Sorry for the Monday guilt-trip, but just some food for though about our Western lifestyles and the unintended indirect consequences of our consumption. Marketplace is airing an interesting series about American consumerism with some scary statistics. I know humans want to live comfortably, and we probably believe that we deserve to live the good life as a product of our education, social class, and skilled labor contributions to the economy. Maybe we feel entitled to it and so far it's not illegal, but still it's a jarring realization that the lifestyle we enjoy and take for granted is absolutely unsustainable globally. It is too wasteful, and has and will continue to contribute to global crises and conflicts. I know all humans can't live as well as Americans, many people don't want to, and are perfectly happy with much less. We might blame the government and companies for not doing enough to curb waste and improve sustainability, but ultimately it's the consumer's fault. We bought into the wasteful lifestyle, and companies responded by marketing products that appeal to our preferences. The government also responded because we elected leaders who will see to it that the lifestyle we desire is preserved at whatever cost. I know a small "green revolution" is starting in some industrialized nations, but it needs to really snowball before it can even make a dent in the larger wasteful system of consumption.
Interviewing a consumer-lite household in LA, we find that even spartan Americans aren't living sustainably. If you are curious how your lifestyle compares to the average American, and how many planet Earths would be needed if all humans lived as you did, try this simple survey: http://sustainability.publicradio.org/consumerconsequences/ .
My household is slightly below average (5 Earths instead of 6). We live in an apartment and don't buy much which works in our favor, but I drive a lot and eat too much meat/dairy, which is of course wasteful.
Still, when my colleague Joellen crunched the survey numbers, the results were kind of startling: If everyone on the planet lived like the average person in this house, it would take about three planet Earths to sustain our population.
Anna and Christa Simpson: Whoa!
Dena Simpson: What more could we give up? I mean, I walk to work, we live in a teeny-tiny house, we don't have central heating or air...
And yet their modest way of life, extrapolated across the population of the globe, would ultimately consume the globe -- because a lot of their consuming is done for them by utility companies and transport lines and just the demands of a normal American life. Still, the real Simpsons are doing pretty well: If everyone in the world consumed like the average American, we'd need about six Earths to sustain ourselves.
The pollution caused by transporting goods across continents
Nineteen percent of the children in Long Beach have been diagnosed with asthma -- that's nearly double the national rate. This port city is an air pollution hot spot, one of the worst in the country.
The culprit is "fine particulate matter." This and other diesel pollutants have increased so much in recent years they now merit their own category: it's called "Goods Movement Pollution." And it pours out of all the diesel trains, trucks and ships that bring us consumer products.
Sam Atwood: Ocean-going ships burn some of the dirtiest fuel in the world.
Sam Atwood is with the South Coast Air Quality Management District.
Atwood: It's known as bunker fuel. And it's relatively cheap, which is why it's used.
But it also has 2,000 times more noxious sulfur than the diesel used by trucks.
Elisa Nicholas: This is really much more serious than we had thought before.
Elisa Nicholas is CEO of Long Beach Children's Clinic. She says lung function isn't only at risk, but the actual formation of this vital organ, as well.
Nicholas: We now have studies that actually have shown decreased lung growth that is associated with air pollution.
And that's not all: Particulate pollution is now linked to cancer and heart disease. Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch, says transport emissions may be most severe in Southern California, but they're actually a national problem.
Frank O'Donnell: The U.S. EPA has noted that particulate pollution from diesel engines has shortened the lives of more than 20,000 Americans each year.
That's 20,000 Americans essentially dying from consumption and its infrastructure. Officials at the ports of L.A . and Long Beach are now aggressively trying to reduce diesel emissions.
Atwood: Southern Californians are paying a portion of the price of our relatively cheap consumer goods with their health, with their own lungs. This has to change.
Problem is, it's unclear who's in charge. Shippers say they're governed by international law, not local regulations. Interstate rail companies say only federal laws apply to them. Short-haul truckers plead poverty in the face of costly fees and upgrades. And if clean-up mandates become too onerous, says Art Wong, it puts the port at risk.
Wong: There's always the threat that if we scare this business away, we will have cost this region many thousands of jobs. We're in competition with ports up and down the West Coast that would love to take this business away from us.
Garbage piling up
Since 1960, America's population has grown by 60 percent, but the amount of garbage we generate has grown 180 percent.
John does a lot of curbside recycling on his route, as well as filling the recycling bin at home. He's convinced that the rest of us want to do the right thing too as long as it's not too time-consuming.
He laughs, but still wonders whether anybody ever thinks about where all their discarded junk is going or what happens to it when it gets there -- like turning into greenhouse gases: landfills are the largest human source of methane in the U.S.
We don't see the methane, but we don't really see the trash either after it leaves the curb. It just kind of disappears. I asked him whether that makes it easier for all of us to just keep buying and consuming and then tossing our stuff away.
Wilucz: I don't think so. We will run out of space, and how we deal with it may be more the question we need to address.
Here in Los Angeles County, half of our landfills are slated to close in the next decade and a half, including the largest one in the country, Puente Hills. They'll all be closed by 2053.
OK, so none of us can throw anything out -- ever again.
But believe it or not, some places actually want our garbage. The U.S. imports trash from Canada and hazardous waste from Mexico. Why? Money. A report from the Congressional Research Service shows more than 42 tons of municipal solid waste crossed state lines for disposal in 2005.
Pennsylvania is the country's biggest trash importer.
Pat Couturiaux: We need the jobs.
The main reason might actually be profit. Heather Rogers wrote the book "Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage." She says in the 1960s and 70s, private haulers like Waste Management began buying up local landfills.
Today, just a handful of multinational corporations handle most of our waste. Rogers says to maximize efficiency, they've built ever larger regional "mega-fills" and to maximize profits, those landfills seek garbage from farther and farther afield.
Heather Rogers: This exporting is not happening because it makes sense environmentally. It's not happening because it's creating jobs in rural areas. It's happening because it makes economic sense for these corporations to run their facilities in this way.
Landfills may be better neighbors than they were a few decades ago, but they still tend to end up in communities that are poor, or rural or otherwise less politically powerful -- places like Rush Township.
Disposable everything
When did fixing things get more expensive than buying the new version? We asked Marketplace's Sean Cole to investigate the demise of the fix-it culture.
Plekavich: The repair world is shrinking. Certain shops have given up; they just can't take the low volume. And we're lucky that we don't have too much competition in this area.
Plekavich: Because it's expensive to buy all the equipment and send the technicians for training and that type of thing.
Soloway: No, you know, with the advent of disposable stuff.
Stuff that costs less but also breaks sooner. And because it's so cheap, it just feeds into this vicious cycle of buy, throw away, buy, throw away -- a cycle that both Eds know well.
Plekavich: So, if our repair charges are, say $125, and it sells for $135, of course you can't convince anyone to have it repaired.
Greyser: Time is a cost. So you have to go there, you have to park there and then you have to wait or come back. So, you put that all together and you ask yourself, is it easier to say "you know it's time for a new one."
The question is which came first: the lack of available expertise or the lack of demand for repairs? Stuff still breaks, but somehow we've all -- as a society -- stepped away from the proverbial fix-it shop.
Wasting food
Tess Vigeland: We've already heard how we're running out of landfill space. Well, believe it or not, more than 10 percent of that trash is food.
A University of Arizona study found that each of us throws away more than a pound of food every day: half a hamburger here, an unused container of sour cream there...
Kalish: We're salvaging food that is not garbage and we're finding a way to consume what shouldn't have been put in the trash in the first place.
Vigeland: Do you ever get concerned about the quality of the food that you're taking from the streets?
Kalish: What concerns me is that the quality is so high.
Here's what the group found in the first 10 minutes of the search, outside a store near 38th and Third.
Adam Weissman: Here is Styrofoam-packed pre-cut carrots -- 'cause we can't cut our own carrots anymore apparently.
