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Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a two-part report on the emergence of sustainable consumption as a major policy debate and how it will affect consumers, businesses and policymakers.
By Bart Mongoven
With the world's major energy consumers seriously searching for ways to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels and guarantee constant energy supplies, we are seeing the beginning of a revolution in energy production. The focus on finding new energy systems is mainly an outgrowth of economic and geopolitical concerns, in that none of the big three consumers -- the United States, Europe and China -- wants to continue to pay spiraling energy costs or be held hostage to foreign producers. A secondary aspect of this new interest is a search for "cleaner" alternatives.
Both the United States and China, for example, have substantial coal resources, but neither sees complete reliance on coal as a panacea because of coal's impact on air pollution (especially in China) and climate change. Europe, meanwhile, is leading the charge on the climate change issue to the point that it appears willing to trade some energy security for new systems that seem less likely to exacerbate climate change.
After decades of struggling to bring their concerns over the air-polluting and climate-changing side-effects of fossil fuel use to the forefront, environmental activists finally are getting results. Governments and industries that are developing new energy systems will factor in climate change and air quality. In essence, however, as these secondary energy-related issues move from the drawing board to the boardroom, control over them has shifted from the activists who created and promoted the issue to the business crowd that is charged with instituting solutions. This has left the idealists searching for new ways to hold power over the direction of energy policy.
In response, the idealists appear to be taking on a new long-term challenge -- one focused on changing how consumers, especially in the United States and Europe, view consumption. The sustainable consumption movement is focused not merely on energy conservation -- though that certainly would be an important result -- but rather on the development of a personal ethic that has subscribers using as little energy and as few products as possible to achieve their desired standard of living. At its core will be an emphasis on changing people's attitudes toward what has "value" and what does not, while convincing them to view technological developments in terms of whether they are safe in the long run. (Some argue, for example, that while the use of DDT 50 years ago solved the food-shortage problem, it replaced it with a litany of human health and ecological problems that continue to plague society).
New Expressions of Value
Adherents to the sustainable consumption ethic -- those seeking to encourage cleaner or less environmentally intrusive sources of energy and other resources -- are targeting a broad range of industries and processes, and an equally broad range of downstream users of energy, natural resources and consumer products (especially the end-user, the individual consumer). Insofar as sustainable consumption is an effort to mold the purchasing decisions of consumers, it is an attempt to change everyday values. It seeks to promote consciousness of the wider-ranging consequences -- and particularly environmental consequences -- of everyday decisions. Consumers who adopt this ethic, then, would think hard before deciding which appliances they buy, how they heat their homes and how they get to work. The ethic of sustainable consumption reduces the value of a good to a particular individual, and increases the value one places on that good's wider social implications.
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