Questioning Convenience
– By Lisa Rutherford –
As I sat in my dark and chilly home due to a Rocky Mountain Power outage, I started wondering about the conveniences that we take for granted. Sometime ago I saw a bumper sticker that said “Question Convenience.” That has rattled around in my brain for a while but the outage brought it back to the forefront of my thinking. I think perhaps the person who had that sticker on their car was trying to get people to think about what we give up for the conveniences we generally enjoy.
It’s never “convenient” to have the things we count on unavailable. When the power goes out—unless one has a generator—lights, heat or air conditioning, internet access, and more are unavailable.
The generally reliable twenty-four-hour power that we have come to enjoy has certainly not come without costs, as we are witnessing now. Climate change deniers will assert that fossil fuel energy is not the problem, but the majority of scientists who study this in great detail certainly see the connection. They’re much smarter than I—and most others—so I think I’ll stick with them.
Because we have allowed ourselves the convenience of this energy, we are now experiencing the inconvenience of the catastrophes associated with it: more violent storms, raging fires due to extreme temperatures, heaving flooding, rising sea levels, and more. All of these things are affecting the costs we pay for essential goods and services. In fact, Bernardo Bastien-Olvera lead author of a study done at the University of California Davis notes that “Our research adds to the evidence suggesting that impacts are far more uncertain and potentially larger than previously thought.” According to their research, as of 2020 and not including the 2020 disasters, $500 billion in losses directly from climate-fueled weather disasters had been experienced in the U.S. Many people who don’t have financial resources to deal with such losses face the risk of bankruptcy.
Before readers discount that as just more woke-California hogwash, financial firm Morgan Stanley published a report in 2019 that detailed the cost of climate-related disasters. In the three years prior to that report, climate disasters cost the U.S. about $415B. The report asserted that businesses need to do more to protect themselves from the devastating effects of what we now acknowledge as climate change. According to The National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI)—part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)—the five years 2017-2021 cost $788.4B ($157.7B per year) with 911 deaths per year.
Water, another convenience, is being affected by climate change, too. Those of us in the West who rely on the diminishing Colorado River are having to consider the effects of less water available to support the quality of life upon which we have come to rely, certainly an inconvenience. Many are looking to the farmers to give up their water so that some can still have their lawns, golf courses, larger-than-needed homes, and their continued waste of this precious resource.
I hear frequent mention of pioneer ancestors with an assertion that we must honor their works through our efforts to secure more—more water, more land, more fossil-fuel energy. Ha, we’ve become so pampered that most have no clue as to the effort those pioneers exerted and how little, in comparison, is exerted now. Rather, we just want more.
You’d think that people would be willing to cut back during this inflationary period, but I see more new gas-guzzling vehicles on the road. Huge vehicles pass me every day as their internal combustion engines suck up that costly gasoline. Do they let up with the lead foot? No. Are they complaining about inflation and the cost of gasoline? Probably. Are they blaming others rather than taking action themselves? Apparently. The convenience of having a larger-than-probably-needed vehicle apparently trumps everything.
Convenience can have very strange results as revealed in an article in The Economist magazine. Back in the 1970s typical American cars started getting more energy efficient—improving from 13 miles per gallon to 20 miles per gallon by 1980. But, did people stay with that improvement and the convenience it afforded while enjoying the economic benefits of better gas mileage and slow the growth of fossil fuel use? No. Many bought even bigger vehicles and more of them leading to increased oil consumption resulting in usage higher than the decade before. So, given what I’m witnessing lately, we are no smarter than others forty years ago.
Improvement in home-energy efficiency has not led to people keeping smaller energy-efficient homes but has led to the growth in home sizes even as the average population per household has shrunk since the 1940s. That increased home size has led to demand for more materials including lumber from our diminishing forests and other materials, all requiring more energy to produce. Apparently, we are not satisfied with good but always want better no matter what the cost. And the convenience is costing us.
So, as I finished writing, the electrical problem had been resolved. I wondered if people were scampering to turn on all lights and electrical appliances while giving little thought to the cost of that convenience to all of us. November 15, 2022, marked the day that our Earth’s population hit eight billion! And, it’s not the sheer number of people; it’s the consumption of those eight billion that will challenge the future of this planet. Many of those eight billion will want the same conveniences we in the developed world have enjoyed for some time. We need to set a new standard for the future.
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