Reihan Salam watches Discovery’s new Planet Green channel and observes a fundamental problem with green consumerism. For all the current appeal of green consumer technology – it offers the opportunity to save the planet by buying more trendy stuff – this approach is less carbon friendly than actually giving stuff up and living more modestly. If you must drive, don’t buy a new Prius – better to get a small, old used car (though his Prius-bashing is an exaggeration). Don’t outfit your detached, single family home with solar panels – live, as densely and communally as possible, near an urban center. In other words, it’s not merely the way people live now, but the whole social trajectory of American life during the postwar period, the idea of ever-bigger and better cars and homes as status symbols, that’s the problem. The carbon footprint is a status footprint. And it will be hard to shrink using technology that appeals to the same impulses that gave us sprawl and SUVs in the first place.

On the other hand, this argument is also constructed a bit deceptively. Even though using green consumer items may in the short term amount to tooling around the margins of the problem, there’s little evidence that they, in themselves, do more harm than good. Or, for that matter, that starting out this way can’t lead to bigger, more fundamental choices down the line. Salam’s conclusion similarly presents a false choice between our current profligacy and unappealing forms of carbon-friendliness:

No single policy lever can reverse this trend. Steeper progressive taxes might help, curtailing the mortgage interest deduction would definitely help, but there’s no silver bullet. The only lasting solution is for individual families to take it upon themselves to drop out of the positional arms race, to make do with better and with less.

Yes, but any effective approach to limiting carbon emissions will employ not a single policy lever, but many. In addition to government working to change incentives on how and where people live, changes in objective circumstances – e.g., rising fuel prices – will also push both technology and personal choices in more carbon-friendly directions. So the notion that we will all have to live huddled in shabby, multi-family flats while driving 15-year-old Ford Fiestas around isn’t any clearer a picture of the future than you’ll get watching Planet Green.