4.
Examining the Driving Forces.
.
.
INTRODUCTION.
Any informed effort to address the environmental impacts of consumption must begin with an understanding of what causes, or drives, environmentally important consumption activities.
Economics has made major contributions to understanding consumption by considering prices, budgetary constraints on choice, the costs of information about alternative actions, the ability to externalize costs, and so forth.
It has also emphasized the fact that consumption and production are elements of a dynamic system in which all the elements respond together to external events, so that the environmental impacts of consumption are intimately tied to those of production.
These economic insights are essential for understanding the dynamics of consumption.
Understanding environmentally significant consumption also requires the use of concepts not normally included in economic analyses.
For example, economics normally treats preferences as exogenous to analyses, presuming that during the time frame of interest, preferences are constant.
This assumption may not be reasonable when the analysis concerns human responses to long-delayed environmental changes such as in climate or the ozone layer, because the responses may occur over a period of several decades.
In conducting such analyses, it is important to examine the possibility of change in preferences for at least two reasons.
One is that preferences often change on time scales of a human generation or longer: it has been argued, for instance, that cohorts raised in an.
73
74 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
environment of affluence have different values and personal and policy preferences from cohorts raised with scarcity (Inglehart, 1990~.
Another reason to treat preferences as endogenous in environmental research is that information about impending environmental threats may be the sort of stimulus that causes people to reconsider their preferences.
Thus, for studies of consumption and the environment, it may be important to consider processes such as preference construction and cultural change that may mediate the effects of standard economic variables.
This chapter presents five brief reports from the workshop that examine driving forces of consumption other than those usually addressed in economic analyses or that consider the relationships between economic forces and other factors.
As in Chapter 3, the reports raise some intriguing questions for research and, through their bibliographies, direct readers to broader related literatures.
Loren Lutzenhiser's research examines residential energy use in northern California.
The analysis includes several physical and economic explanatory variables typically used in this field, such as climate, dwelling size and type, appliance ownership, and household size and income.
It also includes some factors not usually included in energy analysis, such as race, ethnicity, and cultural assimilation among relatively recent immigrant populations.
Lutzenhiser finds that after taking climate, housing characteristics, household technology, and income into account, Hispanic and Asian households use less energy than whites, that African-Americans use more, and that the immigrant populations studied move toward the white American pattern as a function of acculturation, reflected by the language spoken in the household.
The findings help address the question of how adoption of an American lifestyle alters household energy use and, through it, affects the environment.
They suggest that immigrants may adopt patterns of energy use that are typically American over a generation or two.
The report by Thomas Dietz and Eugene Rosa uses a multivariate analytic approach to examine the effects of two driving forces on an indicator of environmental impact and reveal variations that can be attributed to other forces.
They analyze national-level data on carbon dioxide emissions and estimate the effects of levels of population and affluence.
They find a nearly linear effect of population and an effect of affluence (GNP per capita) that reaches a maximum at about U.
S.
$10,000 and then begins to decline.
When the effects of population and affluence are estimated by regression, the residual variations cover more than a 20-fold range, probably attributable to national differences in technology, institutions, and other factors.
Further study of the residual variation is one approach to clarifying the importance of driving forces other than population size and economic activity.
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 75.
Eugene Rosa's analysis distinguishes measures of gross economic activity from other indicators of material well-being, analyzes the relationships among these other measures, and considers how they relate to an indicator of environmental change.
He identifies four distinct composite indicators of nonfinancial material well-being and finds that all the affluent economies studied continued to change montonically on these indicators through 1985, even though in some of them the oil-market events of the 1970s altered the direction of the trend in carbon emissions per capita.
He concludes that the transitions in these countries reflect a shift to more service-based, postmodern economies, in which both gross domestic product and nonmonetary indicators of welfare became less tightly coupled to carbon emissions during that period.
Rosa suggests that further reductions in resource consumption can be made with only limited impacts on welfare.
Richard Wilk's report considers the hypothesis that Western styles of consumption have global environmental effects because people in developing countries emulate this consumption.
Some scholars have inferred that exposure to Western cultural influence, through such media as exported films and television programs, drives consumption patterns in developing countries where per capita income is increasing.
Such emulation matters for environmental policy because if increasingly affluent populations in developing countries mimic affluent Western lifestyles, there would be very serious global environmental impacts.
If they adopt less resource-intensive and polluting styles of affluence, however, there might be great environmental benefits.
Wilk identifies several indicators of emulation, notes their serious limitations to date, and presents his tentative reading of the data: that Western-style consumption is not a single package that consumers everywhere accept but, rather, that people of increased means in developing countries may pursue a variety of consumption aspirations and lifestyles.
Despite Western mass media penetration of developing countries, Wilk finds only weak evidence that American middle-class consumer aspirations have been uniformly accepted.
The question of whether there is emulation of the most environmentally damaging types of Western-style consumption has barely begun to be examined.
The report by Willett Kempton and Christopher Payne considers major social transformations in human history and prehistory as influences on both consumption (of energy and materials) and quality of life.
They suggest that in the sweep of human history, increases in consumption have been driven by grand transformations of social structures but that these transformations, at least on some indicators such as health and leisure time, have not been associated with monotonic increases in quality of life.
This analysis raises the question of whether forms of social organi
76 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
cation might be adopted that provide an acceptable quality of life at much lower levels of materials and energy consumption than now exist in the industrialized world.
These five reports suggest some of the possibilities for investigating the effects of social and cultural phenomena on environmentally relevant consumption, either independently of standard economic variables or in interaction with them.
There are, of course, many other such investigations that could be conducted.
In Chapter 5, we discuss some strategies for setting priorities among the vast range of possible research questions linking consumption and the environment.
.
REFERENCE.
Inglehart, R.
lsso Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society.
Princeton, N.
J.
Press.
Princeton University
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 77.
SOCIAL STRUCTURE, CULTURE, AND TECHNOLOGY: MODELING THE DRIVING FORCES OF HOUSEHOLD ENERGY CONSUMPTION.
Loren Lutzenhiser.
This paper reviews some alternative conceptions of household energy consumption and uses an analysis of patterns of energy use in a California sample to demonstrate the joint influence of social status, ethnicity, and material culture in the structuring of energy flows.
These findings suggest that conventional models of consumption obscure the workings of sociotechnical systems, seriously limiting our ability to understand the dynamics of energy consumption.
Implications for scientific research and policy modeling, cross-cultural analysis, and environmental justice are also considered.
.
SOCIAL CONSUMPTION AND ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE.
Despite the current hiatus in public and policy concern about energy, the environmental impacts of energy use are increasingly clear.
In fact, efforts to empirically examine, theorize, and model the dynamics and consequences of societal energy use have been pursued for more than 20 years.
But understanding energy consumption is a far from straightforward matter.
Although it is fairly obvious that energy flows are produced and shaped by human action, this consumption only occurs via a complex of fuel flows, energy-conversion technologies, and loosely coupled economic marketing/regulatory systems.
And, as energy is consumed at many different end-use sites, and under fluctuating environmental conditions, the flow is determined by a fairly complex interplay of sociocultural, geographic, technological, and institutional factors.
Because we lack an overarching interdisciplinary approach to such human-environment interactions (Stern 1993), efforts to understand this system have too often been narrowly focused resulting in partial views of the system and its environmental impacts.
The social sciences have produced a fairly rich body of work on the role of energy and energy technology in society (e.
g.
, see Cottrell, 1955; Mazur and Rosa, 1974; White, 1975; Adams, 1975; Buttel, 1979; Duncan, 1978; Olsen, 1991; Humphrey and Buttel, 1982; see Rosa et al.
, 1988, and Lutzenhiser, 1994, for reviews).
A large literature also focuses on the connections between social status and consumption in general (Veblen, 1899; Weber, 1978; Lynes, 1955; Packard, 1959; Douglas and Isherwood, 1979; Mason, 1981; Mukerji, 1983; Fussell, 1983; Bourdieu, 1984; Forty,
78 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
1986; Miller, 1987; McCracken, 1988; Otnes, 1988; Saunders, 1990; Warde, 1990; Burrows and Marsh, 1992), including the construction of status via the stylized consumption of food, clothing, music, language, automobiles, housing, and appliances (Ewen, 1976, 1988; Cowan, 1989; Featherstone, 1990, 1991; Gartman, 1991~.
We know much less about how technology-shaping processes work in the institutional environmente.
g.
, how devices and machines come to have the energetic and stylistic features that they do, and how producers and consumers interact in the negotiation of design (Bilker et al.
, 1989; Bijker and Law, 1992~.
And, with a few exceptions (e.
g.
, Uusitalo, 1983), little attention has been paid until quite recently to the linkages between culture, consumption, and the natural environment [see Durning, 1992; Brown, 1989; Schnaiberg's (1991) critique of Brown; Lutzenhiser and Hackett, 1993~.
The interdisciplinary literature concerned directly with the consumption of energy suggests, however, that social structure and cultural practice are indeed central to the structuring of energy consumption (Lutzenhiser, 1992a; Lutzenhiser and Hackett, 1993), for significant energy use differences are observed between income groups (Newman and Day, 1975; Lacy, 1985; Skumatz, 1988), across life cycle stages (Frey and LaBay, 1983), and among ethnic subcultures (Kohno, 1984; Throgmorton and Bernard, 1986; Hackett and Lutzenhiser, 1991~.
Conservation behavior is also quite socially variable (Heberlein and Warriner, 1982; Dillman et al.
, 1983; Stern et al.
, 1986; Schwartz and True, 1990; Hackett and Lutzenhiser, l991~.
Unfortunately, many of these studies have overlooked important housing and technology differences between social groups"technical" variables that influence consumption.
Conventional energy policy models do little better, however, often glossing over the sociocultural aspects of energy use and choosing instead to treat "stocks" of buildings and equipment as the molar elements of a thoroughly technical analysis.
Although the weaknesses in such approaches are well known (Stern, 1984, 1986; Stern and Aronson, 1984; Archer et al.
, 1984; Cramer et al.
, 1985; Baumgartner and Midtunn, 1987; Lutzenhiser,1992b, 1993, 1994), these models continue to dominate policy discourse and the generation of energy system inputs for environmental systems modeling.
This disconnect between approaches focused exclusively on either the "social" or the "technical" aspects of energy consumption can, in fact, be overcome through a fairly straightforward synthesis.
The following empirical case shows that consumption can, at once, be seen as shaped by the social allocation of buildings and equipment with energetic characteristics and by the cultural expression of energy-using behaviors.
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES.
A SOCIOTECHNICAL ANALYSIS OF HOUSEHOLD ENERGY CONSUMPTION 79.
The data used in the analysis are from a major survey of housing, energy use, and household technology in northern California (California Energy Commission, 1986~.
Rather than consumption being homogenous as many of the simplest conventional models assume these data show considerable variation in energy consumption across sample households (Figure 4-1), with distinct differences in consumption by subgroups defined on the basis of both "social" (e.
g.
, life cycle stage, wealth, ethnicity) and " technical " (e.
g.
, age, type, and size of housing and appliances) characteristics (Table 4-1~.
Because the social and technical aspects of consumption are correlated in these sorts of data, a series of multivariate models were estimated, one of which is reported in Table 4-2.
This sociotechnical model offers a good fit to the data and suggests that both the behavior of social groups and their material conditions contribute to the structuring of consumption in a variety of ways.
A second-stage analysis using regression estimates and subgroup characteristics shows that various combinations of behavior, housing, and technology are responsible for shaping consumption quite differently across social groups (Table 4-3~.
Rates of input energy waste and carbon dioxide pollution.
Households 500 .
.
400 .
.
300 .
.
200 .
.
100 .
.
0 25 50 75 100 125 150 175 mBtu .
, .
200 225 250 275 300 325 350 375 400.
FIGURE 4-1 Annual Household Energy Consumption.
Data from California Energy Commission (1986~.
80 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
TABLE 4-1 Physical and Social Variation in Energy Consumption, Northern California Households.
Mean consumption Cases (mBtu) SD n (%).
Entire sample 129 (68)4127100 Building size (sq it) <400 69 (43)1604 400-599 71 (51)3118 600-999 83 (40)87721 1,000-1,499 123 (49)121629 1,500-1,999 150 (52)88321 2,000-2,699 182 (63)48612 2,700-3,499 214 (91)1393 > 3,500 250 (149)551 Housing type Single family detached 156 (65)235757 Multi-family 86 (48)177043 Year dwelling built 1979-84 112 (63)65116 1970-78 128 (69)90922 1960-69 138 (70)77119 1950-59 134 (64)73018 1940-49 124 (63)3769 pre-1940 116 (72)69017.
Number of persons in household 1 78 (45)79621 2 127 (63)145439 3 144 (63)63017 4 160 (67)51114 5 165 (66)1975 > 6 175 (94)1183 Annual income (1986 dollars) < $10,000 93 (48)63515 $10,000-19,999 106 (55)77119 $20,000-29,999 118 (58)77219 $30,000-39,999 131 (60)66616 $40,000-49,999 139 (62)45311 $50,000-75,000 157 (71)54613 > $75,000 187 (105)2847
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES.
TABLE 4-1 Continued 81.
.
Mean consumption (mBtu) SD n Cases (%).
Race/ethnicity and language spoken at home White 130 (70) 3349 83 Black 119 (62) 154 4 Hispanic 117 (54) 143 4 Hispanic (Spanish) 95 (48) 124 3 Asian 110 (66) 138 3 Asian (other) 106 (54) 130 3.
NOTE: SD = Standard deviation.
.
were also found to be socially variable (Table 4-4~.
When conventional approaches focus on "typical" households and amorphous stocks of housing, they fail to take these sorts of social variations in consumption into account.
.
UNDERSTANDING THE SOCIAL NATURE OF MATERIALS SYSTEMS.
A fundamental reorientation of theory is needed.
The material environment can usefully be seen as an evolving social system in which social status (accomplished through status-graded buildings, equipment, and behavior) is a primary determinate of energy consumption, waste, and pollution.
In a system of status-graded lifestyles, volumes of energy flow provide rough measures of social standing the poor being excluded from all but modest forms of consumption, the middle classes sustained by consumption centered largely in housing and technologies, and the wealthy empowered in a variety of ways by high levels of energy flow.
Rather than the amorphous housing stock assumed in energy analysis, occupied structures actually compose an ordered artificial environment, elaborated over time, its present form reflecting the realities of topography and climate; historical access to materials; the costs of land, labor, and energy availability (a mirror of past political economy); as well as past technical knowledge and cultural preference.
The built environment is a physical accretion of the products of sociotechnical change literally embodying historical social arrangements (e.
g.
, family size and class structure) in built forms forms to which present occupants must behaviorally adapt.
In treating buildings and
82 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
TABLE 4-2 Regression of Annual Energy Consumption on Social, Housing, Technology, and Environmental Variables.
Energy Consumption (mBtu).
b SE p.
Household characteristics N of children <18 yr (0-8)7.
5 (o.
g) a N of adults (0-11)6.
8 (o.
g) a African-American14.
4 (4.
6) a Hispanic-English (spoken at home)-2.
8 (4.
6) Hispanic-Spanish-12.
3 (5.
1) b Asian-English-12.
7 (4.
9) b Asian-other-26.
7 (5.
1) a <$15,0004 4 (2.
2) c $15,000-34,999-1.
4 (2.
4) >$50,00015.
0 (2.
5) a Personts) at home during day7.
0 (1.
8) a Housing characteristics Dwelling size (1,000 sq ft)27.
6 (1.
0) a Multi-family unit (attached)-17.
8 (2.
3) a Built after 1979 (energy building codes)-9.
7 (2.
6) a Building energy efficiency scale (1-6)-1.
7 (0.
6) b Air conditioning13.
3 (2.
4) a Solar water heating-2.
3 (4.
9) Household technology Clothes washer7.
9 (3.
6) c Clothes dryer12.
5 (3.
3) a Dishwasher10.
3 (2.
0) a Frost-free refrigerator9.
4 (2.
2) a 2+ refrigerators20.
2 (2.
4) a Freezer12.
4 (2.
0) a Other appliances to 7)d2.
4 (0.
7) a Pool, hot tub, or spa36.
1 (3.
5) a Environment CEC1_3.
5 t4.
0' CEC2-8.
0 (3.
0) b CEC4-0.
9 (2.
9) CEC5-3.
7 (3.
3) (Intercept)22.
0 (5.
5).
NOTE: b = slope of regression line, signifying mBtu consumed per unit of the independent variable; SE = standard error of b; CEC = dummy variable signifying climatic regions; mBtu = million British thermal units.
ap < .
001; bp < .
01; cp < .
05; dColor TV, computer, stereo, black and white television set, microwave, video, humidifier.
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 83.
technologies as the primary "actors" in society-environment relations, conventional models claim a fictive autonomy for physical objects divorcing them from the social structures and cultural processes within which they are embedded and from which they necessarily derive.
When used to inform policy, these approaches also import biases masking important social differences in material conditions and behavior.
.
IMPLICATIONS FOR RESEARCH AND POLICY ANALYSIS.
A number of basic scientific and policy research implications follow from these findings.
A considerable amount of fruitful work might be done, for example, in examining empirical patterns of consumption and disaggregating their sources through time across the United States.
Linkages between energy-use patterns and the patterned consumption of other goods and services (automobiles, food, entertainment, travel, etc.
) might also be explored.
And, the influences of a wider range of lifestyle orientations than can be captured by simple demographic categories should also be examined.
Studies of consumption that compare U.
S.
patterns with those found elsewhere in the industrialized world would also be useful.
These studies could extend to the consumption of energy "embodied" in goods and services (a significant fraction of overall consumption).
It would also be valuable to inventory and compare other resource flows (water, food, paper, metal, plastic, packaging) and waste flows (garbage, sewage, atmospheric emissions).
