The Environmental Cost of Material Affluence
For the past two decades the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas at beginning of every year has been evoking two contradicting sentiments in my mind: on the one hand, the show is a demonstration of humanity’s creativity and ingenuity contributing to an increasing technological complexity and the advance of a globalised civilisation. On the other hand, this event is the manifestation of an accelerating global consumption and production cycle resulting in material affluence, but also the celebration of the consumer society and the quasi-religious veneration of a beast that consumes the earth’s resources; with its gadgets and gimmicks this consumerism is to a certain degree responsible for climate change and may well be our downfall. The purpose of this article is to take a very abstract view on the cost of creating and maintaining this complexity in terms of energy and resources needed, and as a consequence think about what could be done to reduce resource usage and carbon emissions such that this complexity does not cost the Earth.
Let me start with a simple example. Imagine you are building a small sand castle on a beach which entails forming amorphous sand into shapes that make up a castle by using buckets or your hands; energy is expended to move and organise the sand grains into the shape of the castle’s tower and walls. If you leave the sand castle to its own devices, wind and weather will gradually wear the structure down and the sand grains revert to their state of lowest energy; the energy you invested is perhaps dissipated in heat albeit only in a small quantity. If you want to maintain the sand castle you will need some continuous effort to keep it that way by fighting erosion and natural decay. In the same vein, all the material things in our daily life are the result of a similar process, taking natural resources in their most stable phase, predominately oxides, and, by using energy, transforming them into some more refined state with more embodied energy: iron ore becomes steel, bauxite becomes aluminium, calcium silicates become cement, etc, consuming energy and directly or indirectly producing carbon emissions. In this process more and more natural resources are elevated from their original state and organised into more complex structures, yielding higher levels of complexity.
Over the past centuries mankind has learned to harness more and more sources of energy to transform more and more materials into more complex things. It is, alas, a one-way production and consumption process: use energy to transform resources over consumer products eventually into rubbish and heat while creating green house gases such as carbon dioxide. Most sources of energy are fossil fuels such as coal, oil and gas which are indirectly the result of solar energy. These sources of energy have been used in an accumulative manner, i.e. a newer source has been added and not replaced an earlier source of energy. All the resulting material things have some embodied energy and additional energy is needed to maintain them. The final result of the production and consumption process is an increasing number of material entities making up our life with an increasing level of complexity: your share of public buildings and infrastructure, as well as your brick house, its roof tiles, the wooden floors, your kitchen sink, fridge, blender, shoes, cloths, TV, your smart phone, you name it. See Mike Berners-Lee’s How Bad are Bananas? for a quantitative analysis of the carbon foot print of all your belongings and activities.
To address the title of the story, what is the environmental costs in energy to maintain at least a status quo, just from very simple principles for a single person. Well, assuming that there is a certain amount of energy needed to produce any material item, Eₚᵢ, and some energy to dispose of it, Eₛᵢ, both over the life time Tᵢ, as well as some energy rate to maintain the item in its state, i.e. some maintenance power Pᵢ, then the sum total of all energy rates or power needed to maintain the status quo of all items in one person’s possession or the person’s share of possession of common goods is:
The same equation could be written for any resource, but I did not want to combine resources and energy. There is a dependency, however, because for every resource to be transformed into another form or shape energy is needed; the scarcer the resource, the more energy will be needed to extract it from raw materials or from existing material items. Note that the issue here is not necessarily the energy needed in principle, but the energy derived from fossil fuel which produces heat and carbon emissions, which in turn change the climate. In contrast, diverting some of the solar irradiation to industrial use before it eventually becomes heat is all together different. For the rest I would like to focus on energy only.
In summary, the total energy rate (or power) for a person or society to maintain the complexity of its materialistic life style is determined by the energy needed to produce and dispose of all items distributed over their life times, and the energetic cost to maintain them, which may in turn necessitate the production of other items. The result would be a recursive linear combination for all items and sub items with their fractional contributions. It may sound like a common place and it is indeed very obvious: the more stuff produced using fossil fuel we consume, the more carbon is released. Conversely, what are the easiest way to reduce power (and implicitly fossil energy) consumption per person?
In order to find out how to reduce the average power, i.e. energy and resource consumption per person, we only need to look into the constituents of the previous simple equation. The simplest solution is to sum over fewer items, i.e. simply to consume less, have less stuff. Whenever I see shops selling stuff that looks like short-term consumer products I get angry: that’s just fossil fuel and resource on the way to the bin. Whenever I see temporary packaging to be used for a short time only, I say, no thanks, I brought my own bag or container. Perhaps there should be a cool-off period on all purchases for gadgets and gimmicks: you have to wait for a period of time to be allowed to take an item home. If you really need it, you can come back; a low pass filter to remove purchases on a whim. How much stuff do we need, how many shoes does a person need? Perhaps adopting a slightly more modest life style would be a start, or at least consider the footprint of items you consume by consulting Mike Berners-Lee’s How Bad are Bananas?
Next on the list is the production and disposal energy over the live time which has to be seen in conjunction with the maintenance power, equivalent to the rate of decay. To make this contributor small, there is a balance to be had between something that takes more energy to be produced in the first place, sometimes also using more labour, but then has a long life together due to a small decay rate. Perhaps seen as snobbery, but I tend to use well made shoes that last me 10 years or more, try to maintain them well and put a new sole on when needed. So I can make do with a small number of pairs with an overlapping life span. I try to apply the same for many things, a bicycle, solid wood furniture, a washing machine, etc. Perhaps avoiding short replacement cycles and going back to producing and consuming long-lasting items with scope for repair would offer a lot of gain in the reduction of energy usage and carbon emissions.
Last but not least is another obvious interpretation of the equation by writing it slightly differently, adding the recycling energy Eᵣᵢ over the recycling period and distributing the production energy Eₚᵢ over the total live time Tₚᵢ:
The production energy Eₚᵢ only needs to be expended once over a hopefully very long period, and the recycling energy Eᵣᵢ should not be too onerous. For a very long life time, the initial production energy becomes insignificant and the energy expenditure is determined by the maintenance rate, equivalent to the decay rate, as well as the energetic effort to recycle an item. The consequence is a collection of new design constraints: first, make items robust so they do not decay too quickly, and second, make them recyclable such that an item can be recursively taken apart into individually recyclable entities, i.e. no compound materials which can only go on a landfill or into an incinerator at the end of their life cycle. Take an example from nature: everything is reused in many interlinked life cycles.
There are immediately two issues a critic might come up with. First, producing and consuming less will lead to an economic downturn; well, not necessarily. A redefinition of economic growth, away from gross economic output that includes mostly material goods more towards immaterial goods and services such as repair services; it is not about removing economic activity, but shifting the activity to less (fossil) energy and resource consuming ones. Second, there are the rebound effects: efficiency gain leads to more consumption; saving energy on one item will be used elsewhere; energy consumption will shift elsewhere on the planet. This may well be true, but there is a limit to what people can consume, in particular in services. Of course these efforts have to be orchestrated and synchronised on a global scale.
That being said, it would be nice: a) working towards a state where energy needs are met by solar energy only as the only truly independent energy source, directly or indirectly (Taming the Sun — Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet), b) global distribution of energy derived from solar energy, either as synthetic solar fuel (an infrastructure is already in place and does not have to be written off) or using for instance a global ultra-high voltage DC grid, and c) economic growth is not measured by GDP only but by other more meaningful metrics that reflects areas mankind can improve on such as, but not limited to, the education and arts, all of that on a global level. See Alternative measures of progress for more on that.
