Why is consumption such a problem? (and why can't 'green growth' help?)

Household consumption is the most significant driver of climate change. It contributes to over 60% of our greenhouse gas emissions, and requires more than half of all land, materials and water. Consumption is a bit like a funnel through which the earth’s resources are flowing. And despite the efforts of activists and environmentalists across the world, consumers now know less about the impacts of their consumption than at any time in the past. This is not an accident but a product of lengthy supply chains and 'in confidence' commercial relationships that have no interest in revealing where the resources they use come from, or the more serious impacts of their activities.

Increasing consumption is made to seem ‘good’ for the economy, but we now know it is bad for the environment. Facing this double-bind, businesses and governments have embraced a number of strategies that promise to alleviate the ‘environment problem’ without disturbing the goose that has laid the golden egg of economic growth for so long. These strategies emphasise the value of ‘green growth’ but avoid doing anything about the mounting impacts of consumption. Unfortunately, green growth alone can't save us. There are four main reasons why this is so:

1. Eco-efficiency can reduce the ‘carbon intensity’ of an individual product but cannot reduce the larger impact of its consumption in higher volumes. For example, the introduction of LED lighting in practice lowered the costs of lighting for most people, and so encouraged more production of LEDs for lighting more places, and using LEDs in more products, negating much of the new technology's potential benefits.

2. Green-growth cannot be implemented quickly enough to slow climate change. High-carbon systems and products such as cars and diesel trucks remain in use, and will do so for some time. Whilst innovation and technological substitution might slowly change how we do what we need to, such as substituting electric vehicles for petrol-driven ones, this is a process that takes a long time, and there is now less time to counter catastrophic climate change.

3. Green growth leaves in place the ‘consumption problem’ it claims to solve. Without regulation and targeted incentives, green innovation wii 'follow the money', and this will encourage more consumption elsewhere, that will add its weight to the global environmental crisis. For example, online music and digital photography might have reduced the impact of making and distributing CDs and printing photographs but has vastly increased the need for running servers supporting this service.

4. There are fewer barriers to consuming, producing and wasting more than there ever has been. Buying is now faster and easier than it has ever been, and more efficient manufacturing technology has made many goods cheaper, whilst shipping has become ever more efficient. This encourages faster rates and higher volumes of consumption, as more people have the money now to buy more, sooner, and faster.

These all reinforce the significance of the global paradox William Stanley Jevons (1865) tried to describe, that greater efficiencies in production over time tend to lower prices and thus encourage more consumption. Two consequences of this are that not only will lower costs lead to lower prices and a wider take up of the service or product on offer, but will tend to reduce the seller's margin, encouraging the seller to produce and sell more goods faster, as in fast fashion.

Efficiency, as this suggests, is a double-edged sword. For the more we substitute what we have for what we think is 'greener' the more we increase the environmental load of our consumption. This is why we need to transform not only what we consume but how and why we consume. We simply can't afford to continue with an economy based upon buying more stuff. The solutions to our dilemma are well known, but most governments and most industries prefer to avoid talking about them, in case they miss out on the now increasingly risky bonanza of growth.