Introduction
Humanity’s evolution, development, and survival have always been possible due to the improved utilisation and interaction of its immediate human and non-human environments, which set it apart from other species. Humanity’s ingenuity and capacity to domesticate plants and animals improved their general well-being and health, enabling population growth and human species migration across most of the earth’s geographical spaces (Durante and Griskevicius, 2016). With increased population and advancement, humanity learned how to make use of the majority, if not all, of the tangible and intangible matter that exists. This acquisition and utilisation of the components of the environment, both physical and nonphysical, is what is referred to as consumption. With the world’s finite resources and humanity’s need for continuous existence, there is a concern about our nature of consumption and discourses on whether we consume too much.
Many scholarly discussions accentuate the trend that the term ‘overconsumption’ is used in academic discourses without a proper definition, making it hard to pin a single definition that can be used to measure consumption (Evans, 2018). However, we can borrow some empirical approaches to measure consumption by calculating the consequences of consumption on our immediate environment and its effect on our optimum conditions of living, including our health, mobility and other basic needs that we need for survival (Middlemiss, 2018, pp.20–27). This means that the amount of waste, inconveniences in mobility, specific health issues and the nature of our basic needs would indicate whether we are under-consuming, at optimum consumption or overconsuming. The criteria primarily apply to tangible goods and do not provide a confident calculation when discussing the consumption of services unless the specific service is wholly dependent on utilising a physical resource. This essay discusses consumption by analysing the evolution of road transport and its dependence on fossil fuels.
‘Energy-sed’ Development and Globalisation
The second industrial revolution, which was characterised by the replacement of steam engines with combustion engines and electricity powered by carbon-based oil, gas and coal, ushered in a new industrialised era that the world’s economies have not fully moved away from since the beginning of the 20th century (Xu, David and Kim, 2018; Abas, Kalair and Khan, 2015). The revolutionary industrialisation processes were seen through economic and technological advancements, allowing for the exploitation of many other resources around the world. The availability and manipulation of oil and electricity influenced economies, affecting people’s standards of life and instigating the current need for continuous economic growth (Mohajan, 2019). This economic growth is still based on industrialisation and other practices heavily reliant on energy to run machines. The value of energy, amplified by its effects in the Industrial Revolution, rendered fossil fuel sources essential commodities. Within the same period, globalisation took place, and the advancement in the transport industry supported the interconnectedness of people, increasing access to different resources and creating demand for new goods (Zou et al., 2016). The availability of new goods and the desire to improve living standards are attributed as drivers of consumerism behaviour. There has been further development of newer and complementary energy sources to fossil fuels. However, a century later, fossil fuels are still heavily exploited and utilised all over the world and are the leading energy source in the transport industry (Browne, O’Mahony and Caulfield, 2012).
Transport and mobility have been critical catalysts of growth in all forms of economies. It allows for the sourcing of raw materials, distribution of products and the continuity of a working economy. It is stated that ‘transportation networks are at the heart of the supply chain and are the foundation of a country’s economy” (Fan et al., 2018). All the industries and livelihoods in both ‘developed’ and ‘developing economies’ are dependent on transport, whether it is the transportation of goods or day to day mobility of the population. The transport industry’s interconnectedness and growth can be deemed a necessary evil due to its economic value. Its vilification as an emission hotspot can be countered by the inability of the earth’s carbon system to keep up with the carbon removal from the atmosphere. However, with land consumption and change in land use, plastic waste choking carbon reservoirs and oceans, and the use of pesticides in agriculture affecting the soil’s capacity for carbon sequestration, it can be suggested that the carbon from the transport industry would have been minimal if the carbon cycle system was entirely intact. This, however, differs from the case as non-fossil-based means of transport exist, and the most common transport practices are outrageously wasteful, underscoring the over-consumptive nature of the transport industry. The wasteful and consumptive nature of the transport industry is mainly seen through the growing sales of private vehicles, the presence of traffic congestion in numerous cities, and the failure of governments and businesses to invest in less-emitting public means of transport.
Cutting Emissions, Maintaining Consumption?
Scientists and scholars claim that the global temperatures, the distribution and capacity of rainfall, the diversity of biodiversity species, the composition of the earth’s atmosphere and other natural characteristics of the earth have been changing since the perceived start of the Anthropocene (Hamilton, Bonneuil and Gemenne, 2015, pp.21–23). The changes, especially in the composition of the atmosphere, were acknowledged in the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (1992), calling for the world nations to cut the emission of greenhouse gases. The focus on fossil fuels as the main source of greenhouse gas is rampant since the United Nations estimates that up to 75% of the total greenhouse gas emissions are all based on oil, coal and gas, and a third of this is from the transport industry. Intrinsically, humans are an adaptive species and, in the past, have adapted to new forms of living and new environments and even modified the environments to meet their needs. The ongoing atmospheric fallout is not planned and controlled, but rather, an unnatural reaction of the composition of the earth as a result of the continuous dependency on fossil fuels and other resources at a rate that exceeds the earth’s regeneration process and overwhelms the carbon cycle (Vasylieva et al., 2019). The rising acknowledgement that the atmospheric impacts of the use of fossil are now reflected in policies that are meant to reduce fuel-intensive transport systems, technological advancements aimed to promote efficiency and reduce dependency on fossil fuels, innovations and research in the use of biofuels and increased campaigns on the adaption of renewable sources of energy. The presence of these changes does not necessarily mean that the use of fossil fuels is actively limited in the transport industry.
