Consumption

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NASA's Terra satellite captured a visible satellite image of the Gulf oil spill on May 17, 2010. The oil slick appears as a dull gray on the water's surface and stretches south from the Mississippi Delta with what looks like a tail.

Photo courtesy NASA Goddard / Rob Gutro

When the Gulf oil disaster first hit the headlines, John Francis got a series of calls and messages from friends across the country offering condolences and apologies. Francis isn’t from the Gulf but he has spent years trying to answer the question that now looms large in public debate—what does it mean to end our addiction to oil?

It took an oil spill and a tragedy to get Francis to radically change his life. Francis grew up in a working-class African-American family in Philadelphia and moved to California as an adult. He was in his early 20s in 1971, when he witnessed the aftermath of a collision between two oil tankers in San Francisco Bay. The resulting spill coated shores from Berkeley to Marin with oil and killed thousands of birds and fish. That event and the death of a friend a year later profoundly shook Francis. He gave up driving and riding in motorized vehicles for 22 years.

One day, as an experiment, he stopped speaking and realized that the experience opened up deeper modes of communication with others. “From this new place [of silence] lessons come,” he writes in his memoir,Planetwalker. “The first is that most of my adult life I have not been listening fully.” He spent the next 17 years in silence, began a pilgrimage on foot across the country, pursued a Ph.D. in environmental studies in Wisconsin at one of the nation’s foremost graduate programs, and became an expert on oil regulations. He taught courses at the University of Wisconsin—Madison without speaking and took an oil regulations policy job with the U.S. Coast Guard without driving.

The journey has made Francis into a kind of moral, spiritual, and symbolic leader for the environmental movement. He considers himself to be living proof of the idea that a single person and simple actions can reach millions. He has since resumed driving, riding, and speaking, but continues to promote environmental education, walking, and personal empowerment, especially among children, youth, and college students, and through lectures across the country.

I caught up with Francis at a green building conference in Seattle. I wanted to find out what his life might teach us about how to confront a disaster like the BP spill in the Gulf.

John Francis delivers a TED Talk telling the story of his life.

Photo by TED.

John Francis: A number of my students are always asking, "How do I know what is going to be my issue, my moment to make a decision?"

For me, it started with the wildlife—I could see that birds were dying. In my childhood, I used to save young birds that had fallen out of their nests. Once I went to save a bird, but before I could, a car ran over it. I cried for weeks.

The spill in San Francisco Bay made me cry. It made me cry in a painful way. There are tragedies you can move away from and you don't have to confront them. If you’re reading about an oil spill in the newspaper, you can just turn the page. But you couldn't get away from the effects of the spill. I could see that birds were dying. And the olfactory impact—the smell—was just huge.

I tell my students, "If you are moved to such a degree that you feel the pain, and that you can feel the tears running down your face, then you're looking at an opportunity to make a change, to make a difference in the world.”

Each of us has to have that moment when we know that we have to do something.I said, "What I want to do is not ride in cars." My girlfriend said, "Yeah, but we don't have any money." That's usually what happens—you start thinking about practical realities—money, job. Those thoughts can dissuade you from making that decision at that moment.

It took a friend's death to convince me that we only have right now—this moment. He died in a boating accident. He was about the same age as I was. He was a deputy sheriff, was married, and had a beautiful family and a house. He was living this dream, and all of the sudden he was just gone. It was irrevocable. He doesn't get to come back and say, "Oh, there’s something I wanted to do."

What I wanted to do was get out of my car and walk. I went on a walk with my girlfriend to commemorate and celebrate his life—20 miles to hear some music. On my way back I realized that there's no guarantee that tomorrow is going to come or that we're going to get it together. I told my girlfriend, "I’m already walking. I'm just going to keep walking."

Madeline: In your book, you describe how that walk led you to give up driving altogether. You write, "I just didn't want to come back and fall into the same old way of living a life." In your case, you witnessed these events that shook you enough to change your life dramatically. What do you think it will take for people in this country to change their ways of living? We all have lifestyles that contribute to climate change, our oil economy, and environmental problems.

John: In 1969, there was another spill in California—the Santa Barbara blowout [when an undersea rig exploded]. It was 200,000 gallons of oil. That spill galvanized a lot of people to start the environmental movement in the United States. People made some really significant changes just to get a day recognized for the environment—Earth Day.

It was a spill and someone’s death that prompted me to change. And it was me just being stubborn, even when I thought, "God, I don't know if I can really make a difference."

It's going to take something like that to happen for each of us: Each of us has to have that moment when we know that we have to do something. It might not happen to the whole country all at once—but enough people making those changes will make a difference.

As I walked across the country and studied environment and started speaking again, I realized that sustainability starts with the way we treat each other. And I believe that the way that we treat each other manifests in the physical environment around us. Our relationships are the first opportunity to treat the environment in a positive, sustainable way. We can't oppress one another; we can't kill each other for resources; we can't use each other for our own gain. We need to look at each other. We all use oil. We all have some responsibility. That's a good thing because if we have some responsibility, we all have some power.

I have to say if somebody had told me years ago that I could make a difference by getting out of my car and walking, I would have thought maybe they were not right on the beam. At first, I thought I might have a peaceful life playing the banjo and living in a cabin. But after more than 20 years of walking, I walk to the other side of the country, and the next thing I know, I'm a Ph.D., helping to write the oil pollution regulations for the United States. And I could not have seen that!

Madeline: How has the spill in the Gulf affected you?

John: Well, right away, when there's any spill in the United States or anywhere in the country or in the world that gets into the media, people start writing me. Sending me emails and calling me to say, "John, we're so sorry."

I am affected by this spill, even though I don't own any stock in BP, and I haven't lost any loved ones. People are going to hurt from this spill. People are going to feel pain. In that pain, however, there’s an opportunityfor us to change and look at what it is that's going on. In that clarity, or moment of obligation, we can understand who we are and make that commitment to change. Some people have already started car-free, motor-free, engine-free lifestyles. And I hear from them. Even though we may not all give up driving and riding in cars, we can look for the hidden costs and redefine our energy policies. The hidden cost of our petrochemical economy is huge and devastating to the rest of the planet. People die so we can drive in our cars. That's a cost that we think we don't have to pay financially. But we do pay the price—because it manifests in the physical environment around us.

Madeline: Many of us—when we're looking at what's happening in the Gulf or thinking about the enormity of climate change—experience grief or despair. How have you learned to confront those feelings in yourself?

John: I talk to you. And I write articles and a blog. I talk to the media. And I talk to the people around me. I'm not the expert. I can tell you my life and my journey. I think we need to understand the connectivity that all of us have with each other. Each of us is not here doing this alone. It's all of us. We’re part of each other's journeys as well.

Madeline Ostrander interviewed John Francis for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Madeline is senior editor for YES! Magazine.

Interested?

• All Hands on Deck: What can you do to respond to the Gulf oil spill?
• The Greatest Danger: In the face of global warming it is hard to escape a sense of outrage, fear, and despair. Joanna Macy says that speaking the truth of our anguish for the world brings down the walls between us, drawing us into deep solidarity.
• Planetwalker: John Francis walks the earth.

Chris Jordan & Sarah Waller: Tuna 2009. The artwork depicts 20,500 tuna, the number taken from the world's oceans every 15 minutes.

In the 2009 documentary "The Age of Stupid", a fictional historian who is possibly the last man on Earth looks at archival film footage from 2008 and contemplates the last years in which humanity could have saved itself from global ecological collapse. “Why didn’t we save ourselves when we had the chance?” Were we just being stupid? Or was it that “on some level we weren’t sure that we were worth saving?” The answer has little to do with humans being stupid or self-destructive but everything to do with culture.

Human beings are embedded in cultural systems, are shaped and constrained by their cultures, and for the most part act only within the cultural realities of their lives. The cultural norms, symbols, values, and traditions a person grows up with become “natural.” Thus, asking people who live in consumer cultures to curb consumption is akin to asking them to stop breathing—they can do it for a moment, but then, gasping, they will inhale again. Driving cars, flying in planes, having large homes, using air conditioning…these are not decadent choices but simply natural parts of life—according to the cultural norms present in a growing number of consumer cultures in the world. Yet while they seem natural to people who are part of those cultural realities, these patterns are neither sustainable nor innate manifestations of human nature. They developed over several centuries and today are actively being reinforced and spread to millions of people in developing countries.

Preventing the collapse of human civilization requires nothing less than total transformation of dominant cultural patterns. This transformation would reject consumerism—a cultural orientation that leads people to find meaning, contentment, and acceptance through what they consume—as taboo and establish in its place a new cultural framework centred on sustainability. In the process, a revamped understanding of “natural” would emerge: it would mean individual and societal choices that cause minimal ecological damage or, better yet, that restore the biosphere to health. Such a shift—something more fundamental than adoption of the new technologies or government policies regarded as key drivers of a shift to sustainable societies—would radically reshape the way people understand and act in the world.

Transforming cultures will require decades of effort in which cultural pioneers—those who can step out of their cultural realities enough to critically examine them—work tirelessly to redirect key culture-shaping institutions: education, business, government, and the media, as well as social movements and long-standing human traditions. Harnessing these drivers of cultural change will be critical if humanity is to survive and thrive for centuries and millennia to come and prove that we are indeed “worth saving.”

The Unsustainability of Current Consumption Patterns

In 2006, people around the world spent $30.5 trillion on goods and services. These expenditures included basic necessities like food and shelter, but as discretionary incomes rose, people spent more on consumer goods—from richer foods and larger homes to televisions, cars, computers, and air travel. In 2008 alone, people around the world purchased 68 million cars, 85 million refrigerators, 297 million computers, and 1.2 billion mobile phones  Consumption has grown dramatically over the past five decades, up 28 percent from the $23.9 trillion spent in 1996 and up sixfold from the $4.9 trillion spent in 1960 (2008 dollar values). Some of this increase comes from the growth in population, but human numbers only grew by a factor of 2.2 between 1960 and 2006. Thus consumption expenditures per person still almost tripled.

As consumption has risen, more fossil fuels, minerals, and metals have been mined from the earth, more trees have been cut down, and more land has been plowed to grow food (often to feed livestock as people at higher income levels started to eat more meat). Between 1950 and 2005, for example, metals production grew sixfold, oil consumption eightfold, and natural gas consumption 14-fold. In total, 60 billion tons of resources are now extracted annually—about 50 percent more than just 30 years ago. Today, the average European uses 43 kilograms of resources daily, and the average American uses 88 kilograms. All in all, the world extracts the equivalent of 112 Empire State Buildings from the Earth every single day.

The exploitation of these resources to maintain ever higher levels of consumption has put increasing pressure on Earth’s systems and in the process has dramatically disrupted the ecological systems on which humanity and countless other species depend. The Ecological Footprint Indicator, which compares humanity’s ecological impact with the amount of productive land and sea area available to supply key ecosystem services, shows that humanity now uses the resources and services of 1.3 Earths. In other words, people are using about a third more of Earth’s capacity than is available, undermining the resilience of the very ecosystems on which we depend.

In 2005 the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a comprehensive review of scientific  research that involved 1,360 experts from 95 countries, reinforced these findings. It found that some 60% of ecosystem services—climate regulation, provision of fresh water, waste treatment, food from fisheries and many other services—were being degraded or used unsustainably. The findings were so unsettling that the MA Board warned:

Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.

The shifts in one particular ecosystem service—climate regulation—are especially disturbing. After remaining at stable levels for the past 1,000 years at about 280 parts per million, atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are now at 385 parts per million, driven by a growing human population consuming ever more fossil fuels, eating more meat, and converting more land to agriculture and urban areas. A 2009 study that used the Integrated Global Systems Model of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that unless significant action is taken soon, median temperature increases would be 5.1 degrees Celsius by 2100, more than twice as much as the model had projected in 2003. In other words, policy alone will not be enough. A dramatic shift in the very design of human societies will be essential. 

These projected levels of temperature change mean the odds would be great that ocean levels would increase by two or more meters due to the partial melting of Greenland or W. Antarctic ice sheets, which in turn would cause massive coastal flooding and submerge entire island nations. The one sixth of the world who depend on glacier or snowmelt-fed rivers for water would face extreme water scarcity. Vast swaths of the Amazon forest would become savanna, coral reefs would die, and many of the world’s most vulnerable fisheries would collapse. All of this would translate into major political and social disruptions—with environmental refugees projected to reach up to 1 billion by 2050.