Vigeland: I'm just astounded at this pile of beautiful-looking bread.
Kalish: Multiply this by all of the bakeries, the pastry shops, all throughout the city. Every single day, they're all boasting that it's made fresh every hour. How can they do that? By throwing it out.
The group gathered cartons of not-yet-expired eggs, boxes of butter, plastic-wrapped broccoli and celery. From outside the celery looked wilted, but removed from its packaging, just one stalk had gone bad. The rest was perfectly edible.
That study we mentioned earlier says American households toss out $43 billion worth of food each year. 15 percent of that waste either hasn't expired or is never even opened.
Weissman: Well, I think the question for all of us is simply, well, to ask questions with every consumption choice we make. Not necessarily to feel this well of guilt over how we've lived our lives, but to ask ourselves how can we continue to live our lives?
Greed as a disease
Scott Jagow: Our need to constantly have more may be a disease. A mental illness, perhaps a physical one. Professor Peter Whybrow studies neuroscience and human behavior at UCLA. He's written a book called American Mania.
Peter Whybrow: What it basically points out is that we have a frenzy around certain material things that we just can't do without anymore in our lives. So we've moved from need to desire to craving, basically. We grew up in scarcity -- we evolved in scarcity, that is -- so in fact, most of us don't know what to do with abundance.
Jagow: How did we go from evolving from scarcity to this point?
Whybrow: Well, I think it's been very complex, but in the last 20 years, we sped everything up. Suddenly, there was a fast new world in which everybody could work all day and all night. You spend all night here working for the morning program...
Jagow: Yes I do.
Whybrow: And you do that because the world is still going on while the rest of us are asleep. We've essentially taken the brakes off the business cycle in this country, and what that has done is it's brought extraordinary material abundance. And we don't quite know what to do with stuff.
Jagow: So as a public health issue, what is happening to us?
Whybrow: Well, I think we are pushing ourselves to our physiological limit. You can't do the things we're doing without seeing the predictable outcomes of obesity, Type II diabetes, sleep depravation, anxiety, depression... All those things are predictable if you live a life where you're constantly at the edge.
Whybrow: Well, we could stop it -- you know, the good thing about the human being is we do have a rational part of ourselves. The only problem is, at the moment that's all we have, because all the social restraints have disappeared. And when you take off the social brakes, and we have individualism as the icon of what we're all trying to achieve, there's no social feedback that traditionally in the market has prevented people from being greedy, to put it bluntly. I mean, if you look around, there are lots of evidence of greed, which I consider to be a behavioral disorder.
Accelerating consumption
Scott Jagow: Belts, shoes, iPods, cell phones... in the past 20 years, U.S. consumption has nearly doubled. How can we possibly keep up that pace? The scary thing is, our buying spree might speed up before it slows down.
She says she owns a hundred pairs of shoes, and shops about once a week.
Juliet Schor: Now, if you're talking about the whole world doing that, that will have big ripple effects throughout the economy and the ecology.
That's Juliet Schor. She teaches sociology at Boston College and wrote the book "Born to Buy." She says for one thing, as clothing has gotten cheaper, we're buying more of it -- almost twice as much in this country as we did 15 years ago. Schor says each blouse and boxer short takes a toll on the Earth, from the pesticides used to grow cotton to the carbon released transporting it. And there's a subtler toll:
Schor: Every individual has to do a lot more work to stay current. It's like a treadmill, where we just speed up but we're all just staying in place.
Next is UCLA professor Jared Diamond, who wrote the Pulizter-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (elucidating the environmental factors that may have contributed to the unequal distribution of wealth/power we see today among peoples) and more recently Collapse (how societies fall due to environmental mismanagement).
KAI RYSSDAL: There's a technical term for what we're doing as we eat, shop, drive and go about our daily lives. The word is "overshoot" -- when a population uses up resources faster than they can be replaced.
