David Owen is the author of several books and articles on the relationship between human consumption and the environment such as Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability, and more recently, The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions Can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse. His work as a journalist has lead him to undercover work as a high school student for an exposé on standardized testing, to several works on golf.
The MSE sat down with Owen before he gave his talk on the myths of efficiency as this year’s MSE Annual Environment Public Lecturer. What followed was a cynical, humorous, and yet hopeful discussion about what lead to his recent interest in environmental issues, the relationship between energy and wealth, and the ultimate question: will we change our environmentally destructive behavior before it’s too late?
You’ve written on a variety of topics. How did you get interested in the topic of sustainability?
My wife and I lived in New York City until 1995, and then we moved to a 200-year-old house in the country. Suddenly, instead of this tiny apartment, we had 14 rooms and a yard. But, one of the things I noticed was how, even though it felt as though we had moved into “nature”, our environmental impact had increased rather than shrunk when we moved out of the big dirty city. We went from no cars, to one, and then two, and for a while we had three. Our power consumption soared by a huge amount.
There’s a number of things that I learned, and one of them was that, in the United States, the only successful public transit system, really, is New York City’s; it has half of all the subway stops in the country. The reason is that, transit doesn’t work if you move people and their destinations too far apart, because once they’re too far apart, you don’t have enough people per unit of area to support something like a bus system or a subway system. The ideal transportation, from an environmental point of view, is walking, but to achieve that, you need pretty high levels of density.
If you graph globally per capita gross domestic product, and per capita energy consumption, you basically have a 90-degree slope; in other words, as we get richer we use more energy, or as we use more energy, we get richer. And really, energy consumption is human wealth, and we have made our lives infinitely more comfortable than they were a thousand years ago. Unfortunately, the downside is that, by doing all that, which mostly involves setting things on fire, we’ve also had impacts on our world and the environment that we now have to cope with.
How does that energy slope compare between high-consumption countries?
It’s pretty much the same. Climate change is a global problem; you have to look at the global meter. What we’re really doing when we make our machines more efficient is we’re making them less expensive to use, and not just for us, but for everybody else. I think anyplace in the world where people are becoming more affluent, their energy consumption is rising. You see that, too, with renewables or with supposedly green energy ideas. So-called green energy tends to be additive; energy consumption tends to beget energy consumption. As usual, with our solutions to things, we’re more likely to be making things worse than we are making them better if we think about these problems in the way we usually think about them.
In the opening pages of The Conundrum, you introduce the idea of ‘heirloom technologies’ – technologies that are less energy intensive and more efficient in the long run. This seems to be in contrast with the technologies we use today – more energy intensive and less efficient in the long run because it has a shorter life span. Can we continue to support the kind of economy that thrives on the high consumption rates due these kinds of technologies?
It’s very hard to imagine an alternative. Someone said, “It’s easier for people to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism,” which I think is probably true.
Even if you decide not to change your wardrobe this year, you’re still going to spend that money on something, and what you’re really spending is energy; you’re expending environmental impact. If you save a $1000, now you’ll take a trip to Europe; so I’ve turned that into jet fuel. So, it doesn’t really matter how I shift it around, because everything that I do has those impacts.
People in the past have always predicted that, as we become more efficient, we’ll have this huge amount of leisure because we can satisfy our needs by working for a very brief period of time. But people tend to want more. There’s no reason for people to have huge amounts of credit card debt or live in houses that are too enormous; there’s no human need that drove that, it’s just the perversity of the way we are.
Would you move back to Manhattan?
No, not as long as I can afford my wasteful lifestyle. My wife and I have remodeled our house to make it smaller, so we’re heating less, but to have a global impact, everybody has to move at the same time. For example: I believe that in the United States, the top marginal income tax rates to should be higher, but I would not be willing to just contribute more money to the United States Treasury. I would support it if everybody had to do that, but I’m not going to do it myself because it’s just going to lighten the burden on somebody else – it won’t have any impact on the whole. Actually, if people believe that something good will come of it, they’re often willing to support sacrifices that they think are fair and that apply to everybody, but it’s when they feel that they’re losing their relative position that they squawk.
What would it take for the “whole” to move together?
I think it takes disaster, really. Look at a simple problem like health care – there’s nobody who thinks that the US healthcare system works well, and yet, there’s no political method for making it work. So if you move to a bigger problem that’s not just a US problem – it’s a global problem, there’s no agreement on how to fix it, there’s no agreement on exactly what the consequences are – I mean, it’s off the scale of anything that people have any ability to do.
I was the head of the zoning commission in my little town for a long time and you couldn’t tell there were ideological differences at the local level. At the local level, even the furthest person to the right is an environmentalist if he’s talking about his immediate environment; he wants it to be nice. I never knew what anybody’s party affiliation was based on what they thought about local issues. It’s when it becomes more abstract that this sort of division takes place. Once you get beyond the size of a high school, people get hard to govern.
Do you think we’re going to deal with our environmental issues on time?
I don’t know. I was trying to think: “If I was an environmental activist, what would I do?” and I think that I would try to achieve economic collapse in large affluent industrial countries, which might mean you might need to behave like the Tea Party. I think actually you could make the case that the Tea Party is the Green Party because if they were successful in their whole program, it would wind it [the American economy] back. It sounds sort of whacky, but the greenest things that have happened in the United States have been recession-related – putting people out of jobs makes them consume less.
What would be your prescription for the “Conundrum” of sustainable development where there are countries today that still need to increase their consumption to meet their basic needs?
[For] countries that are basically starting with a blank slate where there’s no middle class and there’s no grid for huge parts of the population, it’s a chance to build in a way that is sustainable. India now is building this extraordinary interstate highway, and China too. It’s too bad that they were starting without one [and] they didn’t think about it in a different way. That kind of growth has happened in China the way it’s happened everywhere; it’s this incredibly dirty, disgusting, crazy process the way it was done in this country.
Is it possible to reverse car-centric and low-density infrastructure in North America towards something that’s more conducive to public transit?
The problem isn’t the mode; it’s mobility itself. For example: my flight was cancelled yesterday and I couldn’t fly, so I drove. It was very pleasant; the roads were in beautiful condition, everything’s well marked, beautiful multi-lane highway – all the way here from Connecticut. I would’ve been happy to drive for another couple of hours – that’s the problem!
The ideal approach is to make it impossible for people to do anything but [take public transit], even if they have enough money, which is the advantage of a dense city; with 4 people going to dinner, you can’t take 4 cars, you can’t take any cars. It’s not a political decision by anybody. The ideal environmental solutions – where we take a blank slate world and we rebuild the way we want it – are the ones that are completely unconscious; it just becomes a part of what you have to do.
What do you hope people take away from your book?
Skepticism. All you smart young people, just be a little skeptical of conventional wisdom. I think it’s interesting to read back through some of the history of the environmental movement on this continent. It’s sort of discouraging to read. It’s still very much a “back to nature” kind of [philosophy], but being at one with nature is really a big problem. This idea that I’m entitled to experience a pristine nature means you have to spread out pretty far. We don’t tend to think of that as selfish consumption, we think of it as an enlightened thing. But if you multiply it by 7 billion people, it doesn’t work. Sprawl is created by people escaping sprawl.
Do you have any hope for the future?
I do. I don’t necessarily believe that we’re going to make all of these terrible difficulties go away; I think we’re going to find ways to cope with them. But I’m glad I’m alive; I wouldn’t chose to have been unborn to reduce the global impact by one. I think that people would rather deal with a problem than not be around.
- Interview conducted and edited by Melissa Fundira
