What Does Sustainable Living Look Like? Maybe Like Uruguay
No greater challenge faces humanity than reducing emissions without backsliding into preindustrial poverty. One tiny country is leading the way.
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Let’s say you live in the typical American household. It doesn’t exist, not in any sense except in a data set, but it’s easy enough to imagine. Maybe it’s your aunt’s, or your neighbor’s, or a bit like your own. Since more than half of us live outside big cities, it’s probably in a middle-class suburb, like Fox Lake, north of Chicago. You picked it because it’s affordable and not a terrible commute to your job. Your house is about 2,200 square feet — a split-level ranch, perhaps. You’re in your mid-30s and just welcomed your first child. Together with your partner you make about $70,000 a year, some of which goes toward the 11,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity and 37,000 cubic feet of natural gas you use to heat the house, play video games and dry your clothes. You take six or seven plane flights a year, to visit your mom after her surgery or attend a conference, and drive about 25,000 miles, most of which you barely register anymore, as you listen to Joe Rogan or Bad Bunny. Maybe twice a month you stop at Target and pick up six or seven things: double-sided tape, an extra toothbrush, an inflatable mattress.
You believe that the power and goods you consume are changing the climate but do not believe in your ability to stop it. So when you come into more money, no matter your political leanings or education, you buy a bigger house, another car, more stuff. You barely notice, but in the years since 1988, when James Hansen testified that our burning of fossil fuels was destroying the conditions for life, your home has grown by about 1,000 square feet and you’ve bought another car, an S.U.V. that’s itself 25 percent larger, even though you have fewer kids. All these choices compound so quietly that if you’re lucky enough to earn over $100,000 a year, you wind up helping your relatively small social group — about a fifth of Americans — contribute around a third of household emissions. Even if you don’t, by the end of the year, your carbon bill is world-historically anomalous but normal among your neighbors: 17 tons for transportation, 14 tons for housing, eight tons for food, six tons for services, five tons for goods.
That household total, 50 tons, represents a carbon footprint of about 25 tons per person. It’s a figure that eclipses the global median by a factor of five and is nowhere close to where it needs to be if you — we — want to stave off the worst of warming’s effects: around two tons per person.
The task of shrinking our societal footprint is the most urgent problem of our era — and perhaps the most intractable. For most experts, the first steps are obvious and yield the largest and least invasive cuts. Since electricity makes up about 25 percent of the United States’ five billion or so tons of yearly emissions, it more than likely begins with decarbonizing the grid. Next comes a push to electrify the transportation sector and regulate industrial production; each contributes about 27 and 24 percent of emissions, respectively. Then come several smaller cuts, to the buildings we live in and the appliances we use, from policies already having success in Europe and Canada: replacing gas-burning furnaces with electric heat pumps, updating building efficiencies and banning air-conditioners and fridges that use hydrofluorocarbon. Exactly how much all these cuts reduce our footprints is difficult to say, because our country spans an entire continent with several climates. But modeling by Energy Innovation suggests that, even after enacting dozens of subsidies, new efficiency standards and introducing new technologies, by 2050, it might only reduce our emissions by half.
This is the problem with any climate policy, big or small: It requires an imaginative leap. While the math of decarbonization and electric mobilization is clear, the future lifestyle it implies isn’t always. Right-wing commenters sometimes seize upon this fact to caricature any climate policy as a forced retreat from modernity — Americans forced to live in ecopods — while on the left any accounting seems to cloud the urgency of the moment. A majority of emissions come from just 100 or so corporations, activists argue, a concentration of industrial production that, once decarbonized, could slash the footprint beneath every wall sconce and sandwich. Even if it were true, these arguments conveniently ignore one uncomfortable fact: Walmart, Exxon Mobil and Berkshire Hathaway didn’t burn that fuel on their own — we paid them to, or burned it ourselves, because the way we live depends on it. By any standard, American lives have become excessive and indulgent, full of large homes, long trips, aisles of choices and app-delivered convenience. If the possibilities of the future are already narrowing to the one being painted by science with increasing lucidity, it strains even the most vivid imagination to picture it widening again without a change in behavior.
This isn’t an American crisis alone. All around the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles. Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons. In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons). By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons), and places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons.