There’s no question that we humans need to modify our consumption and energy use habits to be more environmentally friendly in a world being ravaged by climate change. The solution, we are told by companies, politicians, and partially informed loudspeakers, is that we need to change what we consume. Buy electric cars! Use energy generated from solar and wind instead of fossil fuels! Give your business to companies that have net-zero carbon usage! This way of thinking makes consumers believe that they are doing something good for the environment by buying something different, but the real path to reducing our impact on the environment is to use less altogether. The flaw in our collective thinking is that switching to “greener” options is itself going to solve our environmental problems. We choose to ignore that everything comes at a cost. Sure, switching to a new electric vehicle from your old gas-powered car may reduce your fossil fuel consumption and on-road emissions, breaking even at approximately four years of usage, but the electricity used to charge your vehicle and the resources needed to manufacture your batteries, chips, and solar panels still need to come from somewhere.

The consumption of electronic products is increasing at such a breakneck pace that companies are rapidly racing to get approval to perform deep-sea mining for the metals required to manufacture batteries, but scientists are warning that there hasn’t been enough research done to determine the impacts on ocean ecosystems. Life at the bottom of the ocean has taken million of years to get to the point it is at, and deep-sea mining can quickly disrupt these ecosystems that would need several more millions of years to recover. We don’t even fully know what effects deep sea ecosystems have on global environmental health, but we do know that ocean health is very closely tied to managing warming in a healthy earth. Companies pushing to get regulatory approval to start mining without waiting for appropriate scientific research are willfully ignoring the impacts that their actions will likely have on the earth. We have already seen the above-ground impact that mining rare earth metals has had on the environment by salinating water, destroying ecosystems and habitats, and destroying potentially arable land by spraying acid during the mining process. The market for rare earth metals is incredibly strong because of the high usage of electronic products throughout the world, encouraging the development of illegal mines in places like the Amazon rainforest, where trees are cleared to make room for such mines, assisting in the depletion of the effectiveness of the Amazon rainforest as the world’s largest carbon sink.

An increase in consumption of electronic products must be accompanied with an increase in chip manufacturing. Every time you buy a new phone or new computer, it’s easy to see the device in your hand and disregard the work it took for it to get there. Chip manufacturing is incredibly water-intensive and produces copious amounts of hazardous waste. A single one of Intel’s chip fabrication plants in Arizona produced “nearly 15,000 tons of waste in the first three months of [2021], about 60% of it hazardous [and] … consumed 927m gallons of fresh water … and used 561m kilowatt-hours of energy.” The world’s largest chip manufacturer, TSMC, uses 5% of the entire country of Taiwan’s electricity and continued to use excessive amounts of water in the midst of a drought, causing tensions with farmers who have to work to provide the population with food. And yet, we are constantly bombarded with advertisements to “trade in” your old phone for the newest model, or sign up for phone plans that will replace your phone with the newest model every year. Just because your phone looks clean and doesn’t have an exhaust pipe doesn’t mean that it isn’t the result of an extremely wasteful and environmentally damaging manufacturing process. It’s easy - and incredibly irresponsible - to ignore the impact that your daily consumption has on the earth. Farmers are already struggling to water their crops amid increasingly common droughts, and chip manufacturing expansion is only making their lives even harder. We are so disconnected from the sources of everything we consume - our food, our electronics, our clothes - that we don’t even register the implicit tradeoffs we make when choosing to get the newest phone, TV, or car. Everyone needs to eat, but you could probably live with an old phone (or even no phone at all!) so why are farmers the only ones fighting the battle for the water needed to grow the food that everyone eats?

Greenwashing is a different, but not altogether unrelated issue. Companies nowadays are trying to increase their appeal to an audience that wants to be more environmentally friendly by saying that they have “net-zero emissions.” This often hinges on the carbon credit market, which allows people to sequester carbon and sell those credits to larger, polluting entities in a sort of zero-sum game that allows these companies to claim that they sequester as much carbon as they are outputting. We rely on questionable - and provably flawed - methods of calculating carbon offsets to allow largely polluting companies to get away with not actually reducing their emissions. The idea of carbon credits and carbon offsets is ultimately just another excuse to allow companies and individuals to continue their high-consumption, highly-polluting ways while claiming that they aren’t actually impacting the earth in a negative way. The right solution to work towards a healthier earth is to cut down consumption as well. It’s not a bad thing to implement projects to sequester carbon, but these should be in addition to - not instead of - cutting down emissions.

People want to project their eco-friendliness by using the “greener” option, like switching out their gas-powered cars for electric vehicles, but that’s not nearly enough. This isn’t to say that oil wells and fracking are better options, but it is rather to show that there is a cost to everything. Just switching cars doesn’t get rid of all the effects that your consumption has, you actually have to choose to drive less and use alternatives as much as you can - take the train, ride a bike, carpool - in order to meaningfully reduce your impact on the earth. This extends to all forms of consumption - don’t buy more food than you need, don’t replace your electronics until you really need to, have a higher tolerance for aging products. Despite all that we have come to learn about our environment by this point, we are still choosing to make rash decisions to match with the inordinate demands of human consumption, deciding to “deal with it later” in a world where we can’t afford to do that anymore.

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