Climate change is just one of the many symptoms of excessive consumption levels. Air pollution, the average loss of 7 million hectares of forests per year, soil erosion, the annual production of over 100 million tons of hazardous waste, abusive labour practices driven by the desire to produce more and cheaper consumer goods, obesity, increasing time stress—the list could go on and on. All these problems are often treated separately, even as many of their roots trace back to current consumption patterns.

According to a study by Stephen Pacala, the world’s richest 500 million people (roughly 7% of the world’s population) are currently responsible for 50% of its carbon dioxide emissions, while the poorest 3 billion are responsible for just 6%. These numbers should not be surprising, for it is the rich who have the largest homes, drive cars, jet around the world, use large amounts of electricity, eat more meat and processed foods, and buy more stuff—all of which has significant ecological impact. In 2006, the 65 high-income countries where consumerism is most dominant accounted for 78% of consumption expenditures but just 16% percent of world population. People in the United States alone spent $9.7 trillion on consumption that year—about $32,400 per person—accounting for 32% of global expenditures with only 5% of global population. It is these countries that most urgently need to redirect their consumption patterns, as the planet cannot handle such high levels of consumption.

Indeed, if everyone lived like Americans, Earth could sustain only 1.4 billion people. At slightly lower consumption levels, though still high, the planet could support 2.1 billion people. But even at middle-income levels—the equivalent of what people in Jordan or Thailand earn on average today—Earth can sustain fewer people than are alive today. These numbers convey a reality that few want to confront: in today’s world of 6.8 billion, modern consumption patterns—even at relatively basic levels—are simply not sustainable. Add to this the fact that population is projected to grow by another 2.3 billion by 2050 and even with effective strategies to curb growth will probably still grow by at least another 1.1 billion before peaking.

It therefore becomes clear that while shifting technologies and stabilizing population will be essential in creating sustainable societies, neither will succeed without considerable changes in consumption patterns, including reducing the use of certain goods such as cars and airplanes. Habits that are firmly set—from where people live to what they eat—will need to be altered, and in many cases simplified or minimized. These are not changes people will want to make, since their current patterns are comfortable and feel “natural,” because of sustained, methodical efforts to make them feel just that way. Indeed, human behaviors central to modern cultural identities and economic systems are not choices that are fully in consumers’ control. They are systematically reinforced by the increasingly dominant cultural paradigm of consumerism.

 
Chris Jordan's Midway: Message from the Gyre, 2009, a photographs of an albatross chick on Midway Atoll in the N. Pacific. Nestings are fed bellies-full of plastic by their parents, who soar out over the vast polluted ocean collecting what looks to them like food for their young. On this diet of human trash, tens of thousands of chicks die yearly of starvation, toxicity, and choking. 

     .   
Consumerism Across Cultures

To understand what consumerism is, first it is necessary to understand what culture is. Culture is not simply the arts, or values, or belief systems. Rather, it is all of these elements—values, beliefs, customs, traditions, symbols, norms, and institutions—combining to create overarching frames that shape how humans perceive reality. Cultures, as broader systems, arise out of the complex interactions of many different elements of social behaviors and guide humans at actors and institutions and by the participants in the cultures themselves.

Today the cultural paradigm that is dominant in many parts of the world and across many cultural systems is consumerism. It is a cultural pattern that leads people to find meaning, contentment, and acceptance primarily through the consumption of goods and services. While this takes different forms in different cultures, consumerism leads people everywhere to associate high consumption levels with well-being and success. Ironically though, research shows that consuming more does not necessarily mean a better individual quality of life. Consumerism has now so fully worked its way into human cultures that it is sometimes hard to even recognize it as a cultural construction. It simply seems to be natural. But in fact the elements of cultures—language and symbols, norms and traditions, values and institutions—have been profoundly transformed by consumerism in societies around the world. Indeed, “consumer” is often used interchangeably with "person" in the 10 most commonly used languages of the world.

Consider symbols—what anthropologist Leslie White once described as “the origin and basis of human behaviour.” In most countries today people are exposed to hundreds if not thousands of consumerist symbols every day. Logos, jingles, slogans, spokespersons, mascots—all these symbols of different brands routinely bombard people, influencing behaviour even at unconscious levels. Many people today recognize these consumerist symbols more easily than they do common wildlife an almost invisible level. They are the sum of all “social processes that make the artificial (or human-constructed) seem natural.” It is these social processes that shape people’s realities. Most of what seems “natural” to people is actually cultural. Ultimately, while human behaviour is rooted in evolution and physiology, it is guided primarily by the cultural systems people are born into.
 
