MacAskill ch8

Another major area of ethical consumerism is “green living.” On a per-person
basis, US citizens emit more greenhouse gasses than any other large country,

with the average American adult every year producing twenty-one metric tons of

carbon dioxide equivalent. (Remember that carbon dioxide equivalent, or CO2eq

,

is a way of measuring your carbon footprint that includes greenhouse gasses

other than carbon dioxide, like methane and nitrous oxide.) As we’ve seen,

climate change is a big deal. It’s therefore natural to want to do something about

it, and the obvious way is to move to a lower-carbon lifestyle.

Sadly, many popular ways of reducing your greenhouse gas emissions are

rather ineffective. One common recommendation is to turn off or shut down

electronic devices when you’re not using them, rather than keeping them on

standby. However, this achieves very little compared to other things you could

do: one hot bath adds more to your carbon footprint than leaving your phone

charger plugged in for a whole year; even leaving on your TV (one of the worst

offenders in terms of standby energy use) for a whole year contributes less to

your carbon footprint than driving a car for just two hours. Another common

recommendation is to turn off lights when you leave a room, but lighting

accounts for only 3 percent of household energy use, so even if you never used

lighting in your house, you would save only a fraction of a metric ton of carbon

emissions. Plastic bags have also been a major focus of concern, but even on

very generous estimates, if you stopped using plastic bags entirely, you’d cut out

one hundred kilograms CO2 equivalent per year, which is only 0.4 percent of

your total emissions. Similarly, the focus on buying locally produced goods is

overhyped: only 10 percent of the carbon footprint of food comes from

transportation, whereas 80 percent comes from production, so what type of food

you buy is much more important than whether that food is produced locally or

internationally. Cutting out red meat and dairy for one day a week achieves a

greater reduction in your carbon footprint than buying entirely locally based

food. In fact, exactly the same food can sometimes have a higher carbon

footprint if it’s locally grown than if it’s imported: one study found that the

carbon footprint from locally grown tomatoes in northern Europe was five times

as great as the carbon footprint from tomatoes grown in Spain, because the

emissions generated by heating and lighting greenhouses dwarfed the emissions

generated by transportation.

The most effective ways to cut down your emissions are to reduce your

intake of meat (especially beef, which can cut out about a metric ton of CO2eq per

year), to reduce the amount you travel (driving half as much would cut out two