And, a good deal of attention is overdue to the social patterning of transportation and gasoline consumption a significant source of energy demand and environmental pollution.
Policy implications also follow from the social variation in consumption, the persistence of some low-energy-use cultural patterns in the midst of affluence, and the failure of conventional models to capture these variations.
Policy-oriented research might focus on how conventional modeling systems operate and persist, and how cultural and institutional factors might be introduced to energy-policy modeling.
Ethnographic work on cultural differences in consumption could shed light on the roots of persistence of low consumption levels and might suggest how durable and long-lived those patterns might be.
Studies of "social traps" in housing and technology both for the poor and the relatively more affluentmight reveal policy openings and long-term problems with consumption rooted in settlement patterns and social institutions (e.
g.
property-ownership conventions, taxation, inheritance, and lending systems).
The implications for equity and community that follow from a more social model of built environment and energy use are also significant in a more populous, competitive, and highly engineered future.
The growth of consumption
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86 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
TABLE 4-4 Race/Ethnicity and Class Patterns of Energy Intensity, Waste, and Pollution.
Energy Intensity Waste an Total Energy Energy Waste Living space energy per capita per sq It energy (sq ft/person) (mBtu) (mBtu) (mBtu) (mBtu) Entire sample 650 126 58 100 68 White 685 130 62 99 70 < $15,000 648 99 61 105 54 $15,000-50,000 668 126 60 99 68 > $50,000 771 173 68 95 93 Black 555 119 55 125 65 < $15,000 550 103 59 131 57 $15,000-50,000 547 126 52 123 69 > $50,000 615 164 56 101 86 Hispanic (English) 433 117 44 116 62 < $15,000 361 99 44 136 51 $15.
000-50,000 444 118 42 107 63 > $50,000 532 150 50 103 79 Hispanic (Spanish) 366 95 33 107 50 < $15,000 361 93 35 113 49 $15,000-50,000 364 98 29 99 52 > $50,000 569 110 49 79 54 Asian (English) 596 110 42 86 62 < $15,000 448 69 31 84 41 $15,000-50,000 579 109 39 87 61 > $50,000 727 136 56 85 74 China, Japan, S. Asia 422 106 30 92 60 < $15,000 448 87 30 99 48 $15,000-50,000 372 108 30 95 60 > $50,000 521 123 29 74 72.
NOTE: mBtu = million British thermal units.
atons of carbon.
bpounds of carbon.
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 87.
.
Waste and Pollution.
Energy Waste Waste Waste energy CO2 per sq ft energy co2 co2 per capita per capita (mBtu) (mBtu) (tonsil (tonsil (mBtu) (leash iOO 68 2.
8 1.
5 27 2,232 99 70 2.
9 1.
5 29 2,383 .
05 54 2.
3 1.
2 28 2,379 99 68 2.
8 1.
5 27 2,208 95 93 3.
8 2.
0 33 2,693 r25 65 2.
8 1.
4 26 2,216 L31 57 2.
4 1.
2 27 2,305 23 69 2.
9 1.
5 25 2,086 ~ 01 86 3.
6 1.
9 26 2,194 L16 62 2.
5 1.
3 20 1,619 ;36 51 2.
2 1.
1 16 1,387 07 63 2.
5 1.
3 20 1,613 ~ 03 79 3.
1 1.
7 25 1,956 L07 50 2.
1 1.
1 14 1,211 13 49 2.
1 1.
1 14 1,235 99 52 2.
1 1.
1 14 1,116 79 54 2.
6 1.
3 20 1,889 86 62 2.
5 1.
3 23 1,859 84 41 1.
7 0.
9 16 1,384 87 61 2.
4 1.
3 22 1,729 85 74 3.
1 1.
6 27 2,304 92 60 2.
4 1.
3 16 1,253 99 48 1.
9 1.
0 13 1,011 95 60 2.
4 1.
3 16 1,274 74 72 2.
9 1.
5 18 1,455
88 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
and the decline of ecosystem resources even with the benefits of advanced environmental technologies are likely to pose serious problems for even the most prosperous peoples and places in the industrialized world.
.
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92 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACTS OF POPULATION AND CONSUMPTION.
Thomas Dietz and Eugene A. Rosa.
How can we investigate the driving forces of environmentally significant consumption? The brief essays in this chapter offer a variety of theoretical and methodological answers to this question.
As with most problems in science, multiple strategies will yield a more robust understanding than any single approach.
In this essay, we propose the use of statistical models of the driving forces of environmental change to understand impact over time and across nations.
This approach is based on a venerable and robust tradition in the social sciences that of macro-comparative research (Bollen et al.
, 1993~.
To link this social science tradition to work in the environmental sciences, we begin with the IPAT (Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology) equation.
The IPAT framework is useful for thinking about the human actions, including consumption, that drive environmental change.
The formulation was first offered by Ehrlich and Holdren (Ehrlich and Holdren, 1971, 1972; Holdren and Ehrlich, 1974) in a debate with Commoner (1972a, 1972b) and has seen broad usage since then (Dietz and Rosa, 1994~.
IPAT is easily understood, frequently used for illustrative purposes and can discipline our thinking.
It also serves as a good starting point for a statistical model of the driving forces of environmental change (Dietz and Rosa, 1994, 1997; Preston, 1995~.
The classical IPAT formulation is an accounting identity and thus must assume rather than test the effects of driving forces on environmental change.
In contrast, the statistical model can be used to test hypotheses about driving forces.
The IPAT formulation is simply:.
I = P xA x T (1).
where I is environmental impact, P is population, and A is affluence.
The typical measure of A is per capita economic activity, so PA becomes aggregate, or total, economic activity.
Measures for I, P. and A are used to calculate T. which is by definition I/(PA) or environmental impact per unit economic activity.
Thus T represents not only technology per se, but also culture, social organization, and all facets of human life other than population and economic activity.
In previous papers (Dietz and Rosa, 1994, 1997), we suggest that the IPAT idea can be reformulated into a stochastic model:.
I= aPbACT4e, (2)
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 93.
where a, b, c and d can be either parameters or more complex functions.
In either case, they can be estimated using standard statistical procedures.
The key change from the traditional IPAT approach is that an independent measure of T must be used the researcher must specify what is meant by technology rather than solving for T as I/PA.
I,P,A, and T can represent either single measured variables or vectors of measured variables.
The residual term e represents all variables not explicitly included in the model.
This makes the residual both interesting and interpretable.
It is the multiplier that represents all effects other than those specified in the model.
The model is simple, systematic, and robust: simple because it incorporates key anthropogenic driving forces with parsimony, systematic because it specifies the mathematical relationship between the driving forces and their impacts, and robust because it is applicable to a wide variety of impacts.
One can easily think of more complex formulations.
For example, a long tradition of economic and environmental models attempts to explore the complex feedbacks among variables considered in a model.
Following that tradition, a reasonable first step in elaborating our model would be to draw on the vast literature on population and development to specify equations linking population and economic growth.
The realism of such models can be heightened by adding further equations to describe other causal feedbacks.
Models with many equations, parameters and variables are commonplace in the econometric literature.
But more elaborate models quickly become opaque and strain the limits of available data.
Thus at this early stage in modeling the driving forces of environmental change we believe that the best strategy is one that begins with relatively simple models that are easy to understand and that can be disciplined by existing data sources.
We also note that our formulation represents an advance over the existing literature examining the relationship between affluence and environmental impacts.
Most of that literature uses only one independent variable, affluence (Grossman and Krueger, 1995; Selden and Song, 1994; Shafik, 1994~.
In those models, environmental impact is considered a nonlinear function of affluence, as is the case in our model.
But the impact of population on the environment usually is assumed to be directly proportional to population size, as in the IPAT accounting equation.
Any nonproportional effects of population (increasing or decreasing returns to scale) are ignored.
Since most debates about the driving forces of environmental change have focused on the impacts of population, we believe models that do not explore population effects will prove of limited value.
Thus our model, despite its admitted limitations, represents a step forward.
Our goal here is to show how this model can easily be
94 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
elaborated to answer interesting questions about consumption and the environment.
.
APPLYING THE MODEL OF CONSUMPTION.
Different ideas about consumption can be accommodated by changing the operational definitions of various terms in the model.
A common, if controversial, argument about consumption suggests that humans engage in too much economic activity use up too much ecological "space" (Daly and Cobb, 1989) or have too large an ecological "footprint" (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996~.
This definition seems to match what Stern (Chapter 2) proposes as the "ecological" or "physics" definition of consumption.
Measures of per capita economic activity, such as per capita gross domestic product, used as A in the model, would be an appropriate specification for this interpretation of consumption.
Then PA becomes aggregate economic activity consumption defined in terms of ecological space.
2 Consumption can also be taken to mean affluence per se.
As societies become more affluent they not only consume more, but, in addition, their patterns of consumption may shift.
This corresponds roughly to the "sociological" definition of consumption.
