After the Net Impact Conference, I've been thinking about the idea of over consumption and how there are too many people for this planet to support. I started to do some research and found this interesting opinion article on world consumption by the guy who wrote “Guns, Germs and Steel”. It's in from the NYT and he's a UCLA faculty member so he must be right.
He writes that the one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32 (N. America, W. Europe, Japan, Australia). The other 5.5B people in developing countries have a relative consumption rate of below 32, mostly closer to 1. This means that I consume 32 times more "stuff" (e.g. use resources like oil and metals, and produce waste like plastics and greenhouse gases) than someone in, for example, in a village in Kenya.
Per capita consumption rates in China are 11x below ours, but (assuming consumption rates remain steady for everyone else), if they catch up to our consumption rate, the worldwide consumption of oil and metal would double. If you add India to the mix, consumption would triple. If the whole world were to catch up to our per capita consumption rate of 32, world consumption rates would increase 11-fold, which is the equivalent of the world's population increasing from 6.5B to 72B.
So what to do? Cut down. People think that cutting consumption contributes to a decrease in the standard of living but he argues that most of American consumption is wasteful and has little to do with quality of life. For example, Western Europeans consume about 1/2 as much oil per capita as we do but their standard of living is arguably higher in ever measure.
This is not a doomsday outlook; rather he shows that there is the possibility of sustainable fishing and forestry, among other things. And he raises Australia, and even China, as budding examples of environmental citizenship, with participation in Kyoto and other vigorous environmental policies.
It's not too late for us; let's hope January 20th brings something new.
2 comments:
thanks for sharing the article and thoughts.
on NPR this afternoon, they were talking about how one of the best ways to confront our current energy crisis is by conservation - i.e. reduce consumption. but it's true that this idea of reduction in consumption seems to go against the whole free market, trickle-down theory. no?
fascinating!
Pauline, since you're obviously intrigued by per capita consumption, I'd like to draw your attention to my book, "Five Short Blasts: A New Economic Theory Exposes The Fatal Flaw in Globalization and Its Consequences for America." To explain very briefly, my theory is that as population density rises beyond some optimum level, per capita consumption begins to decline. This occurs because, as people are forced to crowd together and conserve space, it becomes ever more impractical to own many products. Falling per capita consumption, in the face of rising productivity (per capita output, which always rises), inevitably yields rising unemployment and poverty.
In your post, you observed that per capita consumption in China is 11X lower than in the U.S. and worried what would happen if it rose to our level. It can't. It can rise some but cannot reach our level because their over-crowding make it impossible to use and store many products.
As one small example, consider the per capita consumption of dwelling space in Japan. The average Japanese home is less than 1/3 the size of the average American's, not because the Japanese like living in tiny, cramped quarters but because with ten times the population density of the U.S., there is no room for larger homes. This dramatically reduces their per capita consumption of everything required to build, furnish and maintain a home. The same is true of vehicle consumption in Japan, and a whole host of other products.
You also observed that oil consumption is much lower in Europe than in the U.S. Once again, with a population density about the same as China, most of Europe is a very crowded place, consequently with low per capita consumption.
High per capita consumption is not a bad thing. (I'm not defending wasteful consumption here. Obviously, that IS bad.) Rather, high per capita consumption is simply characteristic of a high standard of living.
But you're right to worry that the planet cannot sustain an American-style standard of living for everyone. I think the problem you're concerned with is total consumption, not per capita consumption. Since total consumption is simply total population multiplied by per capita consumption, then the choice is between a planet with a high population living at a very low standard of living, or a smaller population that allows everyone to enjoy a high standard of living. The latter CAN be achieved, over a long period of time, through ethical, non-coercive means.
If you’re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, I invite you to visit my web site at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com or my blog at PeteMurphy.wordpress.com where you can read the preface, join in my blog discussion and, of course, purchase the book if you like. (It's also available at Amazon.com.)
Pete Murphy
Author, "Five Short Blasts"
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