It’s culture more than attitude that emits carbon

In Australia, America and Canada we have big spaces, big houses, longer commutes, big fridges, and more than one, clothes dryers etc.  Per capita personal greenhouse gas emissions are three to four times as high as in many European countries.

And the difference is cultural.  If you live in a nice apartment in Rome, your carbon footprint effortlessly plummets. The classy apartment in Rome doesn’t have a clothes dryer, an air conditioner, microwave or limitless hot water. The fridge is tiny. The average car is small. The Fiat 500 gets twice as much gas mileage as any hybrid SUV. And it’s not considered suffering.

To live without an air conditioner in Adelaide, Australia feels like a sacrifice.  To do so in Rome where buildings have thick walls and shutters to help you cope with the heat is normal.  In Europe even apartments have drying racks and indoor or balcony clothes lines.
When I lived in an apartment in Adelaide the strata rules forbad hanging washing outside on the balcony where it was visible.  I used an airing rack and installed two long rods in the laundry to hang sheets.

In many European countries, space has always been short and people are forced to be more aware of humans’ negative effects on the planet.  In small countries like the Netherlands, there are no distant landfills because you tend to run into the next city or town.

Also, the centuries-old streets in London or Barcelona or Rome simply can’t accommodate much traffic and people have learned to live without it and many never learn to drive. In contrast, most Australian cities were designed for people with vehicles.

In Europe there is no concept that people have a right to produce huge amounts of waste nor that the Council has a duty to remove it.  Garbage collection is less frequent and less is collected.  The result is that they naturally try to generate less of it — food comes with no packaging, televisions leave naked from the store.

In Germany, there are blocks of townhouses that are “passive” houses — homes so efficient they do not need to be heated. And an upscale suburb that had banned cars from its streets; you could own a car, but it had to be kept in a garage at the edge of town where parking spaces cost over $30,000 a year, meaning that few people owned cars and those who did rarely used them for small daily tasks like shopping.

No country is uniformly environmentally conscious.  In Italy people are very agitated about genetically modified food but they routinely throw litter out of cars.  In Germany residents are comfortable in smaller energy efficient homes but they still love cars with gas-guzzling engines and driving fast on the autobahn.

Around the whole world we need to make some shifts in lifestyle but most changes are simply about habits, not about losing comfort or convenience.

Jean Cannon

Jean is an award winning consultant and trainer helping people and businesses around the world who want greater efficiency and reduced stress!

If you sometimes need to deal with staff errors and what is even worse, covered up errors that come back to bite, you are riding a time bomb and Jean will help you defuse it. Plus get you real recognition from markets and regulators.

The good news is that this is now available as online training so you only need to commit to one hour per week and no travel. You can even Do-It-Yourself! .

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This entry was posted on Monday, December 7th, 2009 at 4:32 am and is filed under Global Warming, Climate Change & Energy. 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.