Monday, 06.09.08
Life On Planet Green
Photo by flickr user Robbt under a creative commons license
What exactly does it mean to lead a "green" lifestyle? Planet Green aims to answer exactly that question -- though to help the medicine go down, the channel will feature light eco-tainment, including programs hosted by HBO heartthrob Adrian Grenier, celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, and hard-hitting celebrity journalist Maria Menounous. While it's easy to poke fun at Planet Green and the broader phenomenon of Green Chic, the deeper insight behind this greenthusiasm is roughly right: building a saner environmental future will indeed mean changing the way we live. However, it almostly certainly won't mean buying the kinds of eco-friendly products likely to be advertised on Planet Green.
Consider the eco-conscious automobile par excellence, the Toyota Prius. As it turns out, manufacturing the Prius's battery is extraordinarily carbon-intensive. Paying off this carbon debt through fuel savings will take 46,000 miles, according to Wired. Only after 100,000 miles would the Prius catch up with carbon savings offered by a ten-year-old Toyota Tercel. And the Prius would never catch up with a 1994 Geo Metro XFi.
By now the Prius is a cliche. Tooling around in an ancient, airbag-less deathtrap, by far the greener choice, is not. So one hopes the celebrity avant-garde will start bidding up the price of aging Tercels and Geos and Chevrolet Sprints, tricking them out and inspiring America's Joneses to keep up. Soon we'd see almost-new automobiles sporting faux rust, the better to convince us of their owners' environmental virtue. But somehow I doubt that Planet Green and the world's leading automobile manufacturers will push this line too hard. After all, used car dealers generally don't have big advertising budgets.
What about greening our housing stock? The best thing to do, inconveniently for homebuilders, is for people to live in old, small, not-too-drafty houses, if not in modest apartments clustered near shops and mass transit. Prefabricated construction is nice, as are skylights and solar panels and recycled materials. Passivhaus buildings, which require virtually no energy for heating and cooling, represent a real leap forward in sustainability.
But it's even better not to get divorced (one household is less wasteful than two), or, better yet, to live in group house. Long considered the sole preserve of the very young, some form of communal living is being embraced by a growing number of people. Co-housing communities, in which private dwellings exist alongside communal facilities, are taking off among retirees, and increasingly among younger families. If this sounds like a nightmare, like the Soviet communal apartments of yesteryear, it's worth noting that this is not an unfamiliar arrangements in the annals of human history, that going green will naturally require some small sacrifice in private space, and that social isolation is a much bigger killer in modern America than overcrowding. In 1970, Americans consumed 478 square feet person. As of 2000, that number had increased to 800 square feet per person. Suffice to say, Americans did not become twice as happy over that interval.
Part of the problem is psychological. Our houses and cars are positional goods -- goods that reflect our place in the economic and social hierarchy -- and expenditures on positional goods have sharply increased as we've grown more affluent. Inequality intensifies what some have called "the positional arms race," as, for example, those of modest means struggle to buy their way into above-average school districts. Of course, this means longer hours at work and longer commutes to bigger, more isolated homes, which means parents spend less time with children and stress and anxiety levels build and build.
No single policy lever can reverse this trend. Steeper progressive taxes might help, curtailing the mortgage interest deduction would definitely help, but there's no silver bullet. The only lasting solution is for individual families to take it upon themselves to drop out of the positional arms race, to make do with better and with less. My guess is that Planet Green won't exactly help that cause.
Eco-tainmentMSNBC reports on Discovery Communications' new green channel. |
Green grows upA 2006 Wired feature predicts environmentalism's shift to the mainstream. |
Towards a rational environmentalismIn a critique of "green" culture, Jonah Goldberg says we need to "save the environment from the environmentalists." |
Made-for-TV ecologyMother Jones describes how Hollywood celebrities are cultivating feel-good environmentalism. |
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So I read the wired article, and nowhere did it say it was the batteries that took all the energy to make the batteries, it said it took it to make the car. It takes a lot of energy to make any car. Digging into the sources of the claim, I find that it comes from an unspecified Oregon market research firm that made a bold assumption: all 30 pounds of nickel in the batteries are freshly mined for the batteries. Putting aside the sheer rediculousness of the assertion that mining 30 pounds of nickel takes the equivalent energy of something like 50,000 gallons of gas - the batteries would cost 100's of thousands of dollars if it did - almost all the nickel in use is recycled!
If you are going to get a new car, a prius is a good way to go.
I've often wondered whether simply taking a mid mileage car and driving it until it dies is far more green than buying a hybrid, or even a standard gas engine higher mileage car. My 1984 Volvo has 334k miles; surely this extended use offsets at least some--and possibly all--of the environmental effects of a higher mileage car that's brand new, even if this new car gets 10 to 20 mpg more.
