princen also co-edited an collection of papers, Confronting Consumption (MIT Press, 2002) that was reviewed by Vicki Robin (author of the famous cult book Your Money or Your Life, and chair of the Simplicity Forum http://www.simplicityforum.org ) in the Summer 2003 Issue of Yes! Magazine

http://www.yesmagazine.org/article.asp?ID=995

Finally, there is a special issue of Journal of Industrial Ecology edited by Edgar Hertwich (Volume 9, Numbers 1-2, Winter/Spring 2005), on our ability to live better by consuming less and reduce our impact on the environment in the process. There is some fascinating stuff here in this free issue, supported by the Garfield Foundation and the United Nations Environment Programme, Division of Technology, Industry, and Economics. Download from

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=5&tid=1704

including a paper on The Everyday Life Context of Increasing Energy Demands and a review of The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, by Barry Schwartz. (New York: HarperCollins, 2004)