Today, we're consuming about 30 percent more trees, fish and fossil fuels than the planet can regenerate. We can run a deficit like this for a little while, but there are limits to how big a hole we can dig before it gets too deep to get out of.
Jared Diamond: Of course we are in overshoot and everybody knows that we are in overshoot -- and we are overshooting the things that people talk most about. First thing we're running out of is oil, and everybody knows it. Second thing we're running out of is water. Something like 70 percent of the fresh water in the world is already utilized. Topsoil -- we're exploiting it and it's running off into the ocean. We've already exhausted something like maybe half of the topsoil that was originally in the Great Plains. And then fish and forests...
RYSSDAL: It seems to me what we're missing is the "or else" part of this discussion... There's a whole list of things we have to fix -- what happens if we don't?
Diamond: History is full of the "or elses." For example, the most advanced Native American society of the New World, the Maya, had astronomy and astronomical observatories and writing and books. They chopped down their trees, they ran into water problems, and the big Maya cities that American tourists go to visit today, they go abandoned.
RYSSDAL: Are we seeing those crashes anywhere today?
Diamond: Absolutely. The African country of Rwanda, the most densely population country in Africa, began to get deforested, massive problems of soil erosion, too many people and not enough food... And in 1994 Rwandans transiently quote "solved" -- if I can put it in quotes -- their population problems in the most awful way imaginable. Namely, six million Rwandans killed, one million Rwandans in brutal ways, and drove another two million into exile. That's an example of a country that did not master its environmental problems.
RYSSDAL: How much time to we have left?
Diamond: If we carried on as we are now, then I would expect that we will not have a First World lifestyle anywhere sometime between 30 and 50 years from now.
RYSSDAL: Concentrates the mind...
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An "alternative view" to Jared Diamond's Collapse:
Jerry Taylor: The case for sustainability seems reasonable enough. After all, who is for "unsustainability"? But trying to pin down what sustainability means is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall.
One of the more popular definitions comes from the U.N., which defines sustainability as that which "meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." But how can we reasonably be expected to know what the needs of people in 2107 might be? The challenges they might face are no more obvious to us than our present-day challenges might be to people living in 1907.
Nevertheless, the U.N. definition can be read as a call to improve human welfare over time. An entire profession has grown up around that proposition. It is known as economics. Accordingly, let me suggest that Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was the world's first and best blueprint for sustainable development as defined by the U.N.
Some understand sustainability as a call to protect the natural resource base from deteriorating so that future generations will be as blessed as we are. But the wealth created by exploiting resources is often more beneficial than the wealth preserved by "banking" those resources for future use. Otherwise, there would be little point in exploiting resources for commercial use in the first place.
Fine, you might say. But isn't there a case for making sure that important resources are maintained at a "minimum critical level" and that the proceeds of their use be preserved for future generations? Sure -- but that's functionally indistinguishable from the mission to maximize human welfare over time.
There's nothing necessarily wrong with sustainability. It just doesn't add much to the intellectual conversation.
Jerry Taylor is a senior fellow at the CATO Institute.
My political twist:
Developed nations live so well partly at the expense of the Third World. Probably more wars have been fought over resources, productive land, and wealth inequalities than religion, ideology, and ethnicity – which may just be ancillary factors to motivate people to fight over more banal economic issues. The Third World doesn't hate us for being rich, because even staunchly anti-American foreigners desire to send their children to American universities to have a chance at a better job and better life. But I think some people are irritated by G8 nations already enjoying so much wealth, yet constantly attempting to acquire more and meddle in the rest of the world's affairs (by unscrupulous means if necessary). I think people accept that there will always be rich and poor despite personal achievement and environmental factors. But I think people are tired of our accelerating greed. We already have it all, yet still want more and refuse to share even the crumbs from our table. In fact, some might think that wealthy nations actively keep the poor down with the bottom of our boot. There are plenty of examples:
Backlash against illegals – who actually contribute more to our economy (via sales tax and Social Security payments that they will never collect on) than many trust fund bluebloods who exploit every little tax loophole.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/05/business/05immigration.html?ex=1270353600&en=78c87ac4641dc383&ei=5090
Trade protectionism – Western companies aggressively enforce drug patents to keep cheaper generics out of the hands of the patients who need them most, farm subsidies keep the global price of commodities artificially low.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=575
The war on drugs – the battlefields are in the poor producing nations (causing much economic disruption, violence, corruption), while much less is done to combat consumption in the West.
