Letter: Con­sump­tion has to fall for cli­mate crisis to ease

Michael Keith’s com­ment­ary on the import­ance to cli­mate change of urb­an­isa­tion (Opin­ion, Janu­ary 26) is squarely on the mark. As much as we like to ima­gine that renew­able energy expan­sion and car­bon emis­sions mit­ig­a­tion are a sil­ver bul­let, such responses are totally insuf­fi­cient given the vast scale of mater­ial and energy con­sump­tion — in which urban areas play a major part. As Keith notes, even without power­ing up new cit­ies, their con­tin­ued con­struc­tion using 20th-cen­tury approaches would be sure to pro­duce untold addi­tional harm.

Rem­ed­ies for cli­mate change and envir­on­mental dam­age more gen­er­ally depend on fairly simple arith­metic: either pop­u­la­tion or per cap­ita con­sump­tion levels must drop sharply. Both are related to urban devel­op­ment, yet pop­u­la­tion momentum will keep the former from occur­ring any time soon des­pite fall­ing fer­til­ity rates — too late, in any case, to make enough of a dif­fer­ence.

It leaves a world­wide drop in con­sump­tion as the only viable solu­tion. While Keith’s warn­ing only addresses part of the prob­lem, it is an import­ant warn­ing non­ethe­less. Even more import­ant is the urgent need to expose as a naive and per­ni­cious fantasy the idea that car­bon mit­ig­a­tion through a trans­ition to renew­ables will mostly suf­fice.

Mari­ano Tor­ras
Pro­fessor of Eco­nom­ics; Chair, Depart­ment of Fin­ance and Eco­nom­ics, Adelphi Uni­versity, Garden City, NY, US