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Humanity’s insatiable appetite for energy created the climate-change crisis. The same appetite is now impelling us into an energy transition which carries its own tremendous costs. Switching from fossil fuels to renewables is an improvement, but it’s not nearly enough. It’s necessary, but not sufficient as a solution. To create a truly sustainable world for the eight billion human beings now living on it, we need to cut down the overall amount of energy we use—preferably without sacrificing the quality of life we enjoy in rich countries, while also raising everyone else up to a similar quality of life. 

That’s a tall order. 

It’s also entirely possible.

Take clothing. It’s an especially obvious example of a product most of us in the industrialized world could easily consume less of without making our lives any less pleasant. The wastefulness of the garment industry is staggering. Since the beginning of the century, global clothing production has roughly doubled, while the lifespan of each garment has been drastically shortened. With the rise of what is known as fast fashion, mind boggling numbers of garments are produced each year that are meant to be worn only a few times before getting tossed. “Maybe fashion marketing has convinced you that the industry is now mostly organic and circular, recycling discarded clothes into brand-new ones,” writes journalist J. B. MacKinnon in Sierra magazine. “In reality, six out of 10 articles of apparel end up in a garbage dump or trash incinerator each year.” 

On top of all the cotton and other materials that are wasted in the process, junking all these clothes also wastes huge amounts of energy. The mills and factories that produced them, the ships and trucks that transported them, and the stores that sold them all ate up energy. Manufacturing apparel generates as much as 8 percent of global carbon emissions. That’s more than most countries. Would your life be much worse if you bought fewer Tshirts? The planet would certainly be better off. 

Economists use the concept of embodied energy to measure the total amount of power used to create a given product. Whether that energy came from fossil fuels or renewables, it came at some cost in harm to the environment or human suffering, often both. Everything we use or consume has embodied energy—guitars, sofas, blenders, tires, toothpicks. That goes for “green” products made of natural materials like bamboo, too. It takes lots of energy (and water) to process bamboo into clothing, fabrics, or disposable plates, and more energy is required to ship them. Food also has embodied energy. Broccoli, chicken, rice—it all gets moved around by energy-burning vehicles, stored in energy-burning warehouses, and sold in energy-burning grocery stores. Not to mention the energy used to manufacture the farming equipment, fertilizer, and food-processing machinery needed to grow it and prep it for the market. To reduce your consumption of pretty much anything, then, is to reduce your consumption of energy. Which, in turn, means you are reducing the demand for fossil fuels and/or critical metals. 

There are many ways, besides buying fewer clothes, by which we could cut consumption and energy use and barely even notice. Turn down the heating or cooling systems in your home a few degrees. Waste less food. (Worldwide, about a fifth of all food winds up in the trash.) And, of course, repair and reuse digital devices. 

By far, however, the most effective single way that we as individuals can make a difference is this: Don’t buy a car. Not even an electric one.

Excerpted from Chp 11 of Power Metal: The Race for the Resources that will shape the future by Vince Beiser.