A logical solution would be actively limiting their use, radical replacement of the energy source with cleaner sources, and, ideally, phasing out combustion engines entirely. The 2015 Paris Agreement by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) saw the United Nations member states pledging, through the legally binding document, that they will reduce their emissions. However, unexploited reserves of fossil fuels exist, and the growing energy demand has seen the rise of fossil fuel use, again, now in even larger quantities (Johnsson, Kjärstad and Rootzén, 2018). With the world’s population on the rise, the general use of resources is expected to increase. The increased demand and use of fossil fuels are, however, not attributed to population growth but rather social behaviours, economic capacities, the continuous aspect of economic development, and the availability of fuel reserves (Jackson et al. 2019). The paper states that more than half of the global transport emissions from oil and natural gas are from the United States, China, and the European Union. According to the world population data from the World Bank, the region comprises approximately 25% of the world’s population, and its population growth rate in the last several decades has been minimal compared to Africa, Latin America, and other Asian regions.
Recently, there have been technological developments in restructuring the energy source used in the transport industry. An example would be in road transport, replacing combustion vehicles with electric, thus cutting the entire carbon emission of the vehicle in the utilisation stage of its lifecycle. As much as it is proven that the use of alternative green and renewable fuels reduces the use of fossil fuels, the measure of the change is built based on alternative consumption – the purchase of electric vehicles. The imperative need for introducing and improving the production of electric vehicles was to curb the surge of dependence on fossil fuels and cut down emission rates. A review of papers on the adoption and development of electric vehicles primarily focuses on the comparison of the number of sales of electric vehicles (Coffman, Bernstein and Wee, 2016; Kumar and Alok, 2020; Egbue and Long, 2012), while the carbon emission in the transport industry, continues to rise, though at a slower rate than before. The replacement of fossil fuels suggests that emissions from fossil fuels can be reduced. However, the production and purchase of vehicles would continue to grow, depicting the insatiable need for product consumption.
While the electrification of cars is taken as a solution to the emission of greenhouse gases, the impacts of the production process are deliberately ignored. The key components used for energy storage are developed from minerals, the majority of which require extreme extractivism to compete with the production of combustion engine vehicles (Liu et al., 2022). This negates the ideal purpose of the production of electric vehicles: sustainability.
The acquisition of vehicles, which is a consumptive behaviour, creates a vicious cycle where too many fossil fuel-powered vehicles exist or are replaced by electric cars that are also heavily dependent on extractivism. With this tendency to change the energy source – from fossil fuel to electricity – but maintain the product (vehicles), the root cause of the emission problem remains unaddressed.
Radical Changes
Protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, mobility is a right that everyone is entitled to. It is a core concept and nature of humanity, and technological innovations will always work towards improving the industry. Fan et al. (2018) mentioned that mobility is a pillar in sustaining economic growth and needs to be improved to reduce its environmental impact. Even with the transition to electrified vehicles, the calculation of cumulative emissions by light and freight vehicles shows that the levels are constantly on the rise (Buberger et al., 2022). This shows that even with the increase in sales of electric vehicles, the sale of combustion engine vehicles is still active and therefore surges the ones already on the roads. Electric vehicles are entering the roads, but they are not replacing the ones that were already there; they are just reducing the number of new polluting vehicles entering the roads. The acquisition of vehicles remains a constant, with a minimal change in their energy sources.
A radical change in transport policies and their implementation might be a good solution to transport emissions. Using the United Kingdom as an example, data from the Office of National Statistics shows that the number of cars in the last twenty-five years rose by more than 40% compared to the population growth in the last fifty years, which is below 20%. While the sheer individual numbers still have fewer vehicles than the population, the comparison shows the reduced ratio of individuals to a vehicle. Based on the trend, the ratio is more likely to increase, with more people buying vehicles. Even with the increasing sales of electric vehicles, the emission that occurs in producing car parts and their assembly is neglected, and the desired electrical energy is also heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Discussing the radical change in policy and behaviours to deal with environmental changes, Nyborg (2020) discusses the need to use social inputs and behavioural changes to coordinate conformity in adopting sustainable behaviours. The same ideologies can be implemented and supported through the transport industry: financing mass transport, discouraging purchases of individual vehicles, and providing subsidies for mass transport while placing barriers that inconvenience the use of individual vehicles. While supporting sustainable approaches while deliberately obstructing unsustainable behaviour would involve suppressing the setup of free markets, the approach would directly prevent the increased use of individual vehicles, limit their sales and use, and support cleaner and non-pollutive transport systems.
Conclusion
The solutions for the transport practices should not be built on the same frameworks that exacerbated consumption in the first place, which is the partial replacement of minor aspects of resource-hungry or wasteful parts of a system. Instead, it should be curated as a whole replacement of systems. The normalisation of wasteful and consumptive privileges and their adoption as parts of freedom and rights are some of the reasons why the paradigm shift is idealistic and hard to replace. Examples would be the rights of a free market, freedom of movement and property rights. While being necessary and serving as parts of the cornerstone of human development, left unchecked, free markets fueled industrialisation. They promoted extreme production and acquisitions, influencing human behaviour and increasing individual and collective consumerism (Panizzut et al., 2021). The same practice can be witnessed in the right to own property, where there are few to no limitations on the ownership quantity, allowing for extreme accumulation, thus increasing production and acquisition. A holistic approach would consider the rights, freedom, and safety of humans, as well as the safety of the ecosystem and direct environments that allow for the continuous existence of humans, especially the parts of the ecosystem that directly influence the well-being of communities at large. Limits create room for a balanced system, reduce inequity, and ensure that the people access their individual freedom and rights while not restricting the collective prosperity of a society.
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