As noted above, a number of recent papers examine the link between environmental impacts and affluence measured as gap, that is, gross domestic product per capita (Grossman and Krueger, 1995; Holtz-Eakin and Selden, 1995; Selden and Song, 1994; Shafik, 1994~.
They find a "Kuznets" curve in which increasing affluence (consumption in this definition) leads to increasing impact until a turnover point is reached (usually around $5000-$10,000 in per capita gross domestic product) at which point impact levels out or declines.
3 Economics offers a more restricted definition of household consumption, defining it as the total spending on consumer goods (Samuelson and Nordhaus, 1989:969~.
This definition closely matches popular concerns with consumerism and implies that as consumer spending goes up, so.
Diets and Rosa t1994' offer a more extended discussion of modeling strategies in the study of environmental impacts.
2The models we are specifying here do not take account of the spatial intensity of human activity.
But when spatial intensity is an important consideration, as it is when land use is changed, it is simple to add a term to the model representing land area.
For an example that applies our formulation to the problem of tropical deforestation, see Dietz et aL ~lg9ly.
Unfortunately, as noted above, these analyses all presume directly proportional effects of population fin terms of our model they assume that b = 1~.
As a result, they may misestimate the effects of both population and affluence.
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 95.
does environmental impact.
In our formulation, consumption defined as consumer spending would be modeled as a term that represents the percent of gross domestic product spent on consumer goods (C):.
I= aPbACCfT4e (3).
Then the function represented byf would indicate the importance of consumer spending in generating environmental impact while holding overall affluence constant.
We also note, following Cramer (1995), that households rather than individuals are often the key consumption units.
This distinction would suggest breaking P into two terms, one for the number of households and one for average household size:.
I= aSgHhACCfT4e (4).
where H is the number of households and S is the average household size.
An example may illustrate the utility of the model.
We have examined CO2 emissions (in millions of metric tons of carbon per year) as a measure of I. The analysis is based on 1989 data for 111 nations.
We use population size for P and gross domestic product per capita (gap) for A.
In this formulation, T is combined with e, a unique term for each nation in the analysis that combines the effects of culture, institutions, and technology per se.
That is, e represents "everything else.
" Thus the equation estimated is the following:.
I= aPbACe (5).
It disaggregates consumption into three components: population size (the number of people consuming), affluence (per capita consumption in the sociological sense), and everything else.
Details of our analysis are described in Dietz and Rosa (1997~.
The effects of population are displayed in Figure 4-2.
Population has a strong impact, and there is some evidence of diseconomies of scale in that there are disproportionately large effects for the most populous nations.
These results embarrass the argument that population has little effect, or even a beneficial effect, on the environment and lend support to ongoing concern with population growth as a driving force of environmental impacts.
Of course, these conclusions are conditional on the cases used in the analysis.
Figure 4-3 indicates that the effects of affluence on CO2 emissions level off and even decline somewhat at the very highest levels of gross domestic product per capita (gdp).
We suspect that this shift is the result of structural changes in both consumption and production, including a
96.
1 000 .
a'.
Q , .
.
.
a'.
a) C to ~4 I, 1 ro.
to 00 10.
.
.
1 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION 1 1 ~.
Chin.
.
/.
72 .
/ B1 30 /~1.
.
~5 99 ~90 62 6779 98 5550 art 1 6 1 35~ 105 7831 83 762~l B 6tl9 as 144 12 94 66,~o~z~' Lila / / / / / .
~ 1,000,000 10,000,000 100,000,000 1,000,000,000 Populate on.
FIGURE 4-2 Effects of population on CO2 emissions.
Solid line represents the effect of population size relative to the geometric mean (12.
3 million).
Population effects are calculated at the geometric mean of gross domestic product (51476~.
The curve reflects the best-fitting log-polynomial model, which has a linear regression coefficient of 1.
123 (SE = 0.
058), and a quadratic coefficient of 0.
063 (SE = 0.
026~.
The numbers in the body of the figure represent the countries used in the analysis; a key is provided in Dietz and Rosa (1997~.
SOURCE: Dietz and Rosa (1997~.
.
shift to a service-based economy and the ability of the more affluent economies to invest in energy efficiency.
(These are hypotheses that can be tested by adding the appropriate indicators to the model.
) This decline in impact only occurs when per capita affluence is above $10,000.
4 Seventyfive percent of the 111 nations in our sample have gaps below $5000.
Thus our results suggest that for the overwhelming majority of nations, economic growth that can be anticipated for the next quarter century or so will produce production and consumption patterns that lead to increasing rather than declining CO2 emissions per unit GDP.
Reductions in CO2.
4As noted above, most economic analyses of economic growth and environment, which do not allow for nonproportional effects of population, suggest that impact declines somewhere between $1,000 and $10,000 in per capita GDP (Grossman and Krueger, 1995; Shafik, 1994~.
The exception is Holtz-Eakin and Selden (1995) whose analysis of CO2 emissions implies a turning point of over $35,000 per capita.
20.
5 .
, Q .
~.
~1.
Cal a) a) a) c a) 1 ~.
.
.
.
.
.
01 EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 97 1 1 1 1.
1 1 1 1 1 102.
13 96 o A ai5 A17 81.
.
.
61lo 66 q~ 2 1 4~9 7~7 / 86 53 ~/40 88 74~: / 41 /loa 50ti'^s 14 18 _.
~.
/67 t~ §6183 32 ~4 - ~3 894335 3~93 106 ~8Z341 1 9~2 50~/46 23 2~20: ~ 05 ,~9963 24 8,~4~683 1 go 4~4 51 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 70 1 00 200 500 1 000 2500 5000 1 0000 25000 Gross domestic product per capita.
FIGURE 4-3 Effects of affluence on CO2 emissions.
Solid line represents the effect of population size relative to the geometric mean (51476~.
Affluence effects are calculated at the geometric mean of population (12.
3 million).
The curve reflects the best-fitting log-polynomial model, which has a linear regression coefficient of 1.
484 (SE = 0.
105), a quadratic coefficient of -0.
152 (SE = 0.
026), and a cubic coefficient of -0.
070 (SE = 0.
020~.
The numbers in the body of the figure represent the countries used in the analysis; a key is provided in Dietz and Rosa (1997~.
SOURCE: Dietz and Rosa (1997~.
.
emissions will not occur in the normal course of development and will have to come from targeted efforts to shift toward less carbon-intensive technologies and activities.
One advantage of our approach is that it is easy to use the model to make projections under alternative scenarios.
This allows comparisons with more complex models and can be used to assess policy options.
Here, as an example, we use the estimated coefficients of our model to project global CO2 emissions for the year 2025.
In one scenario, we assume that national technological multipliers (the e term) will not change over time.
In the second scenario, we assume an increase in efficiency, and thus a decrease in the technology multiplier of 1 percent per year.
In this assumption consumption, defined as affluence, increases but changes in production processes and the bundle of goods and services consumed lead to less impact per unit consumption.
In both cases, we use the United Nations medium-case scenario for population projections and assume a 2 percent annual real growth in gdp (World Resources Institute, 1992~.
The
98 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
first scenario, with no technological progress, implies global CO2 emissions in 2025 of 4.
3 x 10~° metric tons, a 95 percent increase over 1991 emissions.
A 1 percent per year increase in carbon efficiency would mean an increase of only 36 percent, to 3.
0 x 10~° metric tons.
To achieve a goal of stable emissions at 1991 levels in the face of growth in consumption and population, our model suggests efficiency increases would need to average about 1.
8 percent per year from 1990 to 2025.
While such increases are feasible, they will not occur without strenuous efforts.
.
FURTHER DIRECTIONS.
In the interest of clarity, we have avoided complexity in this analysis.
Of course, considering only two candidate driving forces, population and affluence, is not adequate for understanding environmental change.
As noted above, our model can easily be expanded to assess ever more subtle and detailed hypotheses about the effects of consumption and other driving forces on the environment.
Equation 4 above, for example, allows an examination of the relative contribution of number of households, average household size (a disaggregation of population into two components), gross domestic production (gap) per capita, and percent of GDP spent on consumption (a disaggregation of overall GDP into consumption as defined by economists).
As we have noted elsewhere (Dietz and Rosa, 1994), the method allows work on driving forces of global change to link directly with the substantial body of methodological, theoretical, and empirical work on macro-comparative data in the social sciences.
In doing so, it provides a macro complement to analyses such as those of Schipper (Chapter 3) that disaggregate by usage or those of Duchin (Chapter 3) or Lutzenhiser (Chapter 4) that focus on the micro-level of households and individuals.
.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT.
We thank W. Catton, R. Dunlap, A. Ford, E. Franz, L. Hamilton, L.
Kalof, and P. Stern for their comments.
This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation Grants SES-9109928 and SES-9311593, by the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at Washington State University, and by the International Institute of George Mason University.
Figures 42 and 4-3 were originally published in Dietz and Rosa (1997~.
.
REFERENCES.
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A.
, B. Entwistle, and A.
S.
Alderson 1993 Macrocomparative research methods.
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EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES.
Commoner, B.