http://www.libertypost.org/cgi-bin/readart.cgi?ArtNum=94253
Climate change – the Equatorial belt will be hit hardest by global warming (where much of the world's poor live), while the most polluting nations in more northern latitudes will suffer less.
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportid=61491
The Colonial Era has ended, so at least it's no longer acceptable to simply invade sovereign nations, enslave their people, and pillage their resources. But with industrialized nations/companies controlling all financial markets and most of the means of production, they no longer need troops on the ground to manipulate foreign peoples. No matter what our politicians say, much of the Muslim world believes that the US/UK went into Iraq for their oil. If Al Qaeda hates our democracy and freedom so much, then why did they attack the World Trade Center and not the Statue of Liberty/US Capitol? They attacked a financial center and symbol of Western economic achievement. I think to them, Western economic exploitation is more of an affront to their beliefs rather than the liberal freedoms and democracy that we enjoy.
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This whole sustainability thing is a little bit off though on its results. The fact of the matter is, at no point will everyone on earth have what America has. If the money got redistributed globally and there were no third world countries, America wouldn’t be rich in comparison, our standard of living would fall. And then the people who are REALLY rich will be the people living like there are 7 earths all there to feed them. The stats say that someone making 60k is in the top 10% or so globally. So if I am in the top 10% of course I’m going to consume more than the other 90%, or at least there is a large probability I will. Why is that “wrong”? It is technically impossible to use more than 1 earth’s worth of resources, and what is available will be distributed to those who can pay for it. Those who can pay more will get more. Fair or unfair, the end result will be the same. So the only thing I do by reducing my consumption is allow for some other person to increase their consumption. That would be a good thing if it allowed the bottom 10% to take my share, but that isn’t how it works. In my opinion the focus should be away from reducing the top and towards increasing the bottom. Of course, actual solutions to these problems…I don’t have any.
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The question isn't about redistribution necessarily, it's about sustainability. One doesn't necessarily imply the other. You can imagine a world with one rich person and a bunch of poor people, and if the rich person cut his consumption appropriately, we might have a sustainable level of consumption. The problem is that the cost of non-sustainable methods are not passed on directly to the consumer (well...maybe oil wars count). Do you really need like 3 plastic bags if you buy a pencil from Long Drugs or all of that annoying packaging on EVERYTHING? No one else in the world does that, and it has a serious impact on the environment. It doesn't bother most Americans because they don't have to pay the cost on increasing landfills, etc.
Furthermore, there is no obvious link between environmental sustainability and economic power in the developed world. The SF Bay Area is the most advanced on environmental regulations (oil spill notwithstanding) in the US, but also the strongest economic power. Strong economic growth in the UK seems to be happening despite more robust environmental regulations than the US. There is no good reason to keep low mileage vehicles in the market for the general consumer; how does that promote economic growth? My point is simply that there are plenty of superfluous elements to our consumption habits that have a strong effect on the environment, and refusal to change those habits seems indefensible to me.
This seems like the curse of Malthus to me. In the early 19th century, Thomas Malthus predicted the population of the world would continue growing at a furious rate and the population would outstrip resources, causing catastrophe. Of course, he was wrong; in the developed world, many countries are actually experiencing population decline. It is peculiar, though, that while we have slowed population growth, we haven't slowed natural resource consumption. Over the next 50 to 100 years, consumption patterns in the developed world will change drastically (we can already see hints of this with the rising price of oil, even though we just discovered massive reserves in the Gulf not that long ago). I believe the Europeans are in much better place to adjust to these changes, as the costs of keeping our lifestyle become unbearable. For instance, at some point in the near future it will be economically beneficial to have a lot more public transportation, but the US has yet to invest in this infrastructure.
