Making things more efficient is not enough; we have to ask ourselves what we really need.
There is lots of talk about efficiency, but nobody talks much about sufficiency. But in a discussion of the Green New Deal being proposed in Europe, Adrian Hiel writes Laundry, Sufficiency and the Climate Pact: Why a sufficiency-first approach to the Green Deal is needed for cities.
Whirlpool heat pump dryer/Promo image
He starts with the classic example of the clothes dryer, where people are paying more for more efficient and complex condensing and heat pump dryers that will save terawatts electricity, as much as it takes to run the Island of Malta. But Hiel notes:
Stockholm archives/Public DomainHiel then picks up on my favorite example of sufficiency:
Kris de Decker anticipated all this in his original article on sufficiency.
Now, while Europe is debating their Green New Deal, Hiel calls for them to consider the concept of Sufficiency.
the future we want/Screen capture
Sufficiency is a hard sell; The Future We Want is a big single-floor house covered in solar shingles with an a Powerwall and Tesla in the garage. I wrote in my first post about the problem of Sufficiency:
But we will never hit our carbon targets if we just keep trying to make stuff more efficient. We have to figure out what we really need, not what we really want. I agree with Adrian Hiel: “We must move beyond efficiency and to sufficiency. It is the only way of delivering the daunting cuts in emissions that we have to deliver.”