One norm of particular interest is diet. It now seems natural to eat highly sweetened, highly processed foods. Children from a very early age are exposed to candy, sweetened cereals, and other unhealthy but highly profitable and highly advertised foods—a shift that has had a dramatic impact on global obesity rates. Today, fast-food vendors and soda machines are found even in schools, shaping children’s dietary norms from a young age and in turn reinforcing and perpetuating these norms throughout societies.

There is strong evidence that higher levels of consumption do not significantly increase the quality of life beyond a certain point, and they may even reduce it. First, psychological evidence suggests that it is close relationships, a meaningful life, economic security, and health that contribute most to well-being. While there are marked improvements in happiness when people at low levels of income earn more (as their economic security improves and their range of opportunities grows), as incomes increase this extra earning power converts less effectively into increased happiness. In part, this may stem from people’s tendency to habituate to the consumption level they are exposed to. Even products around only a short time quickly become viewed as necessities. Half of Americans now think they must have a mobile phone, and one third see a high-speed Internet connection as essential.

A high-consumption lifestyle can also have many side effects that do not improve wellbeing, from increased work stress and debt to more illness and a greater risk of death. Each year roughly half of all deaths worldwide are caused by cancers, cardiovascular and lung diseases, diabetes, and auto accidents. Many of these deaths are caused or at least largely influenced by individual consumption choices such as smoking, being sedentary, eating too few fruits and vegetables, and being overweight. Today 1.6 billion people around the world are overweight or obese, lowering their quality of life and shortening their lives, for the obese, by 3 to 10 years on average.

Traditions—the most ritualized and deeply rooted aspects of cultures—are also now shaped by consumerism, which is now deeply embedded in how people observe rituals. Choosing to celebrate rituals in a simple manner can be a difficult choice to make, whether because of norms, family pressure, or advertising influence. Christmas demonstrates this point well. While for Christians this day marks the birth of Jesus, for many people the holiday is more oriented around Santa Claus, gift giving, and feasting. A 2008 survey on Christmas spending in 18 countries found that individuals spent hundreds of dollars on gifts and hundreds more on socializing and food. Increasingly, even many non-Christians celebrate Christmas as a time to exchange gifts. In Japan, Christmas is a big holiday, even though only 2% of the population is Christian.

Chris Jordan: Barbie Dolls, 2008 depicts 32,000 Barbies, equal to the number of elective 
breast augmentation surgeries performed monthly in the U.S. 

Institutional Roots of Consumerism

By the early 1900s, a consumerist orientation had become increasingly embedded in many of the dominant societal institutions of many cultures—from businesses and governments to the media and education. And in the latter half of the century, new innovations like television, sophisticated advertising techniques, trans-national corporations, franchises, and the Internet helped institutions to spread consumerism across the planet. Arguably, the strongest driver of this cultural shift has been business interests. On a diverse set of fronts, businesses found ways to coax more consumption out of people. Credit was liberalized, for instance, with installment payments, and the credit card was promoted heavily in the United States, which led to an almost 11-fold increase in consumer credit between 1945 and 1960. Products were designed to have short lives or to go out of style quickly. Workers were encouraged to take pay raises rather than more time off, increasing their disposable incomes.

Perhaps the biggest business tool for stoking consumption is marketing. Global advertising expenditures hit $643 billion in 2008, and in countries like China and India they are growing at 10% per year. In the United States, the average “consumer” sees or hears hundreds of advertisements every day and from an early age learns to associate products with positive imagery and messages.

Clearly, if advertising were not effective, businesses would not spend 1% of the gross world product to sell their wares, as they do. But they are right: studies have demonstrated that advertising indeed encourages certain behaviours and that children, who have difficulty distinguishing between TV advertising and content,  are particularly susceptible. In addition to direct advertising, product placement —intentionally showing products in television programs or movies so that they are positively associated with characters—is a growing practice. Companies spent $3.5 billion placing their products strategically in 2004 in the United States, four times the amount spent 15 years earlier.