This is related to a more basic problem with us Americans and other first world types: give us any problem, and we'll see if we can consume our way out of it.
Ericson, you can be as smug as you want, but the mpg of your car has to only be a part of the picture; and it may possibly be a small and relatively unimportant part of this picture.
The Prius isn't just about mileage. It's also designed to reduce CO2 emissions, even at the cost of lowering your mileage.
The best solution out there is to walk everywhere and if you can't do that bike and if you can't do that take public transportation. However, if those aren't options and you want a new car, getting a Prius is a better call than any other.
It's not that hard to lower your carbon footprint. My wife and I, in a poorly-ventilated bungalow built in 1928, living in a midwestern city with terrible mass transit, have:
*cut our home energy use dramatically. We only use one-third of what we did last year, and we now use less than half of the average American.
*cut our driving by about 40% (a number that will soon rise).
*changed our eating and purchasing habits to the point that we now buy roughly 80% organic food and 30% locally grown (the latter number is rising now that farmers markets are opening nearer our home).
*significantly reduced our meat intake. I was already a vegetarian (except for some seafood, which I'm done eating now), and my wife eats meat products at many fewer meals.
None of this is to brag, though; we still haven't done enough. But the lifestyle changes aren't as hard as people claim. The emphasis on convenience as a crucial part of the American lifestyle is the largest problem. It takes less time to drive to the grocery one mile away than to walk or bike, so people drive, even if they're picking up a handful of things.
It strikes me as somewhat bizarre that people don't account for the embedded cost of replacing one thing with another, however green the new thing is. So if you NEED a new car, then perhaps the Prius is the greenest alternative, but if you don't, then your five year old Corolla is probably greener. Ditto with any significant item, like furniture or appliances, with the possible exception of refrigerators, which are much more efficient than they were 15 years ago (not sure about 10 -- there was a significant boost in efficiency somewhere in the late 90s).
actually, the prius does have airbags. but don't let the truth get in the way of your conclusion.
I bought my Prius in April 2001 when gas prices weren't an issue and only crackpots believed in climate change. I didn't buy it because of my carbon footprint, although I was attracted by the low emissions.
I bought it to send multiple messages. A message to the American automakers (screw you for standing in the way of reasonable reform and changes to mileage standards!); a message to Japanese car companies (I support your efforts to be innovative); and a message to the oil barons and their Saudi cronies (You perpetuate your evil using my money; therefore I will give you as little of it as I possibly can).
Money drives EVERYTHING. The more those that rely on our money hear from us (through our purchasing patterns) that we want green policies and technology, the more they're likely to happen. In the end, all our carbon footprints diminish. And maybe, just maybe, we start to dry up the deep pockets that fund terrorism and work to sustain the anti-American sentiments that fuel it.
We just bought a new Prius, but we did so because the engine on our 14-year-old Camry gave out. It would have cost $4000 to replace the engine on a car worth less than $2000 blue book. Since we have every intention of driving the Prius into the ground just like we drove the Carmy, are we environmentally virtuous again?
wow. who knew? i'm still driving a 1994 GEO. I never thought I was so ahead of the curve by being so behind. I guess the car is now retro-chic.
Re Reihan Salam's comment on the lack of green in the Toyota Prius. I would counter that no ground breakers, in any field of human endeavor, come cheap or are necessarily successful. While the current model may not be the solution it is hyped to be, it is the car that has turned the automotive industry's attention - and the public's - to thinking pro-earth in transportation. In the long run it will be the car that "started the revolution" and it's descendants will make the '94 Geo Metro look the polluting beast it is.
L F Brown
There are tons of instances where buying something second-hand is ultimately much greener than buying something new and letting that perfectly-usable second-hand item go in the garbage. Alas our market revolves around selling as much new crap to people as possible, and I don't see this changing any time soon even as the industry co-ops the Green image in an effort to sell people even more new things.
Doesn't it feel creepy arguing about carbon footprints with all these ExxonMobil ads hanging over us? While I'm glad the Atlantic is finding a way to stay afloat,I always wonder if our corporate sponsors don't subtly influence the tone, if not the terms, of the debate.
if anyone should control their carbon footprints its AL GORE especialy when it comes to his mouth the biggist source of HOT AIR around
"...By now the Prius is a cliche. Tooling around in an ancient, airbag-less deathtrap, by far the greener choice, is not..."
Sigh. It certainly is not a cliche. Sure the celebs buy it as a statement, but for us lesser folk, we buy it for one reason: mileage.
It's hard not to remain smug when the person beside you on the road is getting 20 mpg or less while you glide away at 48 miles per gallon.
Don't be silly.
Posted by Ericson Smith | June 10, 2008 9:44 AM