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I wasn’t saying that redistribution implies sustainability, i’m just saying that when the richest 10% live an “unsustainable” lifestyle, I don’t know if it really is unsustainable. Most tests say, IF every person lived like you, we would need 7 earths. My point was that almost no one lives like we do statistically. So it may be quite sustainable given the disparity. Not to say that 3 plastic bags isn’t a waste, or that we couldn’t do better. The redistribution example was just an attempt to point out what I just stated.
And I believe that while you can say wow look at the SF bay area, environmental tough guys AND they make money, the problem with a lot of economic powerhouses is that they don’t sell “things”. Production is where the pollution is at. Google only takes the electricity it takes to light the building, and they need dump trucks to haul the cash they make. While an area whose wealth is derived from say…coal burning plants, will have a much tougher time maintaining economic growth under pollution laws. I would like to see industrial areas thrive under hard pollution laws. Not that it is impossible, but when “tech” areas and mostly white collar work is generating your economic status, pollution is a much smaller problem.
I do agree whole heartedly with J on the last point though, the us is SCREWED when it comes to public transportation infrastructure. There are a handful of cities in the entire country that have feasible mass transit systems in place. LA is not one of them. For me to bus to work would take 1hour and 48 minutes according to the public transit site. And I would have to walk a mile. Problem is…I only live 8 miles from my workplace!
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As you both said, this issue is not about communistic wealth redistribution. It's about changing our consumer habits for our own SURVIVAL. Because not even the super rich will be able to enjoy all their toys when ecosystems have collapsed, people have taken up arms against one another scrapping for finite resources, and global markets are rendered nonfunctional.
To respond to M's argument on sustainability: yes you are right. The richest 5% of people on Earth can basically afford to live "unsustainably" because the bottom 50% does live way below the sustainability limit. But the top lives decadently at the EXPENSE of the poor. And as we've seen throughout history, that social arrangement can't last and is often overthrown violently (France and Russia come to mind). I thought this was the 21 st Century. What you are basically describing is economic feudalism. It's not the royals and the serfs anymore, but the rich with means and the poor without. Our modern lifestyle is the most wasteful of resources and polluting. But rich people don't observe the consequences because they don't live near landfills or strip mines. Yes it's fine to live comfortably if you're not taking anything away from anyone else, or if you solely shoulder the burdens of your consumption. But it never works like that. Our consumer ways negatively impact millions of people around the globe who don't deserve it.
The consumption that you or I engage in is not against the law, but it's not harm-free. We don't have to be Amish, but we could all scale back. It's good for us, for our neighbors, and for the planet. And of course everyone can't concurrently enjoy our high standard of living. But does that mean we have to continue to be wasteful and decadent to prove the point? It is not a zero-sum game. Just because you don't buy that Abercrombie sweater doesn't mean someone else has to. And just because we can do a thing doesn't mean we need to. If we all get more selective and buy less, then companies will scale back and produce less (or produce fewer, better products!), which will reduce energy and raw materials waste, and those resources could be utilized in other necessary projects (or saved for posterity). Of course less consumption means fewer jobs and less money changing hands in the financial markets, so it depends where your priorities are. And since when was saving money a bad thing? Cumulative American personal debt is above $2 trillion (not quite as bad as the federal government at $30 trillion plus!), and the personal savings rate was uninterruptedly negative for over 12 months (the last time that happened was THE GREAT DEPRESSION). We're spending $1.06 for every dollar we earn. Is that sustainable? When do we put on the breaks? So even if the rich get to spend lavishly because they can afford it, the sub-rich definitely need to come to their senses, if not for the planet then for themselves.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/02/07/business/main1293943.shtml
Pulling the excuse that you guys gave for the real estate profiteering story after the SoCal fires, this sustainability series is not from the Sierra Club. It's from Marketplace - an economics and commerce themed program. Why would business journalists investigate the negative consequences of consumerism instead of telling listeners to keep buying more? That would be like the Vatican hosting a viewing of "The Da Vinci Code". But as the Jerry Taylor op-ed described, economics is basically the study of maximizing efficiency for the material welfare of humankind. Commerce that is hurtful, wasteful, and out-of-control is inefficient and threatens human welfare in the long run. So greed is NOT good if you desire long-term business success. Economics is inherently the study of sustainability. Sustainability doesn't mean we have to sit on useful resources and save them for the 23 rd Century. But we can be intelligent and conscientious stewards of the precious, finite resources we have.