The media are a second major societal institution that plays a driving role in stimulating consumerism, and not just as a vehicle for marketing. The media are a powerful tool for transmitting cultural symbols, norms, customs, myths, and stories. As Duane Elgin, author and media activist, explains: “To control a society, you don’t need to control its courts, you don’t need to control its armies, all you need to do is control its stories. And it’s television and Madison Avenue that is telling us most of the stories most of the time to most of the people.”  Between television, movies, and increasingly the Internet, the media are a dominant form of leisure time activity. In 2006, some 83% of the world’s population had access to television and 21% had access to the Internet. In countries that belong to the OECD, 95% of households have at least one television, and people watch about three to four hours a day on average. Add to this the two to three hours spent online each day, plus radio broadcasts, newspapers, magazines, and the 8 billion movie tickets sold annually worldwide, and it becomes clear that media exposure consumes anywhere from a third to half of people’s waking day in large parts of the world.

During those hours, much of media output reinforces consumer norms and promotes materialistic aspirations, whether directly by extolling the high-consumption lives of celebrities and the wealthy or more subtly through stories that reinforce the belief that happiness comes from being better off financially,from buying the newest consumer gadget or fashion accessory, and so on. There is clear evidence that media exposure has an impact on norms, values, and preferences. Social modelling studies have found connections between such exposure and violence, smoking, reproductive norms, and various unhealthy behaviours.

Government often reinforces the consumerist orientation. Promoting consumer behaviour happens in myriad ways—perhaps most famously in 2001 when George W. Bush and several other western leaders encouraged their citizens to go out and shop after the terrorist attacks. But it also happens more systemically. Subsidies for particular industries—especially the transportation and energy sectors, where cheap oil or electricity has ripple effects throughout the economy—also work to stoke consumption. And to the extent that manufacturers are not required to internalize the environmental and social costs of production—when pollution of air or water is unregulated, for example—the cost of goods is artificially low, stimulating their use. Between these subsidies and externalities, total support of polluting business interests was $1.9 trillion in 2001. Government actions can also be driven by regulatory capture, when special interests wield undue influence over regulators. In 2008, that influence could be observed in the United States through the $3.9 billion spent on campaign donations by business interests and the $2.8 billion they spent to lobby policymakers.

A clear example of official stimulation of consumption came in the 1940s when governments started to actively promote consumption as a vehicle for development. For example, the U.S., which came out of World War II relatively unscathed, had mobilized a massive war-time economy—one that was poised to recede now that the war was over. Intentionally stimulating high levels of consumption was seen as a good solution to address this (especially with the memory of the Great Depression still raw). Victor Lebow explained in 1955:

Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfactions, our ego satisfactions in consumption.

Today, this same attitude toward consumption has spread far beyond the U.S. and is the leading policy of many of the world’s governments. As the global economic recession accelerated in 2009, wealthy countries did not see this as an opportunity to shift to a sustainable “no-growth” economy—essential if they are to rein in carbon emissions—but instead primed national economies with $2.8 trillion of new government stimulus packages, only a small percentage of which focused on green initiatives.

Finally, education plays a powerful role in cultivating consumerism. As with governments, in part this is because education seems to be increasingly susceptible to business influence. Yet perhaps the greatest critique of schools is that they represent a huge missed opportunity to combat consumerism and to educate students about its effects on people and the environment. Few schools teach media literacy to help students critically interpret marketing; few teach or model proper nutrition, even while providing access to unhealthy or unsustainable consumer products; and few teach a basic understanding of the ecological sciences—specifically that the human species is not unique but in fact just as dependent on a functioning Earth system for its survival as every other species. The lack of integration of this basic knowledge into the school curriculum, coupled with repeated exposure to consumer goods and advertising and with leisure time focused in large part on television, helps reinforce the unrealistic idea that humans are separate from Earth and the illusion that perpetual increases in consumption are ecologically possible and even valuable.

Eric Assadourian is a senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute and Project Director ofState of the World 2010. The above is an edited synopsis based on his article The Rise & Fall of Consumer Cultures  which WWI has available for downloading as a PDF here.

• Tracking energy consumption
• The four sectors
• Visualizing the data
• Energy consumption and climate
• Comparing the U.S. to other countries
• References

It's an oft-quoted statistic: the United States is the world's largest energy consumer (for now, at least - China is forecast to overtake the U.S. in 2010). On a per-capita basis, U.S. energy use is double that of some European countries. Just where is all that energy going?

