Want To Help The Climate? Stop Buying So Much Stuff!

Brock University Expert Says Consume Less If We’re Serious About Climate Change

From A Brock University Media Release

Niagara, Ontario, December 2015

Lost in the discussion of the recent Paris climate change conference was a big, environment-damaging elephant: a global system that encourages us to buy more and more stuff, says a Brock University expert on consumerism’s impact on the environment.

“Indeed, economic growth as the heart of our economic system did not seem to be challenged but instead there was a lot of discussion of what alternatives could facilitate business-as-usual economic growth,” says Jennifer Good, Associate Professor of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University.

Good says there’s a certain irony about the COP21 climate change conference beginning on the same day as Cyber Monday (Novemberf 30th, 2015) , a day when consumers spent over $2.2 billion. The production of many consumer goods eat up valuable resources and emit pollution, she says.

The Brock professor monitored the transcripts of North American television news networks including ABC, CBS, CNBC, CNN, CTV, Fox, MSNBC and NBC from November 1 – 27, 2015 and found that ‘COP21’ was mentioned or discussed 74 times and ‘Cyber Monday’ 157 times. However, ‘economic growth’ blew both away with 1,510 mentions or discussions, Good says.

Good researches how mass media fuels materialism and consumerism, which in turn harms the natural environment and contributes to climate change. In her 2013 book Television and the Earth: Not a Love Story , Good says society needs new stories and new ways of calculating personal and societal well-being.

The following article on this issue by Jennifer appeared in a recent edition of the Brock News

COP21 Climate Change Conference and Cyber Monday

On Monday November 30 (2015) two vitally important world events occurred: the climate change conference, COP21, commenced in Paris and consumers just over 2.2 billion dollars (Statista) on Cyber Monday.

It is easy to make a case for the importance of COP21. Increasingly humanity has recognized the precipice to which we are marching – perhaps running.

The world’s political, environmental, and visionary leaders have come together to discuss climate change and develop plans to try and avoid the fall. And Cyber Monday is equally vital in its epitomizing of our fundamental climate change challenge: over-consumption.

This isn’t to say that consumption is missing from our climate change discourse. Energy consumption is discussed – especially how bad non-renewables such as coal should be replaced with good renewables such as wind and solar.  There are also discussions of purchasing different kinds of products.

For example, electric cars have been in the news lately (for example, Premier Kathleen Wynne recent highlighting the importance of electric cars in Ontario’s future). And, as relatively desirable as these alternatives may be, business-as-usual remains intact; similarly, our collective understanding of economic growth as the one measure of societal, indeed global, wellbeing continues unabated.

But what’s good for growth can be devastating for the planet. Let’s use the example of the “cyber” part of cyber-Monday: the booming electronics industry that supplies the purchasing technology, and the content of much of the purchases, for this online consumer extravaganza.

The Electronics TakeBack Coalition (ETBC) estimates that more than 142,000 computers and 416,000 mobile devices are discarded every day in the United States (the electronics item with the shortest lifespan? Our phones).

The UN Environment Program estimates that 40 million tonnes of e-waste are created each year but that number has increased dramatically.  And all of these numbers are increasing as I write because electronic waste is the fastest growing component of the municipal waste stream in “developed” countries and increasingly in “developing” countries.  Indeed, electronic waste has been described as a “waste tsunami.”

It isn’t just the disposal of electronics that has an environmental impact; the ETBC estimates that to create a computer and monitor takes approximately 530 pounds of fossil fuels, 48 pounds of chemicals, and 1.5 tons of water.  All of these statistics help to explain the Basel Action Network’s estimation that two percent of the global carbon footprint comes from the IT industry.

The bad news is that in spite of urgent environmental concerns, our love and lauding of consumption still reigns supreme. For example, a search of North American television news networks’ transcripts (including ABC, CBS, CNBC, CNN, CTV, Fox, MSNBC and NBC) for November 1 – 27, 2015, indicates that “COP21” was mentioned/discussed 74 times, “Cyber Monday” 157 times and “economic growth” blew both away with 1,510 mentions/discussions.

The good news is that this reliance on economic growth as an indicator of societal wellbeing is new. Economist Peter Victor, author of Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster points out that it was in the 1950s that economic growth became a policy priority.  And the earth’s climate is telling us that we have to change this priority.  We are over-consuming – on Cyber Monday and every other day of the year.  Let’s start talking about it!

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Jennifer Good is an Associate Professor of Communication, Popular Culture and Film at Brock University.  

About Jennifer Good’s 2013 book Television and the Earth: Not a Love Story

Habitat loss, the extinction of species, severe droughts, rapidly diminishing polar ice, hugely powerful and destructive storms — how have we arrived at such a precarious point in the environmental history of our planet?

In Television and the Earth: Not a Love Story, Jennifer Ellen Good argues that one of the fundamental reasons for the wholesale neglect and destruction of our environment is television — or, more precisely, the stories told on television. Stories have always been vital to how we make sense of the world, but in the historical blink of an eye, mediated communication changed the source and content of our stories. And no mediated storyteller continues to have a greater impact on our lives than television.

Exploring the essential, and essentially devastating, role television’s celebration of materialism plays in our world, this book arrives at the conclusion that there is nothing more responsible for environmental degradation than the materialism of the affluent countries of the world — and nothing teaches materialism more effectively than television.

The book is available on Amazon at http://www.amazon.ca/Television-Earth-Not-Love-Story/dp/1552665526 . 

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