Today my current RSS reader of choice alerted me to an article at one of my favorite publications, the Christian Science Monitor. The title of the article says it all:

“Top five greenest nations on the planet.”

Naturally, whenever you read something like that, your bullshit detector should be beeping and flashing, because apart from the fact that such a thing is essentially impossible to rank, generally the media will take something like a study, over-simplify it in order to break something complex down into bite-sized chunks that the masses can easily digest, and then declare it in such a way that it sounds like “fact”.

I checked out the article, linked through to the study itself, conducted by the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy. Called the 2010 Environmental Performance Index, it left me troubled by one thing: the study almost completely ignored what is perhaps the biggest contributing factor to “greenness”: consumption.

Greenpeace and Apple and Missing the Point

A few years back, Greenpeace (an organization which as far as I can tell is more interested in publicity stunts and gimmickry than providing constructive scientific recommendations) decided to garner media attention in the technology world with a largely spurious study condemning Apple for the un-greenness of its products.

credit: justHugo @ flickr

Essentially what happened is that Greenpeace regurgitated press releases from key companies (HP, among others) about future environmentally conscious policies, and compared it to Apple’s relative silence on the issue, thus decrying Apple as a blight on the environment. Subsequent tear-downs of products by Greenpeace itself found that Apple’s products were no more or less harmful to the environment than any of their competitors, and that Apple had been in compliance with E.U. standards (the vanguard at the time). This raised a stink among people on both sides, and it did eventually spur Apple to be more public about their environmental efforts.

When Apple did become more public, they pointed out in so many words how Greenpeace, in focusing purely on product materials and recycling, was missing the point entirely (which is assessing true ecological impact). Apple did the calculations and realized that the biggest contributor to its total carbon impact wasn’t the products themselves, but rather their usage.

This is an important distinction, and one which Apple now makes clear on a website dedicated to the issue, revealing that product usage represents more than 50% of the company’s total carbon footprint.

Whither Consumption?

All of this brings me back to the 2010 Environmental Performance Index. You can read the study for yourself, but essentially its focus is on the environmental policies inside each country coupled with measurements (as best as they can get) of water quality, air quality, and more, both for human usage and for the rest of the ecology. It’s an admirable effort, and a necessary one, and as the authors admit, it’s fraught with all kinds of inaccuracy, given that the sources of the data are disparate and inconsistent.

But my beef with the study isn’t that inaccuracy (which I feel is unavoidable given today’s measurements); rather, I take issue with the methodology. In short, I do not see how consumption can be overlooked as a contributing factor when one considers the ecological impact of a particular country.

We are all sharing the planet, so the goal here ought to be to assess impact on the Earth as a whole, not just within borders. Allow me to explain.

credit: ChrisGoldNY @ flickr

The #1 country on the list is Iceland, and they ought to be commended for policies furthering the usage of renewable energy (even though they’re lucky enough to be sitting on the most convenient source of geothermal energy in the world), but Iceland is also a country that imports nearly everything it consumes (save for fish).

This is an important distinction. Icelandic consumers (like consumers in many other countries) demand and purchase automobiles, food products, clothing, and other goods that get shipped to Iceland from elsewhere. Making all those things contributes to some other country’s negative score in a list like this, because they have to absorb the pollution hit from manufacturing, even though it’s Icelandic consumers who are using the items the pollution existed for in the first place. Meanwhile, Iceland, in the media, will be portrayed as a clean, environmentally-conscious place.

Bear in mind this is just an example (perhaps if consumption were included, Iceland would still be #1), but to ignore this very important part of the equation is, to me, academically irresponsible, and reeks of an attempt to raise the standing of Western countries (the biggest consumers) in these rankings at the expense of developing countries (the primary suppliers and manufacturers).

Take China as an example. Nowadays, China manufactures nearly everything (yes, that is hyperbole, but allow me some latitude for levity). Do this as an exercise: walk through a Wal-Mart in the United States and pick up products at random and take note of what percentage are manufactured in China. All those metal, plastic and fabric devices, all manufactured by processes that spew harmful gases into the atmosphere, and according to this Yale study, China takes the hit for it, even though none of those products are made for the Chinese market. It’s Americans who are buying them; shouldn’t it be them who take responsibility for the ecological impact?

credit: Jeff Karpala @ flickr

I do realize that such things are incredibly hard to track, measure, and report upon, but this is an (apparently) high profile and well-funded study at an Ivy League university (Yale), and with their collective brainpower, they ought to be able to do better than this. A good place to start might be to assess impact of heavy industry against worldwide export patterns (a simplified example: if China’s manufacturing sector accounts for X units of greenhouse gas emissions, and 25% of their exports are destined for the E.U., then by extension that 25% ought to be foisted onto the shoulders of the European population, not China’s).

Then again, Yale’s study gives me a good idea: if I dump all my trash onto my neighbor’s property and then clean up my own, I can proclaim to the neighborhood how clean my house is, while outing him for how much of a cesspool his is. Brilliant!

* I should note: one area of consumption Yale’s study does take into account is energy consumption, but there was no reference I could find to usage of products, which probably account for a very large amount of pollution. And energy, like pollution, may well have a significant component that only exists because the country is building goods for export.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 5:20 and is filed under Miscellany. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.