Why live like the Japanese?

How about those Japanese? They use a lot less energy than we do here in North America. Ten years ago their government decided to tax energy use and that tax effectively doubled the price of energy in Japan. Now why did they go and do a  thing like that? That means they slowed their economy down in order to conserve energy. Now ten years later the Japanese use much less energy. They have sophisticated appliances that are energy efficient. They don't use central heating, they live in smaller houses and in the winter they only heat a few rooms. They have smaller cars and they use public transit more.
I don't get it.  Here in Canada we live in a fool's paradise with plenty of cheap energy. We know we'll never run out of oil, we've got the Alberta tar sands, the dirtiest oil on the planet.

Those Japanese are so puritan, they actually save money. They don't spend it all on big cars and big homes. Where are their priorities? We're spending more money than we have, but so what - the banks can always create more money as we go. Why not live for today, instead of worrying about things that will only harm us tomorrow - like climate change?

Here in North America we think we are so much more lucky than the Japanese. Because we believe that we, in effect, live in a perpetual motion economy. The more energy we consume the more it stimulates economic growth. As long as we keep consuming we think we can't lose. What a great deal! And we think that it's always going to be like that.  After all, it's been like that up till now.  So why would it change?
How could we possibly run out of cheap oil?

 
With cheap energy we think that we can keep polluting indefinitely.  We just ignore how it's leading to environmental destruction and global warming.  Out of sight, out of mind, for now.  But not for Los Angeles, or Lytton, or Redding. We somehow imagine that if we lose our forests we can plant grain and raise beef cattle. If we overfish the oceans we can farm fish in net pens.  We think that as long as energy is cheap anything is possible.We act as if  it will always be cheap. After all, it has been cheap for the last two hundred years, so why would it change now?

So we say "Don't bother conserving energy."  We think that we will be able to enjoy the luxuries of big cars and lavish lifestyles for the forseeable future.  It seems that by living comfortably you're helping the economy grow.  How much are they really helping the environment by driving small cars or riding bicycles or recycling? It can't be a benefit to them to live less comfortably so they must be doing it out of some misguided principles. Why do things in order to benefit an abstraction, like the "environment" when you can so clearly help yourself by consuming more? That's our philosophy because we live in North America with its wide open spaces.  So we reason to ourselves.  But the thing about the Japanese is that they have been living on an Island for thousands of years and they know all about sharing a small space with a large population and when one person pollutes the air, everyone else has to breathe it.  And the Japanese value nature because they know it's finite, and to keep damaging it will eventually come around to harm us.

It would do us good to realize that we live in a situation that is not far from what the Japanese are living in today.  The world is finite, economic growth cannot continue forever, because resources are not infinite.  Our consumption of energy is not reflecting the costs of extracting and consuming that energy - the costs in terms of damage to our lungs, to our crops and forests from drought, wildfires, and high temperatures.  And pretending that we can defer these costs indefinitely is living in a fool's paradise.