Another elephant in the room? how energy-intensive lifestyles may undermine the fight against climate change

Abstract Climate change represents a major threat to the world, yet policy responses to it have been tepid and ineffective. Recent dire warnings and more frequent climate-related extreme weather events have stirred greater interest in more assertive responses, mostly around two beloved “solutions or policy areas”—transitioning to renewable energy and energy efficiency improvement. This study investigates whether these solutions lessen carbon emissions. More crucially, it scrutinizes whether they are resilient against consumptive lifestyles, an elephant in the room often ignored by governmental decision-makers. Dynamic fixed effects modeling of cross-national longitudinal data shows renewable energies offer opportunities for reducing carbon emissions, but energy intensity prevents us from realizing their full environmental benefits. We find evidence in our analysis that energy intensity as well as other socioeconomic factors are suppressing the influence of renewable energies on carbon emissions. The analysis also shows that the relationship between national energy-intensity, which taps inefficiency, and carbon emissions is moderated by energy-intensive lifestyles (energy use per capita). This finding suggests reducing energy intensity may offer some reductions in carbon emissions, but such efforts must be paired with reductions in energy consumption per capita.