Tuesday, March 17, 2020

Inconspicuous Solutions

“Inconspicuous Consumption – the Environmental Impact You Don’t Know You Have,” by Tatiana Schlossberg, 2019

This is a book by an upscale millennial who has just discovered that consumer capitalism is anti-environmental.  It’s sort of like Paris Hilton suddenly doing research.  It’s bracketed by lame jokes and inane comments to make her assumedly privileged readers fell like it’s just ‘us cool kids,’ all in fun. Her full name is Tatiana Celia Kennedy Schlossberg, daughter of Caroline Kennedy, granddaughter of former U.S. President John Kennedy.  She went to Harvard and Oxford.  You may wonder how she got a job at the New York Times (NYT).  I don’t.  She covers issues that have been discussed for years, so this is a bit of a primer for those who don’t know anything, She uses the phrases ‘you’ve heard’ and ‘its complicated’ a lot and apologizes for being ‘boring.’  But given she has also learned how to be a reporter, she digs up some valuable information.

Schlossberg covers the environmental impact of the internet and Silicon Valley, power generation, agriculture, clothing and transportation in some detail – all the key areas of carbon production and the destruction of nature and humans.  Only once in 239 pages does she finally say that it is not ‘you’ that is ultimately responsible, but the consumerist corporate capitalist system that nearly everyone lives in. ‘Consumer power’ and ‘voting’ are her two real solutions – nothing else - solutions no doubt pre-approved by the NYT.

Schlossberg covers common subjects like vampire power, toxic mining of heavy metals for e-devices, unrecoverable e-waste and plastic pollution, wasted food, meat-heavy diets, industrial farming techniques, over-fishing, warming/acidic oceans, artificial micro-fibers - all familiar topics.