99 1972a A bulletin dialogue on "The Closing Circle": Response.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 28~5~:17, 42-56.
1972b The environmental cost of economic growth.
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339-363 in R.
G.
Ridker, ea.
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C.
1995 Population Growth and Air Quality in California.
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E.
, and J.
B.
Cobb, Jr.
1989 For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future.
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, L. Kalof, and R.
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Frey 1991 On the utility of robust and resampling estimators.
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, and E.
A.
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P.
Holdren 1971 Impact of population growth.
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365-377 in R.
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Government Printing Office.
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Holdren, John P.
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H.
1995 The effect of population growth on environmental quality.
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M.
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1994 Economic development and environmental quality: An econometric analysis.
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100 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
CROSS-NATIONAL TRENDS IN FOSSIL FUEL CONSUMPTION, SOCIETAL WELL-BEING, AND CARBON RELEASES.
Eugene A. Rosa.
RESEARCH QUESTIONS.
This volume (see Chapter 2) provides a comprehensive, environmentally sensitive definition of consumption as consisting ".
.
.
of human and human-induced transformations of materials and energy.
Consumption is environmentally important to the extent that it makes materials or energy less available for future use, moves a biophysical system toward a different state or, through its effects on those systems, threatens human health, welfare, or other things people value" (emphases added).
The research reported here addresses two classes of threats contained in this definition: threats to atmospheric systems and threats to human well-being.
Fossil fuel consumption has been the foundation of industrial production and modernity for well over a century.
This consumption is pivotal in environmental importance because continued consumption of its finite stocks will make it less available for future use.
But it is also pivotal because it is the principal anthropogenic source of the trace greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CON.
Carbon emissions are the smoking gun of fossil fuel consumption.
Continued growth in the consumption of carbon-based fuels threatens to move the atmospheric system toward a warmer state.
What have been the recent historical patterns of fossil fuel use and of the resulting CO21 loads for the leading industrial nations the dominant consumers of fossil fuels and producers of CO2? Climate change due to continuously increasing CO2 loads could, in turn, threaten human health, well-being, or other features of social life.
How can we measure well-being in a way that neither ignores its multiple domains nor relies on a single domain and single indicator, such as is the practice with aggregate economic measures? How can we assess whether the threats to well-being of increased CO2 are being realized?.
1CO2 releases are due primarily to fossil fuel combustion and secondarily to the loss of moist forests.
In the case of the leading industrial nations, releases are due almost entirely to fossil fuel use.
National estimates of CO2 emissions for the leading industrial nations, such as those presented here, are computed by the Carbon Dioxide Information and Analysis Center (CDIAC) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (Boden et al.
, 1990) by applying a carbon conversion formula to national levels of fossil fuel consumption taken from United Nations compilations and then adding the minuscule amounts of CO2 due to cement production and gas flaring.
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 101.
Taken together the three foregoing questions converge to the central issue addressed here: to what extent is there an historical relationship between the two concomitants of industrialization, CO2 loads and wellbeing? More specifically, is there a coupling between fossil fuel consumption (or CO2 emissions) and well-being? Data from the 1970-1985 period clearly show that energy and economic activity, one domain of well-being, had decoupled in several wealthy industrialized countries.
But what about other domains of well-being?2 Along with the carbon emissions it produces, industrialization has provided not only clear economic advantages to societies but also social and other advantages as well.
The enjoyable features of modern lifestyles characterized by the availability of a broad array of goods and services, by a remarkable geographical mobility, by the power of personal climate control, as well as other things people value depend largely upon industrial production and upon energy.
Are these benefits coupled with fossil fuel use via industrialization? Knowing whether noneconomic well-being is tightly or loosely coupled to fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions can inform debates over broad carbon policy.
If, unlike the economic domain, these other domains are tightly coupled, then policies calling for a reduction in CO2 emissions via reduced fossil fuel use will need to anticipate the costs to well-being of pursuing such a policy.
On the other hand, if these domains, too, are decoupled from CO2, then policies to reduce fossil fuel consumption should anticipate no dramatic downturns in well-being.
We address this question by examining 35-year trends in CO2 emissions and societal well-being.
.
MEASURES OF WELFARE AND WELL-BEING.
Well-being is a principal inquiry of the economic sciences.
The typical way indeed, virtually the only way that aggregate welfare or wellbeing is measured is with summary measures of the economy derived from national accounts.
Thus, measures such as gross national product (GNP) or gross domestic product (GDP) are used to assess welfare.
3 Since.
2These domains, such as health and lifestyle, do not always correlate highly with economic measures See, for example, sen, 1993~.
3Economists have assessed cO2 impact costs using aggregate economic indicators to address two questions: ~i' What is the relationship between national levels of economic activity and cO2 loads, and tii' What would be the impacts to economic activity from alternative carbon policies? ~see, for example, Nordhaus, 1991; Dowlatabadi and Morgan, 1993; Schelling, 1992; Peck and Teisberg, 1993; and Rothen, 1995, who provides a summary of European efforts along these same lines.
'
102 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
energy growth partially decoupled from economic growth in the 1970s and 1980s (see, for example, Alterman, 1985), it follows that energy also decoupled from well-being at least as measured in terms of economic growth.
There are significant, well-known limitations to using a single national product indicator as a measure of welfare.
Two inadequacies have been singled out for particular criticism: (i) that GNP and GDP summarize market transactions, not welfare (see for example, Sen, 1982, 1993~; and (ii) that these measures ignore the external costs to "natural capital" or "ecosystem services" (Coase, 1960; Nordhaus and Tobin, 1973; Daly and Cobb, 1989; Daly and Townsend, 1992; Costanza, 1995, and a variety of important critical chapters in Costanza, 1991~.
With the foregoing considerations in mind our objective was to develop a more comprehensive measure of well-being, one that captured important domains of social life left unaddressed with economic measures.
To meet this objective we first identified the world's 23 leading industrial nations.
4 We then subjected 26 readily available cross-national indicators representative of key domains of social life health, nutrition, transportation, education, culture, communications and media, and general satisfaction to a principal factor analysis.
5 The result was a fourfactor solution, comprising 23 of the original 26 indicators, and representing four broad domains of social life: modern lifestyle, general well-being, health and safety, and life stress.
Results of the factor analyses are presented in Table 4-5.
.
MONITORING TRENDS IN CO2 LOADS AND SOCIETAL WELL-BEING.
To determine the degree of parallelism, or coupling, between CO2.
4we confined the analyses to the leading industrial nations because they produce the lions share of world CO2 loads, they have the greatest policy flexibility, and it is there that we find generally reliable data of the type needed for this analysis.
5An alternative approach would be to rely on '~subjective,, measures of social well-being, thereby tapping into peoples' perceptions of their life experiences.
we did not pursue this option on practical and substantive grounds.
First, unlike social indicator data that are routinely collected by international agencies, subjective '~quality-of-life,, data are only collected episodically and not always for a consistent set of countries.
Second, an earlier literature was consistent in showing little relationship between the ''objective" conditions of life and subjective satisfaction ~Campbell, 1981; Campbell et aL,1976~.
A more recent literature, though questioning this long-standing conclusion See, for example, Veenhoven, 1991,1988' is inconclusive about the relationship between objective and subjective indicators of well-being, an ambiguity even more pronounced when focusing exclusively on the leading industrial nations Myers and Diener,1995y, as is the case here.
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES.
TABLE 4-5 Four-Factor Model: Rotated Solution 103.
Factor Loading Eigenvalue Proportion of Variance Explained.
Modern Life Style T.
.
e.
evlslons Divorce rate Radio receivers University students Cars Telephones Commercial vehicles Secondary students Cinemas Hours worked per week .
86 .
83 .
82 .
79 .
76 .
75 .
71 .
58 40 46 10.
24 .
58.
General Well-Being 2.
23 .
13 Life expectancy males .
81 Life expectancy females .
76 Books published .
67 Daily protein supply .
57 Physicians .
47 Infant mortality rate -.
69 Health and Safety 1.
75 .
10 Daily food supply -.
83 Daily fat supply -.
81 Cancer deaths -.
75 Diabetes deaths -.
68 Accident deaths (autos) -.
62 Life Stress 1.
10 .
06 Pharmacists -.
59 Ulcer deaths .
51 Total Model .
86.
loads (driven by fossil fuel consumption) and societal well-being, we examined trends in CO2 loads and the social well-being measures for the period 1950-1985 for the 23 industrial nations in our data set.
We first examined the trend in per capita yearly CO2 emissions for each of the 23 countries, expecting to find them all on a consistently increasing, monotonic trend until such time as economic decoupling took place.
This was the case until 1970.
We then found (verified by a formal nonparametric test using the Mann-Kendall statistic) the evolution of 3 distinct trends after 1970: an increasing trend for 6 nations (Australia, Greece, Italy, Norway, Portugal, and Spain), a stabilizing trend for 10 nations (Austria,
104 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
o n.
0 ~ 3 o ~.
·° a) 2 Q).
a) 4.
1.