As it turns out, answering that question isn't difficult. The Energy Information Administration (EIA), an agency of the U.S. Department of Energy, was created expressly to track American energy statistics. A visitor to their website will find thousands of tables, graphs and reports covering various aspects of energy supply, prices and consumption patterns.

The goal of this article is to focus on the EIA's consumption data, distilling it into a few graphs that should give even the most rushed reader a basic understanding of the layout of the American energy landscape.

Before getting into the details, a quick explanation of energy sectors may be helpful.  When accounting for consumption, the EIA converts each energy expenditure to a common measurement unit (BTU's) and assigns it to one of four broad sectors, defined as follows:

• Transportation - any equipment used to move people or materials, via land, water, or air.
• Residential - private living quarters. Includes single-family homes, apartments and mobile homes. Hotels, dormitories and other commercial/institutional living quarters are not included.
• Commercial - service-providing facilities. Included are both government and private sector buildings, such as offices, stores, restaurants, churches, hospitals and libraries.
• Industrial - facilities used for producing and processing goods. This sector is dominated by manufacturing operations, but also includes nonmanufacturing enterprises such as agriculture and mining. Another separate category within this sector is feedstocks, which refers to fossil fuels used as raw materials for manufacturing (e.g. petrochemicals, asphalt, etc.).

Special consideration is made for the energy consumed by electrical power plants. Factoring in generation inefficiencies and transmission losses, only about a third of the fuel energy consumed by the average electricity producer is actually delivered to the end user. Rather than creating a separate consumption sector, the EIA adjusts end-use electricity consumption estimates to reflect the actual energy required to produce that power, not just the amount delivered. (For example, 1 kilowatt-hour delivered to a home air conditioner is counted as 3.18 kilowatt-hours of "primary energy" in the Residential sector's air conditioning category.)

gasoline 
Some people may be surprised that gasoline isn't a more dominant presence on the consumption map. While gasoline-powered transportation is certainly the chart's biggest single element, it only constitutes about 17% of national energy use. So why does gasoline get the lion's share of attention from the press?  Some likely explanations:

1. Gasoline is the energy source whose cost is most visible to Americans on a daily basis.  Other energy costs are seen only in monthly utility bills or as a hidden part of the prices of goods and services.
2. Oil and gas prices have fluctuated dramatically in the past two years.
3. Unlike natural gas, coal, nuclear and other fuel sources, the U.S. depends on foreign imports for most of its petroleum.  Gasoline supplies and prices are therefore more vulnerable to political instability abroad.

lighting 
In what has become an annual event, Earth Hour encourages people to turn off their lights for an hour to conserve energy and show they "care about the living planet".  This well-meaning effort to raise consumer awareness may actually be misleading people about where their homes' energy use lies.  As is apparent in the consumption map, lighting is actually the fourth-highest consumption area in a typical American home, behind heating, air conditioning, and water heating.  Targeting consumption in those areas is plainly as important as lighting (or more so), but it won't be as simple as flipping off a light switch.  Reductions in space conditioning and water heating expenditures require more basic sacrifices, such as spending money on weatherization, living with less comfortable thermostat/water-heater settings, or even moving to a smaller home.

electronics 
The residential "electronics" category, which includes computers and televisions, has grown steadily in recent years, but it is still a fairly minor piece of the energy picture. An energy-conscious consumer may look with suspicion at all the boxes plugged into their home entertainment system, but it's a safe bet that in most homes the majority of energy consumed somehow involves heating (furnaces, water heaters) or cooling (air conditioners, refrigerators).  Even the incandescent light bulb is essentially a heating device - the filament is heated to the point that it emits light as a by-product.

Global warming studies have suggested that the world's energy consumption (i.e. burning fossil fuels) is adversely affecting global climate. But the converse is also true: climate affects energy consumption.

This is readily seen in an EIA study that estimated household energy use on a state-by-state basis. The results of that study are mapped below:

Other factors may also be in play.  California, Arizona, and New Mexico are sufficiently arid to allow the use of evaporative air conditioners (aka "swamp coolers"), which consume up to 75% less electricity than refrigerated air conditioners.  It's also worth noting that the Pacific Coast and Southwest states have seen the largest population growth in the past few decades, thus their housing stock is probably newer and more energy-efficient than in the Midwest and Northeast.

Companion knol: U.S. Energy Sources