McMartin: Sex & climate
Dirty (emissions) talk: SFU grad student’s study illustrates the climate-change conundrum in which we finds ourselves
Ihad not, until recently, ever felt the need to consider the effect of sex toys on climate change. Others, apparently, have. There exists an established industry of environmentally friendly sex products guaranteed to please not only you but Mother Earth.
(Go ahead. I’ll wait here while you Google “eco sex toys.”)
Vegan and organic lubricants. Latex condoms made from the sap of rubber trees on sustainably managed plantations. And, designed to soothe the environmentally aware conscience, silicone vibrators powered by solar energy or rechargeable batteries. Who knew?
Did I mention whips made from recycled rubber?
Some time ago, all of this came to the attention of a female graduate student of Mark Jaccard, professor of sustainable energy at Simon Fraser University. The student came across a book that, among other things, offered advice on how to “green” one’s sex life. It claimed ecosex products like those above cut down on pollution, the use of environmentally unfriendly energy and non-renewable resources.
Being an engineer, she decided to investigate the physics behind that claim. She took a long view, and found during the sexual revolution of the 1960s, consumption of sex-related materials, and thus the energy needed to produce and transport them, fell. Perhaps it was the demographics of the time, perhaps it was the advent of the Pill. But sexual preference studies at the time estimated, for instance, that only between one and five per cent of women used vibrators.
Today? Contemporary surveys put that number between 40 and 55 per cent. Perhaps, again, it might be demographics at work, or perhaps it’s the effect of Fifty Shades of Grey on a reading public. But the consumption of such products has increased enormously and, with it, an increase in eco-friendly sex products.
Here’s the environmental catch:
While there was an increase in the materials in sex products that were environmentally friendly, there was also an increase in the energy needed to supply the electricity to manufacture them and to transport them to market. More often than not, that increase in energy was not environmentally friendly. The latex condom may be organically and environmentally acceptable, but the diesel in the ocean-going freighter and the semi-trailer truck to get them to market was not.
Doing the math, Jaccard’s grad student concluded while some consumers changed their behaviour and switched to green products, the sheer volume of sex paraphernalia being sold cancelled out that beneficial change in behaviour. She concluded that even if everyone who bought sex toys bought ecofriendly products, it might offset energy and global-warming emission impacts by only five to 10 per cent.
In other words, changing one’s personal consumption behaviour would affect some environmental change, but not by much.
The grad student’s study was so entertaining, and so illustrative of the climate-change conundrum the world finds itself in, that Jaccard included it in a draft of his most recent book, Duelling Delusions.
In it, Jaccard challenges the beliefs not only of the business leaders and politicians who insist that accommodating climatechange initiatives is economically and socially unfeasible, but also the convictions of environmentalists who insist that to combat climate change we have to radically change our personal behaviours, and do without the technologies we have come to expect.
The gulf between the two camps, and their delusions, as Jaccard calls them, cancel each other out and produces, he believes, an immobilizing stalemate. It’s one inflexible doctrine against the other, both of which ignore the realities of human psychology and the modern world.
“I, we, have been hearing this for 25 years. I blame in part environmentalists (‘we can all change our behaviour’), in part politicians (‘I can only do so much with policy, the public needs to really make the change’), in part industry (‘we compete globally, so cannot do much, the public needs to change behaviour’).”
Instead, he said, we should admit to, and work with, the realities with which we live.
“We are a technological society, and our behaviour is such that we want status, we want entertainment, we want sex, we want mobility to see people and to converse, and we want comfort, and all those things we will keep wanting. They aren’t going to go away. And they involve using energy. But fortunately, it’s technologically quite easy to get those things without CO2 emissions.”
And that includes technologies much, much more basic to human life, Jaccard said, than sex toys.
More in my next column.