_ · INCARB · STACARB · DECARB.
O 1 1 1 1 1 1 1950 1955 1960 1965 1970 1975 1980 1985 Year.
FIGURE 4-4 Carbon emissions per capita: All groups.
INCARB = increasing trend in per capita CO2 emissions; STACARB = stabilizing trend in per capita CO2 emissions; DECARB = decreasing trend in CO2 emissions.
.
Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, the Netherlands, and New Zealand), and a decreasing trend for seven nations (Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States).
We label the three trends INCARB, STACARB, and DECARB, respectively.
Plots of the mean carbon loads for the groups of countries within each trend are presented in Figure 4-4.
To assess whether carbon loads parallel the social aspects of wellbeing, we plotted summated scores based upon our factor analysis for each of the four domains of the factor solution: modern lifestyle, general well-being, health and safety, and life stress (Figure 4-5~.
The summated scores, by carbon grouping, are all either monotonically increasing or monotonically decreasing.
With some exception for the economic laggards, the INCARB countries, we find that the social domains of wellbeing do not closely parallel the three distinct carbon trends.
It appears that the coupling of well-being, whether defined narrowly or broadly, to fossil fuel consumption and the carbon emissions it produces weakened considerably in the 1970-1985 period.
We interpret these findings with a Threshold-Asymptote-Decoupling (TAD) hypothesis.
A threshold level of energy consumption is a prerequisite for a nation to reach industrial status, but beyond that threshold there is considerable flexibility in the amounts of energy needed to sustain or improve standards of well-being.
Noneconomic measures of well
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106 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
being of the type examined here, such as life expectancy, food intake, and types of death, have inherent limitations, and therefore are expected to reach some asymptote.
Thus, the decoupling of energy from well-being is, in part, due to the asymptotic limitations in the well-being measures.
Figure 4-6 presents the relationships of carbon emissions to well-being in more detail and suggests a complex picture.
Generally, the correlations are of much larger magnitude in the INCARB group than in the other groups, particularly in the earlier years of the time series.
This finding is consistent with the TAD hypothesis.
However, the correlations do not diminish with time for all groups and all indicators of well-being or drop sharply after 1970 in the DECARB countries, as might be expected if well-being was decoupling from carbon emissions during this period.
Rather, the trends seem to move in different directions across indicators and country groups.
These results may be interpretable in terms of properties of the particular indicators or of particular countries within groups (because the groups are small, a single anomaly can have a large effect on correlations).
The proper interpretation awaits a finer-grained analysis.
.
SUMMARY OF RESULTS.
We have used historical trends to ask whether there is a parallelism between carbon loads and societal well-being and how closely key indicators of well-being couple with carbon loads.
We found, in general, that well-being after 1970 did not closely track trends in per capita carbon loads in 17 of the 23 societies examined (the DECARB and STACARB groups).
Parallelisms did remain between carbon loads and our wellbeing indicators for the INCARB group of six countries a positive parallelism for the economic measures and the modern lifestyle and general well-being measures, on the one hand, but an inverse parallelism for our health and safety and stress measures, on the other.
Because the indicators examined are well-behaved over a sizable spell of recent history (35 years) and because the types of indicators examined are not prone to abrupt or precipitous change, we can derive reasonable substantive and policy conjectures from our results.
The patterns we are observing, we hypothesize, reflect a structural transformation of the advanced industrial societies: from an industrial-based modernity to a service- and communication-based postmodernity.
7 The three separate pat.
6These data are included as part of our larger analyses but are not included here for lack of space.
7A number of European scholars (see, for example, Mol.
1995) are promoting a theory of "ecological modernization" whose main features are consistent with our results to describe the next stage of development for industrial societies.
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108 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
terns of carbon loads (INCARB, STACARB, DECARB), then, reflect different stages in this transformation.
On the policy side, we conjecture that broad strategies devoted to the reduction of CO2 emissions via reduced fossil fuel use in the leading industrial nations will probably not be accompanied by significant impacts to societal well-being at least, not over the next several decades.
This conjecture presumes that reductions in fossil fuel consumption can continue to come from technical improvements and other innovations that do not interfere with material well-being, as apparently occurred between 1970 and 1985.
There is some evidence, however, that the pattern of energy use that produced decoupling during that period has been changing.
For instance, Schipper (Chapter 3) identifies ways that energy use has been shifting "from production to pleasure," a shift that may make it more difficult to achieve future energy and emissions reductions without reducing well-being.
Detailed analysis of data on carbon and well-being since 1985 can help address this issue.
.
STRENGTHS AND SHORTCOMINGS OF THIS APPROACH.
The principal strength of the approach outlined here is that it provides a way of addressing an essential analytic and policy question through an aggregate conceptualization of social welfare and with readily available archival data.
Furthermore, it represents an effort to broaden the concept of well-being in a way that more thoroughly reflects the threats consumption may pose to human health, welfare, and other things people value.
By differentiating the concept of well-being, it raises questions that suggest promising directions for further research.
The approach has two principal weaknesses.
First, as with all aggregate measures of human activity, the aggregate data mask considerable underlying detail and countervailing processes.
Second, our approach is more empirically driven than theory driven with the result that it can identify relationships with considerably greater ease than it can explain them.
.
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Alterman, J.
1985 A Historical Perspective on Changes in the U.
S.
Energy-Output Ratios.
Washington, D.
C.
: Resources for the Future.
Boden, T.
A.
, P. Kanciruk, and M.
P.
Farrell 1990 Trends '90: A Compendium of Data on Global Change.
Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.
Oak Ridge, Tenn.
: Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Campbell, A.
1981 The Sense of Well-Being in America: Recent Patterns and Trends.
New York: McGrawHill.
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 109.
Campbell, A.
, P. Converse, and W. Rodgers 1976 The Quality of American Life: Perceptions, Evaluations, and Satisfactions.
New York: Russell Sage Foundation.
Coase, R.
1960 The problem of social costs.
Journal of Economics and Law 3:144.
Costanza, R.
1991 Ecological Economics: The Science and Management of Sustainability.
New York: Columbia University Press.
1995 Integrated Ecological Economic Modeling and Adaptive Management of Complex Systems.
Lecture, annual meetings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Atlanta, Ga.
February 17.
Daly, H.
E.
, and J.
B.
Cobb, Jr.
1989 For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Daly, H.
E.
, and K.
N.
Townsend, eds.
1992 Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics.
Cambridge, Mass.
: M.
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Dowlatabadi, H.
, and M.
G.
Morgan 1993 Integrated assessment of climate change.
Science 259: 1813,1932.
Mol.
A.
R.
J.
1995 The Refinement of Production: Ecological Modernization Theory and the Chemical Industry.
The Hague: CIP-Data Konninklijke Bibliotheek.
Myers, D.
G.
, and E. Diener 1995 Who is happy? Psychological Science 6:10-19.
Nordhaus, W.
D.
1991 To slow or not to slow: The economics of the greenhouse effect.
The Economic Journal 101:920-937.
Nordhaus, W.
D.
, and J. Tobin 1973 Is growth obsolete? Pp.
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New York: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Peck, S.
C.
, and T.
J.
Teisberg 1993 Optimal CO2 Emissions Control with Partial and Full World-Wide Cooperation: An Analysis Using CETA.
Palo Alto, Calif.
: Electric Power Research Institute.
Rothen, S.
M.
1995 The Greenhouse Effect in Economic Modeling: A Critical Survey.
Dubendorf, Switzerland: EWAG (Swiss Federal Institute for Environmental Science and Technology).
Schelling, T.
C.
1992 Some economics of global warming.
American Economic Review 82:1-14.
Sen, A.
1982 Choice, Welfare, and Measurement.
Oxford, England: BasilBlackwell.
1993 The economics of life and death.
Scientific American 208~5~:4047.
Stern, P.
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1992 Global Environmental Change: Und erstand ing the Human Dimension.
Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, National Research Council.
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Veenhoven, R.
1988 The utility of happiness.
Social Indicators Research 20:333-354.
1991 Is happiness relative? Social Indicators Research 24:1-34.
110 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
EMULATION AND GLOBAL CONSUMERISM.
Richard R. Wilk.
There are good reasons for concern about the environmental impacts of 5 billion people consuming at the level of the developed countries of Europe and North America.
Given high economic growth rates in many parts of the developing world, as well as the rapid spread of electronic media, advertising, and consumer goods, we must ask what kind of consuming future we can expect in areas that are now constrained by poverty and isolation.
If everyone develops a desire for the Western highconsumption lifestyle, the relentless growth in consumption, energy use, waste, and emissions may be disastrous.
It is also possible, however, that each country, region, or ethnic group may maintain different aspirations, definitions of living standards, and consumption goals.
Then we could expect a high degree of diversity in consumer demand and, perhaps, much more moderate long-term levels of consumption, even with more equal distribution of income.
Of course, it is also possible that a large part of the developing world will never achieve the threshold income levels necessary to consume large amounts of durables, luxuries, or services, whatever their aspirations.
