We should eat less meat. We should fly less. We should drive electric cars—and definitely not the SUVs Americans love.
The moral argument is clear and compelling: Historically, the U.S. is the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, and we owe it to our fellow Earth inhabitants to curb our carbon-heavy lifestyles first and most.
Morality isn’t an effective argument, however, judging by most people’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic as it enters its fourth year.
Even when the pandemic threat was most acute, the concept of wearing a mask for a few months to protect people’s own health and the health of those around them tore countries—especially the U.S.—apart.
With climate change, we’d have to ask people to sacrifice the way they live for the rest of their lives to address a problem that is not going to be solved in our lifetimes.
The energy crisis engulfing Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is also showing the limits of even relatively significant individual sacrifices during an extreme wartime scenario.
Responding to both high prices and government pleas to reduce usage, consumer behavior in the European Union may have saved between three and 10 billion cubic meters of natural gas last year, according to the International Energy Agency. At the high end of that range, the amount saved is still less than 3% of the bloc’s 2021 consumption.
The resistance to and limited effect of personal sacrifice are why I (sometimes begrudgingly) conclude we must look to capitalism and the innovation of new and better technologies to save us.
“A population as a whole doesn’t generally sacrifice its way to change,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, founder and director of Yale University’s Program on Climate Change Communication, and a senior research scientist at the Yale School of the Environment.
Consumer choices, influenced by government policy, product availability and costs, are integral to combating climate change.
The IEA estimates that around 55% of the cumulative emissions reductions in its scenario of achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 are linked to consumer choices, including purchasing electric cars or installing heat pumps.
Leiserowitz calls a small but influential segment of any population “early adopters.”
“These people can be motivated by something one person might call sacrifice, but they might call living out their values,” Leiserowitz said. “Early adopters are absolutely critical because they provide social proof that an innovation works and is desirable.”
This process is how we went from the Nissan Leaf targeting a small subset of “early adopters” with polar bear commercials in 2011 to the Ford F-150 Lightning promoting its towing capacity (among other non-climate features) in 2019.
In the vast gulf between the Leaf and electric F-150 consumers, Tesla proliferated.
“You don’t switch to make the world better, you switch because it’s a better car,” said Matt Eggers, a former vice president of North American sales at Tesla. “We focused on safety and the fact you don’t have to go to the gas station, and we didn’t talk about environmental benefits until the customer asked about it the second time.”
Eggers is now an investor at Breakthrough Energy Ventures, which is among the investors of Mill, along with other big-name venture capital firms like Prelude Ventures and Energy Impact Partners.
Mill will also likely be relying on so-called “early adopters” as its first customers.
Right now, food takes up more space in landfills than anything else and more than half of that waste comes from kitchens, Rogers wrote on LinkedIn when announcing Mill last week.
Households can avoid a half-ton of greenhouse gas emissions a year by signing up with Mill, according to a preliminary study the company conducted. That's the same as driving the distance between Miami and New York City in a typical gasoline-powered car, a Mill spokesperson said.
