28 November 2022. Shopping | Energy
How to buy less. // More birds are killed by fossil fuel plants than by wind turbines. A lot more.
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1: How to buy less
I spent the weekend deleting, mostly, emails from companies offering ‘Black Friday’ deals—an early Christmas shopping rush that, at least in the UK, has been imported from the United States’ celebration of Thanksgiving. In the hailstorm of offers, an understated protest from the Ethical Shop stood out:
We don't do Black Friday discounts. To be honest we find the whole thing pretty distasteful and prefer to offer useful household goods, essentials and gift ideas, that in a small way, make a positive difference.
So I thought it might be worth picking up a couple of pieces I read in the past week about shopping—its compulsions and it limitations.
(Source: www.buynothingday.co.uk)
The first was in Time magazine, part of its ‘Time 2030’ series that is designed to look at the processes of transition. It was about ‘Why we buy things we don’t need’—in fact, that was the headline.
The article discusses a new book by Ann-Christine Duhaime, called Minding the Climate, which says that our brains are to blame. She is a Harvard neurosurgeon, and she tells the reporter:
“All things being equal, we are predisposed to try to acquire more and more stuff, and to try and work less to get it.”
It’s all about dopamine:
Our brains especially like it—and release more dopamine—when we get an unexpected good reward, Duhaime says. Our ancestors likely learned the benefits of “intermittent small variable rewards,” as Duhaime calls them, to teach them to explore... The good feeling associated with unexpected rewards is partly why we like shopping.
But we’re not hard-wired to do this. It’s not just genertics. Various experiments suggest that environmental factors also play their part. The brain can also learn new behaviour:
we have learned over time that the key to survival is acquiring more resources, but the brain also has a tremendous amount of plasticity. The challenge is that our systems are designed for short-term decision-making, and curtailing our own individual consumption for the long-term health of the planet may not benefit an individual person today.
There are some tricks that can help. We don’t need to give up on rewards completely. We can substitute lower-impact treats (cocoa powder in milk rather than a chocolate bar, for example), or buy used clothes rather than new ones. Social rewards also work—members of the ‘Buy Nothing’ groups that are starting to pop up get their rewards from the social approval of the other members when they don’t buy something.
Vox popped up in the week before Thanksgiving with one of those lists of tips on what to do if you did want to buy less.
One of these is about changing your language—from what we think we need to what we think we want. This is according to ‘declutterer’ Tracy McCubbin (and yes, it’s 2022, and ‘declutterers’ are a thing):
“As in ‘I need a new pair of jeans. I need a new jacket.’ I can guarantee that most of us have all the jeans and jackets that we need.” Instead, we should channel our preschool vocabulary lessons that taught us to distinguish between wants and needs: “‘I want a new pair of jeans. I want a new jacket.’ Once you change your language, the item ceases to have as much power over you.
Another is about knowing what we have, as a way of reducing impulse buys. A second element here is knowing better what you already have, so you don’t buy things you already have. Changing the way you think about your money helps.
The financial coach Annette Harris gets people to focus on the things they are saving for, so they can slowly reduce what they’re spending on. And inevitably, Marie Kondo pops up in an article like this, who asks about the things you buy that you know you’re only going to use once or twice. Clothes are at the top of this list.
And this might also be a way of squaring off the dopamine problem. Ashlee Piper, a sustainability expert who saved $16,000 when she had a no-spend year in 2013, recommends writing a ‘needs list’ for things you’re planning to do, and then working out how to get hold of them without buying them—borrowing them, repurposing something else, and so on. Succeeding at this becomes part of the reward.
These days she runs monthly no-spending challenges for people under the hashtag #nonewthings.
Along the way, she’s noticed that digging into the emotions behind purchasing habits is key to change. She compares shopping to dieting — you stay on the wagon until you have a bad day, then you break your plan. “The same for me happened with the desire to browse and shop, especially online.” She says high and low emotions, along with boredom and even procrastination were the root causes of overspending for her.
She acknowledges, though, that all of this can be harder for families with kids. All the same, one of the benefits is less sense of anxiety:
“When clients feel less anxious ... life changes as a whole, and you’re in a different physical and mental space.”
By the way I suspect that I’m not the only reader that thinks that the ‘Buy Nothing’ poster above is too clever for its own good.
2: Counter-factuals: birds and fossil fuel plants
The climate change writer and researcher Michael Thomas has a short post at his newsletter, Distilled, on the question of the risks to birds from wind turbines.
It’s one of the strongest messages you get from groups that are opposed to wind turbines: turbines kill birds. It’s obviously an emotionally charged point as well. Thomas spent time following 40 groups on Facebook that campaign against clean energy, and this narrative recurs over and over again.
(Wind turbines off the coast off the Netherlands. Public domain, cia publicdomainpictures.net)
So he decided to post the counter-factual question: how many birds are killed by fossil fuel plants?
It turns out that there’s some research on this already, going back a decade:
In 2012, researchers at Vermont Law School set out to answer this question. They found that wind turbines kill 0.27 birds per gigawatt-hour (GWh). Fossil fuel power plants by comparison kill a staggering 9.4 fatalities per GWh. In other words, fossil fuel power plants kill 35x more birds per unit of electricity than wind turbines.
(His emphasis).
How do they do this? Helpfully, he counts the ways.
First, mining and extraction causes habitat damage and loss.
Secondly, burning fossil fuels creates acid rain, which harms birds both directly and indirectly. (There’s data on this as well).
And third, and most importantly, fossil fuels cause global heating which puts birds at risk—and some species at risk of extinction. This is
"the single greatest long-term threat to birds and other avian wildlife." According to the IPPC , 12% of birds are at significant risk of global extinction.
The conclusion is pretty clear: the best way to stop birds getting killed is to phase out fossil fuel as quickly as possible, even if it means building more wind turbines.
Other writing
Fans of folk music might enjoy a review I wrote for the music site Salut Live! On a concert I attended last week by the Scottish folk singer Kris Drever. Here’s a video of one of his better-known songs:
j2t#399
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