The choice of different scenarios for the consumption trajectories of the developing world hinges partially on the issue of emulation.
Do people of other cultures find the Western high-consumption model attractive? Or do their own cultures offer strong alternative values that make foreign models less attractive? Are some groups or cultures more likely to emulate the West than others? What cultural, social, and economic forces promote high-consumption lifestyles? The strongest form of emulation is often labeled "cultural imperialism.
" This theory contends that a combination of Western control of mass media and improved advertising, along with falling trade barriers and the spread of industrial capitalism, will inevitably lead the developing world into emulative forms of consumption (Tomlinson, 1991; Rassuli and Hollander, 1986~.
There are various moral positions on cultural imperialism; some see it leading to economic freedom, while others consider it a malign form of brainwashing and false consciousness (Ewen, 1988; Horowitz, 1988~.
Many social scientists reject cultural imperialism and contend that instead of increasing centralization and homogenization, the next century will be dominated by new forms of nationalism, localism, and cultural fundamentalism that will challenge both the economic and cultural hegemony of the West (Foster, 1991~.
There is some empirical evidence for both processes; some forms of localization are concurrent
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 111.
with other kinds of globalization; heterogeneity and homogeneity both seem to be increasing in different sectors and at different scales (Friedman, 1990; Hannerz, 1987; Featherstone, 1990; Wilk, 1995; Drummond and Patterson, 1988; Belk and Dholakia, 1995~.
Recent historical and social-scientific research on consumption has produced a great deal of empirical data and many excellent case studies that bear directly on the issue of consumer emulation.
Studies of the growth of consumer culture in post-World War II Japan (Tobin, 1992), France (Kuisel, 1993), and Austria (Wagnleitner, 1994) all argue that emulation is not at all mechanical or inevitable but is, instead, a temporary product of specific political policies, trade practices, and cultural influences.
The explosion of consumer demand in China during the last decade has been used both as an example of cultural imperialism and of autonomy and increasing diversity in consumer culture.
Consumer aspirations have changed several times during the last 20 years, and comparisons show that the mixture of goods consumed in China at a particular level of income is quite different from that found in other Asian countries (Sklair, 1994~.
The case studies demonstrate that people, in general, tend to emulate local elites rather than following a single global generic "Western" consumer model.
Sometimes people explicitly reject foreign models instead of emulating them.
Periods of emulation may alternate with intervals where global or international standards are rejected in favor of local goods or styles (e.
g.
, Andrae and Beckman, 1985; Appadurai, 1986, 1990; Friedman, 1994) The influence of Western media and the advertising of global brands on actual consumer behavior and aspirations is still not clearly understood, and the "cultivation effect" of television is weak or highly variable in cross-national data (Ware and Dupagne, 1994; Liebes and Katz, 1990; Moore, 1993~.
The few comparative cross-cultural studies of consumer aspirations and values are difficult to interpret.
Technocratic, urban, highly educated groups in many parts of the world show some increasing commonalities in aspirations and cultural beliefs.
But are these sectors the leaders of a new wave of consumerism or small Western cultural enclaves of technocratic and academic "cosmopolitans" (Hannerz, 1990; Belk, 1988; lames, 1993~? Methodological problems (translation, sampling) also make these survey results equivocal (Holt, 1994~.
The precise linkage between Westernized values and the consumption of Western goods is also not well established.
Economists find that the determinants of national demand, and the amount saved and invested instead of spent on consumer goods, are complex.
The share of increased income spent on major consumption categories, such as food, durables, and housing, var
2 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
ies widely at the same income level, as does the savings rate (Lluch et al.
, 1977; Gereffi and Korzeniewicz, 1994~.
Even the historical development and present fluorescence of mass-consumer society in the West is poorly understood, despite a wealth of new studies (e.
g.
, Mintz, 1985; Brewer and Porter, 1993; Cross, 1993; Richards, 1991; Benson, 1994; Tierstin, 1993; Craik, 1994; McCracken, 1988; Csikszentimihaly and Rochberg-Halton, 1981~.
Historians tend to agree that the growth in Western consumer demand resulted from a breakdown of rigid class hierarchies and a relaxation of religious inhibitions on conspicuous consumption.
Some authors stress the emergence of a "romantic ethic" (Campbell, 1987) or a trend toward cultivating health and self-improvement (Lears, 1989~.
Recent work has shifted away from "social emulation" or class-competition models of consumer demand, toward a focus on communication, nationalism, advertising, and the growth of markets and retailing.
Because all of these trends are occurring in developing countries, we can expect a similar growth of consumer culture, even in the absence of any specific form of emulation.
So, even without emulation, consumption levels in developing countries may dramatically increase.
fudging the emulation hypothesis is premature because social science, in general, still lacks a well-established general theory of consumption.
Each discipline tends to focus on consumption from its own narrow perspective (though see Miller, 1995~.
More synthetic work is being done in hybrid fields like consumer research, cultural studies, and social history (Sherry, 1995~.
Studies of household decision making in several disciplines have been especially promising, because most major investment and consumer decisions are made at the household level.
There is considerable constructive debate on models of intra-household bargaining, gender, and power that have direct implications for understanding consumption, spending, and savings behavior (e.
g.
, Phipps and Burton, 1995; Folbre, 1994~.
Given the importance of predicting future global demand for consumer goods, energy, water, food, and other resources, we need to better establish the determinants of consumer behavior.
While there is a good deal of empirical data available that bear on these issues, there has been little cross-disciplinary synthesis, and fundamental theoretical issues remain unresolved.
The major points that emerge from the literature in several disciplines include the following:.
(1) There is still no generally accepted model of consumer behavior.
(2) The database for cross-cultural comparison of consumption is poor in quality.
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 113.
(3) No single academic discipline has adequate tools or data for studying cross-cultural consumer behavior.
(4) The development of consumer culture in developing countries is following a different trajectory from the historical path of the West.
(5) There is still every reason to think that consumption will increase as incomes rise, but we cannot yet predict how that increase will be apportioned to various goods or sectors.
(6) Simple emulation remains an empirically weak model for prediction.
.
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1994 The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain, 1880-1980.
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1993 Consumption and the World of Goods.
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1987 The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism.
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1994 The Face of Fashion.
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Cross, G.
1993 Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture.
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, and R. Patterson, eds.
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1988 All ConsumingImages.
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114 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
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1988 The Morality of Spending.
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1993 Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization.
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1989 Beyond Veblen: Rethinking consumer culture in America.
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McCracken, G.
1988 Culture and Consumption.
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Mintz, S.
1985 Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
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Moore, S.
1993 Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption.
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EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 115.
Sklair, L.
1994 The culture-ideology of consumerism in urban China.
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1993 Redefining consumer culture: Recent literature on consumption and the bourgeoisie in Western Europe.
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1991 Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction.
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1994 Coca-Colonization and the Cold War.
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116 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
CULTURAL AND SOCIAL EVOLUTIONARY DETERMINANTS OF CONSUMPTION Willett Kempton and Christopher Payne.
In the workshop paper summarized here (see Kempton and Payne, forthcoming, for the complete version), we draw data from a wide range of human societies to ask: What can cross-cultural comparisons teach us about the relationship between consumption and quality of life? We argue that the dependence of quality of life on consumption is not monotonic and is both weaker and more complex than is often assumed.
We begin by addressing two myths that underlie much thinking about consumption.
The first myth is that quality of life generally increases with higher consumption levels that is, more consumption of goods and services increases the quality of life.
This relationship is believed to hold across societies and across social strata within any society.
Parts of it are parodied in the tee-shirt slogan "He who dies with the most toys wins.
" The second myth is that society evolves and changes to improve the lot of individuals.
If our society previously had one form of government, kinship system, economy, or whatever and another form replaces it, the societal change improves the quality of life of members of the changed society.
We call these the "most toys" myth and the "social evolution for individual benefit" myth.
They are addressed at several points here.
We begin by considering the types of societies within which biologically modern humans evolved.
These societies are small, organized around family relationships, and subsist by hunting and gathering.
Both mobility and their social organization limit consumption.
Mobile societies shift residences, whether on a predictable yearly cycle based upon seasonal cycles of wild crops and game or moving more opportunistically to follow herds, water, or areas not yet exhausted of plant resources.
Individuals in these societies limit consumption simply via the limit on inventories you can't possess more than you can carry.
Socially, hunting and gathering societies are organized around family relationships and are egalitarian.
We also briefly examine a subsequent form of subsistence, swidden agriculture.
This pattern relies on cutting and burning forest, farming the plot for one or a few years, and abandoning it for decades to lie fallow and regrow.
As societies moved from hunting and gathering to swidden agriculture, and then to fixed agriculture, changes in social and political organization accompanied these production and settlement changes.
Among other things, these changes increase status differentiation.
With larger populations in settlements and social differentiation comes the need
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 117.
for display of status by means of prestige goods.
Subsequently in social evolution, material consumption is driven partially by status competition.
Remarkably, the consumption literature rarely distinguishes consumption for social-status display from sustenance, enjoyment, or other (sometimes overlapping) motivations for consumption.
