The Impact of Lifestyle on Energy Use and CO2 Emission

The Impact of Lifestyle on Energy Use and CO₂ Emission

Yi Ming Wei et al (2005), carried out a research to determine the impact of life style on energy use and its related carbon emission. They came up with some interesting findings. They were able to establish the existence of a relationship between energy consumption and carbon emission, and that this relationship is greatly in influenced by lifestyle.

Consumers may directly or indirectly use energy. Direct usages include such use as domestic electricity supply, gas/coal for space heating during winter and Air Condition for home cooling during summer. While indirect energy usage has to do with their buying of consumer goods, products of industrial process with great energy input.

The writers reckoned that China is an economy in transition, and urbanization means more and more rural residence migrating to urban regions, and because of economic growth, urban residence consumption of home appliances increase and places greater demand on energy which in turn leads to greater CO₂ emission.

Taking a critical look at the impact of urban and rural residence lifestyle on energy use and carbon emission, the writers posits the following findings with policy implication, focusing on 2002:

§  For the urban residence, the indirect impact of energy use and carbon emission was higher than the direct impact; the indirect impact being 2.44 time that of direct impact. The policy significance of this is that the Chinese government should compel or encourage the urban residence to imbibe the following habits: 1) Reduce per capital energy use for heating/cooling. 2) The government should institute energy conservation standard for home appliances. 3) The government should go into full scale production of green food.

§  Meanwhile, for the rural dwellers, their direct energy use is higher than that of indirect (Yi Ming Wei et al., 2002), their direct energy use was 1.86 time that of the indirect. The policy implications here are: 1). Government should focus on developing clean energy generation technology in rural residence. 2). Reduce the use of motorcycle as source of transportation as its energy-intensive. 3). Rural residence should use gas for home heating rather than coal with high CO2 coefficient.