Synopsis

For the Service sector the most important impacts of technological change are changes in how individuals use their time – their “time budgets” – and changes in consumer expenditures. Longer life expectancies, shorter working hours, and vastly rising incomes have changed time budgets and expenditure patterns in ways that have significant environmental impacts. A principal example is increased personal mobility – a consumer demand that appears far from satiated. Increased demands for ever more personal mobility have been largely met by motorized vehicles. Thus emissions from transportation, along with a whole variety of other environmental impacts, have grown substantially. Fortunately, projecting future transportation growth from historical innovation diffusion patterns indicates lower environmental impacts than are suggested by traditional linear extrapolations, assuming business-as-usual. Yet, the growth of the Service economy and the consumer society is such that these could soon rival agriculture and industry as major sources of global change. Thus individual lifestyle decisions, particularly decisions about which artifacts are used and how, become ever more important in determining the type and scale of environmental impacts. One important example described in more detail is that of food. With rising incomes food demands become increasingly saturated. In the industrialized countries, further agricultural productivity increases from biological and mechanical innovations can then be translated into actual absolute reductions in agricultural land use, even while production and exports continue to increase.