Now that COP28 has concluded, it’s time for a quick climate-change quiz. See if you can identify the climate hero in the scenario below:
Jared and Annette arrive at a potluck, each bringing a mixed salad with the same ingredients. By a strange coincidence, they’re also wearing identical Christmas sweaters. They compare notes, and it turns out Annette’s salad ingredients were all bought from Vermont farmers, while Jared’s are supermarket ingredients shipped here from California, Mexico and Chile. Annette’s sweater was knit by a local crafter using Vermont wool. Jared’s came from Walmart, and was produced in a Chinese sweatshop using electricity from a coal-fired power plant.
Question: Which one is doing their part to lower their greenhouse gas emissions?
Crazy? Indeed. But if you read Environmental Action Network’s “Annual Progress Report on Emissions,” you’ll discover the way Vermont’s emissions are counted makes Jared the environmental hero, while Annette just isn’t “doing her part.”
That’s because “sector-based accounting” was used to tally our emissions. Emissions from various sectors of the Vermont economy are added up, and that’s our total. Anything produced in Vermont — like Annette’s sweater and salad ingredients — add to that total, but emissions from goods that came from outside Vermont are ignored. So by EAN’s accounting, Jared’s supermarket and Walmart purchases — though loaded with greenhouse gas emissions — add nothing at all to Vermont’s total.
The emissions embedded in a sweater or salad may seem trivial, but even in a small state like ours, they’ll be multiplied by hundreds of millions. Consider everything Vermonters buy at chain stores — Walmart, Dollar General, Target, Home Depot, 7-Eleven, etc. Add to that all the fast food purchased at McDonalds, Burger King, Pizza Hut and Wendy’s, and all the coffee from Starbucks. Add in all the purchases from Amazon, eBay and other online sellers. Little if any of this is produced in Vermont, and so the emissions from producing and transporting it all here are missing from EAN’s tally. The same bad logic applies to most of the food in Vermont’s supermarkets: zero emissions, no matter how many tons of CO2 were emitted to grow, process and transport it to Vermont.
It’s hard to see how intelligent climate policies can be crafted using an emissions accounting system that implicitly favors imported goods over locally-produced goods. Even local food — which should be embraced as a climate strategy because of its lower food miles and reduced need for packaging — is a loser according to sector-based accounting.
There’s an alternative accounting method that does incorporate consumption, and not surprisingly, it’s called consumption-based accounting. For Vermont, it would mean tallying the emissions from everything we consume — gas, heating fuel, food, consumer products — no matter where it came from. (The emissions from Vermont exports would be excluded because those emissions are the responsibility of an end consumer elsewhere.)
Consumption-based accounting makes it clear that the best way to reduce emissions is to reduce consumption, period. By forcing us to take full responsibility for our emissions, it’s a first step toward meaningful climate action.
Governments avoid consumption-based accounting, perhaps because it challenges the bedrock belief that economies should grow forever. Most mainstream nonprofits don’t use it either — maybe because their donor bases hope the climate can be “fixed” while leaving intact the source of their wealth: the growth-driven consumer economy.
In any case, EAN and its “network members” — including VNRC, VPIRG and other large Vermont environmental NGOs — are among those groups that ignore consumption. Instead, they see climate change as a problem for which technofixes are the solution. And with sector-based accounting, there’s a technofix for every sector: industrial renewables for the electricity sector, EVs for transport, heat pumps for thermal, etc. These technologies don’t require changing our consumer-based economic system; on the contrary, they represent huge profit-making opportunities for corporations and wealthy individuals. As one prominent renewable energy advocate put it, climate change is “the largest wealth creation opportunity of our lifetimes.”
Some will argue that asking residents to rein in their consumption would be unfair to the many Vermonters who already live with little. But the upper-income levels are where reductions are most needed. Low-income Vermonters aren’t chartering private jets out of Burlington’s airport, nor do they have second and third homes with heated swimming pools and three-car garages.
The EAN report calls to mind a line from Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies and statistics.” EAN’s report is loaded with creatively presented statistics, but it omits one of the most important statistics of all — consumption. In that way, EAN’s report serves to maintain the growth of an economic system that is literally killing the planet.
Steven Gorelick is a member of the Vermont Post-Growth Council. He lives in Walden.