Social status consumption is a zero-sum game, which drives competing individuals or groups toward higher consumption ending not with "need satisfaction" but only with exhaustion of an individual's resources.
Acting alone, each individual competing for status seeks to make the best of his or her position.
But satisfaction of these individual preferences itself alters the situation that faces others seeking to satisfy similar wants.
A round of transactions to act out personal wants of this kind therefore leaves each individual with a worse bargain than was reckoned on when the transaction was undertaken, because the sum of such acts does not correspondingly improve the position of all individuals taken together.
There is an "adding-up" problem (Hirsch, 1976~.
.
LEVELS OF CONSUMPTION.
Next we address relative levels of consumption across societies.
We compare consumption of the main two throughputs of environmental interest, mass and energy, and further divide mass throughputs into recycled and nonrecycled categories.
Energy use has been thoroughly studied in a number of indigenous societies.
Total mass throughputs of indigenous societies have not been studied explicitly, but we can make estimates from existing ethnographic data.
The bulk of the mass used by indigenous peoples is biodegradable and recycled by biological processes.
Wood, hide, reed or bamboo, foodstuffs, and such, when discarded, degrade and feed biological cycles.
These societies also create a one-way (nonrecycled) flow of materials for stone tools, such as chert, flint, and obsidian.
Ceramic vessels can survive 10,000 years before reintegration into the soil, so we consider them nonrecycled as well.
Table 4-6 shows four types of societies, with estimates for energy, nonrecycled material, and recycled materials.
Note that hunter-gatherers function at two orders of magnitude less energy and one order of magnitude less materials than the United States.
Swiddeners (based on Beckerman, 1976) use about the same level of materials as does the United States but differ from the United States in that over 99 percent of the materials are recycled.
The supposedly modern concept of "sustainability" has been achieved in most hunting-gathering and swidden agricultural societies, as evidenced by the fact that many of these societies can be shown to have run their systems of materials and energy throughput in the same locations for millennia.
These societies modify their
118 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
TABLE 4-6 A Rough Quantitative Comparison of Energy and Materials Use Across Diverse Types of Societies.
Nonrecycled Energy Materials Recycled Materials (kW/ capita) (kg/ capita / day) (kg/ capita / day).
Hunting and gathering 0.
11 0.
035 3.
6 Swidden horticulture 0.
25 0.
15 50-100 Agriculture in a 1-3 0.
5 4-50 developing country U.
S.
A.
11 56 2.
7.
NOTE: The full paper explains how the quantities were calculated or estimated.
.
environments initially especially swiddeners but then continue in the same location for very long periods without continuing environmental degradation.
Their long-term durability within the ecosystem is not matched by durability in contact with the global political economic system upon this contact they are quickly absorbed into the nonsustainable world economy.
.
HOW CAN ONE COMPARE QUALITY OF LIFE?.
Low-consumption societies are not very relevant if the life they live is "nasty, brutish and short" [Hobbes, 1968~1651~:186~.
Comparing quality of life across societies is fraught with problems, but anthropologists have developed some measures.
To summarize briefly, our paper suggests potential candidates such as nutrition, health, life-span, work time vs.
leisure time, in- vs.
out-migration ("revealed preference" for a given society), and relative perceived quality of life by ethnographers.
Of course, this is not a complete list of all the measures we would like to have.
What the above measures have to recommend them is that they are in available data ethnographic, archaeological, human biological, or paleoarchaeological records.
When objective measures are applied to compare the quality of life across widely divergent societies, the results are surprising.
We concentrate here on work time and health; other measures are covered in Kempton and Payne (forthcoming).
.
RESULTS OF COMPARISON.
Regarding health measures, studies of skeletal remains show that health declined not improved as might be expected after transitions from hunting-gathering to early agriculture, then from early agriculture
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 119.
to archaic states.
Decreases in health occurred due to the greatly reduced range of plant species eaten, social stratification resulting in separation of decision makers from the bulk of the population, and high population densities leading to infectious disease (Diamond, 1987~.
Health did not improve markedly until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as a result of public health measures in the cities and the advent of modern antibiotics.
Life-span is longer in industrialized societies than in any of the indigenous societies we discuss.
One component of the "most toys" myth is that the devices we consume reduce our work time i.
e.
, that life is easier today than in earlier historical periods or in technologically primitive societies.
Regarding earlier historical periods, Juliet Schor has challenged the myth of less work in the modern era.
She takes the comparison back to medieval time (Schor, 1991), finding a large increase in work time during the industrial revolution and a decline back to medieval levels during the twentieth century.
We feel that the work-time comparison gets more interesting when extended to indigenous peoples.
Several sources demonstrate that sustenance requires less work in primitive societies than in our own.
In one study of indigenous people, Johnson (1978), compares middleclass France with the Machiguenga, a horticultural group in the Peruvian rain forest, another society autonomous from the global economy.
The middle-class French had 10 hours of free time per day, and the Amazonian people had 14 hours of free time per day; free time in each case included about 8 hours of sleep.
Qualitatively, Johnson made parallel observations about his own time sense while living there: "[In] their communities .
.
.
I sense a definite decrease in time pressure .
.
.
when I return home [to the United States] I am conscious of the pressure and sense of hurry building up to its former level" (1978:53~.
Other studies of time required for subsistence are reported in Sahlins (1972~.
Huntinggathering societies often require only 3-4 hours of work to provide an ample and varied diet.
In sum, hunter-gatherers and swidden agriculturalists work less and have more leisure than citizens of industrialized societies.
Other studies of contemporary indigenous peoples being drawn into the market economy similarly demonstrate the forces that lead to incorporation into market-based, higher-consumption lifestyles.
The attraction at time of entry occurs despite eventual degradation in the incorporated peoples' quality of life (e.
g.
, Barlett and Brown 1985; Bodley, 1990~.
To briefly consider urban-industrial society, many authors argue that many of the historical developments of the past century have been inconsistent with a higher quality of life for individuals.
Historians like Wiebe (1967), Hughes (1989), and Marcus and Segal (1989) have traced the rise of the technological society during the twentieth century and identified its
20 ENVIRONMENTALLY SIGNIFICANT CONSUMPTION.
defining focus to be the growth of large-scale organizational systems.
Organizational systems can be defined as operational structures that provide their members with efficient means of achieving given ends [compare the administrative theories of Simon (1957) and the economic theories of Galbraith (1967~.
Social critics such as Mumford (1934, 1967, 1970) and Ellul (1964) have argued that these organizational goals result in isolated, dehumanized individuals, while benefiting the organization itself.
Furthermore, organizational theorists have argued that large-scale organizations prevent individuals from developing fully on a psychological level.
Drawing heavily on the work of psychologists such as lung and Marcuse, Denhardt (1981) has argued that there is a fundamental tension between the individual and collective psyches.
This presents a problem of integrating the individual and collective psyches into a self-actualized whole.
In this view, the development of organizational systems has led to a collective psyche that values certain aspects of the human psyche (rationality, instrumentality, etc.
) at the expense of others (emotion, expression, etc).
The repression of these emotive values hampers individual development.
Because of the structure of organizations, therefore, social and individual development is inhibited.
The perspectives of these authors suggest that organizations have become autonomous actors in our society, furthering their own aims rather than human welfare.
When people believe that the efficient production of goods is the means for improving their quality of life, this pursuit makes sense.
As people come to recognize the destructive characteristics of the material lifestyle and of the systems that support it, they see organizations as, in many respects, fulfilling organizational aims to the detriment of human individuals.
The aspects of life that define us as human expressive, creative, unique are those aspects that are in conflict with the needs of organizational structures for efficient operation.
It is, finally, organizational operations that are supported by the myth of consumption.
.
CONCLUSION.
Obviously, we do not advocate abandoning fixed communities, agriculture, and modern technology, a change impossible at current world population levels.
Rather, we wish to list the following observations from the data outlined here and explored more in the full paper: (1) Most early societies had consumption levels several orders of magnitude smaller than industrial societies today.
However, some indigenous societies had very high levels of per capita materials consumption,
EXAMINING THE DRIVING FORCES 121.
similar in magnitude to the United States today but with virtually all in materials promptly recycled by the biosphere.
(2) By objective indicators other than life-span, the quality of life in some ultra-low-consumption societies seems rather high higher than the societies they next evolved into, and by many indicators higher than ours today.
(3) Major social transitions can occur if they provide benefits to decision-making elites and greater "fitness" at the societal level (e.
g.
, military advantage or rapid growth and spread of the sociopolitical system).
(4) Increasing the quality of life of the broad masses of individuals is not a criterion by which organizations survive, nor has it been a force determining the direction of social evolution.
.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
We are grateful to fill Neitzel for major conceptual, literature, and reference suggestions.
Steven Beckerman and Thomas Rocek provided important data.
Abigail lahiel, Faith Mitchell, and various participants at the National Research Council workshop provided helpful comments on the argument and logic of drafts of this paper.
None of these commentators and contributors are responsible for its content.
.
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