Forty years ago, underarm deodorant threatened life on earth.

If you are of a certain age you remember: The chlorofluorocarbons in spray-on deodorants rose into the stratosphere and ate away the ozone layer.

Scientists warned of disaster. The media covered the story widely. Manufacturers launched campaigns against the research, calling it “rubbish,” but public unease led to several governments to ban them in the 1970s, and then to a worldwide ban in the 1990s. The hole in the ozone layer, once the size of North America, has since stabilized. Scientists warn we may be into the second half of the century before it begins to shrink.

Question: How much of our personal behaviour changed since that ban?

The answer: Not at all. We still use deodorants. What changed was the technology. Manufacturers, forced to find alternatives, switched to roll-on sticks. And life, literally, in a global sense, went on.

Consumer history is rife with such examples. Product bans mandated by government include DDT, leaded gasoline, asbestos, mercury, sulphur dioxides, nitrous oxides — changes that reduced smog, acid rain, bird mortality, cancer rates. Those changes required absolutely no change to personal consumer behaviour — one could still drive a car on unleaded gas, after all — but they did require a change to our collective and political behaviour.

The same dynamic, said Mark Jaccard, professor of sustainability at Simon Fraser University, can be applied to climate change.

“The real behavioural change,” Jaccard said, “is that you have to change your behaviour as a citizen, and make sure you elect people who implement policies that are the compulsory kind that will enforce technological change in as gentle and flexible a way that is possible, but that probably won’t reduce energy consumption very much.” (Emphasis mine.)

It’s a blasphemous view in many environmental camps, which preach the gospel that consumers must change their personal behaviours and must reduce their energy use.

But that, Jaccard said, got us nowhere. It produced little change to climate change. The environmentally-friendly practices individuals may have decided to follow personally — such as taking public transit or eating a locavore diet — often had only incremental effect or no effect at all. All those individual lifestyle choices lacked the critical mass to cause societal change.

“In the ’70s and ’80s, I was an advocate of behavioural change and energy efficiency. And, to a great extent, I lived that life. And for 25 years, I haven’t had a car or a parking pass at SFU. I’ve cycled up there or bused up there.

“But whenever my students say ‘We’re all going to switch to transit,’ I’ll tell them the story of the guy who threw up on me on the bus, or the person who helped me get the flu, or who was yakking on their cellphone.

“And I’ll say, ‘People let’s get real. Let’s get real about why people drive their cars. People drive their cars because cars are fantastic! They’re personal mobility devices; you get privacy; you can carry stuff.’”