Can we consider the communal good over the individual? If you live in a household with light eaters, does that excuse you to gorge yourself on costly gourmet meals every day, just because you can? It's still affordable since the others only eat salad, but isn't something wrong there? And what if your sibling suddenly decided that he also wants steak and lobster every day like you (no reference to Glarg intended)? Now all of a sudden you have to scale back and share, or fight every day to see who gets the good food and who goes without. That family might be economically solvent, but the unequal social arrangements are problematic and probably unsustainable.
Maybe that "global family" scenario is playing out among America, other industrialized nations, and rapidly developing nations like China. Just 40 years ago, most Americans could cheaply enjoy a suburban lifestyle, and China was an almost feudal agrarian society with hardly a carbon imprint. Now China rivals America for top polluter status, and both have growing economies that procure raw materials and produce waste at a rate never before seen in history. We and other nations are scouring the globe and scrambling to secure lumber, metals, water, hydrocarbons, and other basic resources. Globalized trade has served to increase the wealth of many undeveloped nations and given them access to new consumer markets. India, Mexico, and others may follow China's lead. And China is following our lead. What do they do with all their newfound wealth (for the 10% of China that is "upper or middle class" at least)? They copy Americans. China is now the #2 buyer of SUVs and diamonds, to name a few. Soon there may be more Starbucks and Walmarts in China than the US. Even the simple habits we practice at home have serious global repercussions.
I don't think we can really divorce the "high tech" sector from the dirtier "traditional" industry. Companies like Google only exist because of the demand to better utilize the computer economy and industrial infrastructure that came before. The internet doesn't exist in a vacuum, so you need circuit boards, displays, cables, electricity, plastics, and other traditional raw materials to sustain it. The electricity usually comes from coal-fired power plants. The plastics come from fossil fuel refining. The wires, microchips, and other components come from ore mines, metal foundries, chemical treatment plants, and semiconductor/transistor manufacturing. None of that is very clean. And then there's all the energy and material waste of packing, transporting, and marketing those goods to the consumer. Clearly it's not Google's fault that we buy so many computers, but such companies only exist to increase computer usage. Therefore they share some responsibility in the industry's environmental and social costs.
So even if Google's headquarters are fairly green (no cooling towers, hazardous waste, or smokestacks), the impact to sustainability of their business is obvious. And one might argue that Google even increases pollution and nonrenewable consumption because its corporate goal is to basically keep users online viewing their content as much as possible (so as to increase advertising exposure). The more people are online, the more electricity they are wasting. Yes computers and the internet increase human productivity, make our lives better, and may even save lives, but then there's the countless hours wasted on YouTube and whatnot. I'd rather have a world with computers and Google than without, but certainly the industry (like all industries) could be cleaner. Greenpeace labeled Cupertino-based Apple (yes, trendy progressive Apple) the lowest among computer/wireless companies in terms of green policies ( http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/20061206/apple-greenpeace.htm). Surely Apple and Google are no Dow/Union Carbide killing thousands in Bhopal, India ( http://www.american.edu/TED/bhopal.htm), but just because they deal in "high tech" doesn't make them automatically nonpolluting.
Are you serious about your commute situation? Dang that is sad for LA transit. I guess you could always use a bike and get to work in 30 minutes or so. But I'm not judging – I drive 15 miles to work every day because Caltrain sucks.