Some newer facts that I’ve chosen to high-light:
1.          Internet data centers running Netflix, Bitcoin et al. produce 2-3% of all carbon emissions.  They are located in areas where power is still partially supplied by coal, like Amazon’s centers in Ohio and Virginia.  The many data centers in Tyson’s Corner, in Loudon County, northern Virginia, handle 70% of world internet traffic, used by 3,400 internet companies.  They are also partially supplied by coal. Massive amounts of water to cool processors is also required here and in places like Arizona.
2.          Kevflavik Airport in Iceland is powered by thermal power and also handles massive cloud computing because of the cool weather there – as servers need air-conditioning and that takes more power.
3.          Hundreds of diesel engines in Silicon Valley act as back-up power for local IT systems and are carbon heavy.  Silicon Valley also sits on top of old toxic waste sites from the time it manufactured p.c. boards using trichloroethylene as a flux cleaner for solder. 
4.          It is not clear that eCommerce is better than ‘old’ commerce to Schlossberg, but the idiotic and rapid 2 - 4 hour delivery times, partially empty vans, high return rates for purchases and an increase in easy buying are dark signs that eCommerce propels consumerism and carbon.
5.          Increases in electricity demand with tech devices on ‘all the time’ create coal / oil / nuclear issues on the production side. 
6.          In her wavering understanding of organic agriculture she thinks that it will require more deforestation instead of a conversion of land.  This land is now being used to feed carbon-heavy animals and cars using mono-culture corn and soybeans.
7.          Container ships are efficient, but they burn the second-most carbon-rich and toxic fuel of all – bunker fuel #6, a thick oil close to asphalt oil.  Schlossberg assumes that we should have access to all food all year around, and so again is confused on whether shipping (and attendant refrigeration) are useful or not.  Her analysis is imbued with consumerism. Nor does she understand ‘export economies’ that starve their own people of local, inexpensive food while providing food to the wealthier part of the world.
8.          60-70% of fish stock is used to make fish meal for animals, pets, other fish or oil.
9.          Rayon, the #3 fabric used in clothing, is made mostly with wood fibers, but results in deforestation. 
10.     The fashion industry is the 2nd most polluting industry in the world and produces 10% of carbon emissions according to Schlossberg.
11.     Cotton and denim are heavy water, insecticide, toxic chemical and dye users.  Schlossberg does not mention that hemp could substitute for cotton.  The Aral Sea disappeared in the USSR because of cotton production and its massive water requirements and that has continued with cotton production by Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan.
12.     Schlossberg counsels her followers to not wash their jeans ‘after every use.’  Who does that?
13.     Cheap cashmere has come at the expensive of desertification in upper Mongolia and the Gobi desert as ‘fast fashion’ cashmere demand has driven huge increases in destructive goat herds.
14.     Fast fashion has increased clothing purchases exponentially.  Yet 60% of clothing gets thrown away within a year, with only 15% recycled.  So clothes are now disposable.
15.     Burning wood pellets is considered to be ‘recyclable’ because you can plant trees.  This loophole in the Kyoto protocol is leading to deforestation in the southeast U.S. where many pellet plants are located.  What is not mentioned is that it will take 20-40 years for the new trees to grow and again sequester the same amount of carbon.
16.     Coal ash is the most toxic and massive of mining by-products and leaks into groundwater and rivers regularly.  It is only partly recycled. The Trump administration is trying to remove regulations concerning it, as it is doing with many other carbon sources.
17.     HFCs in refrigeration units are powerful green-house gases.  Air-conditioning is a key energy drain.  Schlossberg thinks new energy standards could double efficiency and ‘save air conditioning.’ She doesn’t mention any other actions like smaller or collective living spaces and not keeping indoor temps so cool.
18.     Most cheap flowers come from Columbia by air.  She does not suggest not buying them.  She does suggest driving on short flights, as take-off and landings are 25% of fuel use.  She does not mention that military, cargo and business class flying are the vast majority of air transport, not ordinary travelers.  By the way, airplane emissions AND shipping emissions are not covered in the Paris accords, so subsidiary agreements have followed with no teeth.
19.     Transport ranks #1 in carbon dioxide generation. Trucks shipping goods are the largest component – 5% of vehicles but 20% of carbon.  Schlossberg shows how the ‘promise’ of Uber and Lyft are failing, as there is now MORE traffic, not less.  They are not ‘ride-sharing’ companies. Figures show public transport rider-ship is down and this could be connected to these companies.  Real ‘ride-sharing’ in autonomous electric vehicles is still a dim promise.  Again, everyone wants to be everywhere immediately.

Schlossberg is what you might call a typical environmental writer, who poses no threat to capitalism.  This while collecting facts that make it obvious that capitalism as it now stands is both creating the situation and unable to change fast enough through ‘green tech.’  What is missing from her writing is a political movement to crush the power of the capitalist class and the commodity economy and replace it with a sustainable system.  What is also clear from her manifold list of problems is that it describes a patient in a hospital with ‘complications’ of two, three or four medical issues at one time.  In those situations the prognosis is never good.

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  “Tar Sands,” “Native Tongue,”  “Stirring Up the Bacon Eaters,” “Climate Emergency,” “Planning Green Growth,” “Ecological Revolution” (Foster);  “Ecology & Marxism,” “A Redder Shade of Green,” “Stop Tar Sands Oil,” “Ecological Revolution” and “Marx and the Earth, (JB Foster); “This Changes Everything” (Klein), “Civilization Critical.”

P.S. -   
Biden' Our Time
Electing Joe Biden and propping up the power of the DNC will retain business as usual in the immediate term and continue the slide towards environmental oblivion.  In June 2019 Biden told large donors at a fundraiser in New York that ‘nothing would fundamentally change’ if he was elected.  At the debate on Sunday, he pretended he is now almost like Sanders. Biden will say almost anything, including lying, to get elected, which is what bourgeois candidates do to get votes.  After that, sayonara. When Sanders loses and endorses Biden, it will be the turn of the actual left to challenge both ruling class parties on climate change and commodity consumerism. 

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
     March 17, 2020

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