It’s easy to hate on consumption. It turns otherwise intelligent people into manipulable drones, leads to rampant privacy violations, helps people like Jeff Bezos and Sam Walton get disgustingly rich and powerful, encourages advertisers to shove garbage like this in our faces, and culminates every year in a tradition so degrading and horrific that it forces us to question whether we all really did die after Y2K and this is actually hell. But here’s one more thing: A newstudy published in the Journal of Industrial Ecology shows that the stuff we consume — from food to knick-knacks — is responsible for up to 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and between 50 and 80 percent of total land, material, and water use. So, you know, get that Amazon trigger finger ready, because you’re gonna want to do some comfort shopping after this.“We all like to put the blame on someone else, the government, or businesses. … But between 60-80 percent of the impacts on the planet come from household consumption. If we change our consumption habits, this would have a drastic effect on our environmental footprint as well,” Diana Ivanova, a PhD candidate at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and lead author on the study, said in a press release. According to the study, about four-fifths of the environmental impact of consumerism comes not from direct behaviours like driving cars or taking long showers, but rather from sources further down our products’ supply chains. The amount of water that goes into a hamburger or frozen pizza, for example, proved much more significant than showering and dishwashing habits. This is great news, of course, because everyone knows how easy it is to track products from the obscure mines that they sprang from to the local Bed Bath & Beyond (not). To figure this all out, Ivanova and her colleagues used economic data from most of the world and looked at different product sectors, including supply chain information. They found that consumerism was much higher in rich countries than in poor countries (surprise!) and that those with the highest rates of consumerism had up to 5.5 times the environmental impact as the world average.                                      https://grist.org/living/consumerism-plays-a-huge-role-in-climate-change/

Our consumer habits are actually driving climate change- a 2015 study found that the production and use of household goods and services was responsible for 60 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Not surprisingly, wealthy countries have the most per capita impact. A new U.N. report found that the richest one percent of the global population emit more than twice the amount than the poorest 50 percent; moreover, the wealthier people become, the more energy they use. A typical American’s yearly carbon emissions are five times that of the world’s average person. In 2009, U.S. consumers with more than $100,000 in yearly household income made up 22.3 percent of the population, yet produced almost one-third of all U.S. households’ total carbon emissions. As more people around the world enter the middle class and become affluent, the problem is worsening. After basic needs are met, consumers begin buying items for social status; as people try to acquire more and more status, more and more expensive status products are needed. Producing all these things generates climate-changing greenhouse gas emissions. And in fact, across its life cycle, the average product results in carbon emissions of 6.3 times its own weight, according to a study done by Christoph Meinrenken, associate research scientist at the Earth Institute’s Research Program on Sustainability Policy and Management. Technology can provide energy efficiency measures that help combat climate change, but “consumption (and to a lesser extent population) growth have mostly outrun any beneficial effects of changes in technology over the past few decades,” according to a June paper. The research concluded that it is not enough simply to “green” consumption by buying more sustainably produced goods—it is essential to reduce consumption. This is because 45 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions come solely from the production of the things we use and buy every day.                                  The problem with stuff........While large oil companies like ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron are the biggest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions, we consumers are complicit. We demand the products and energy made from the fossil fuels they provide. One scientist found that 90 percent of fossil fuel companies’ emissions are a result of the products made from fossil fuels. The accepted wisdom about the economy has been that consumption is essential to economic growth, since our demand for things makes companies profitable and provides employment.To keep this engine running, companies intentionally plan obsolescence of their products by changing how they look, such as in the fashion industry, or updating the design or software of products and discontinuing support for older models. Prices are kept artificially low to encourage us to buy because the real costs of their creation—which should include their environmental and social justice impacts—are not figured in. So we keep buying, and as a result, only one percent of “stuff” is still in use six months from its purchase, according to Annie Leonard’s The Story of Stuff, the iconic 2007 film. (20 minutes and well worth a look!)                              https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2020/12/16/buying-stuff-drives-climate-change/             

FAO report titled Livestock’s Long Shadow.  Since then, meat industry players have shifted from emphasising the supposed sustainability of organically-produced meat to painting meat as an answer to ecological challenges like climate change.  At a virtual conference in March, for instance, the Animal Agriculture Alliance (AAA), a US-based industry group, announced plans to “change the narrative and position animal agriculture as a solution to reducing our environmental footprint and improving our planet for generations to come.”  For Jacquet, though, such promises are little more than reputation management. “That’s what these people in these positions are paid to do”, she says, referring to trade associations such as the IMS and AAA. She adds: “They’re paid to comfort us. They’re paid to get us to not think hard and deeply about the industry. They’re paid to assuage our worries. And they’re paid to tell regulators: ‘Don’t worry, we’ll self-regulate. We’ll do a good job. You don’t need to worry about us. We are good actors.’

https://www.desmog.com/2021/07/18/investigation-meat-industry-greenwash-climatewash/?utm_campaign=Carbon%20Brief%20Daily%20Briefing&utm_content=20210720&utm_medium=email&utm_source=Revue%20Daily