Green Stats: 32
by Collin Dunn, Corvallis, OR, USA on 01. 3.08
Oliver Munday for the New York Times
32 -- the average rate of higher consumption in the first world, when compared to the developing world. The average rate at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world.
And, according to Jared Diamond's piece in the New York Times, "that factor of 32 has big consequences. Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce."
So, as the world's population continues to grow at an exponential rate, it isn't so much all the people that are necessarily the problem, but their consumption patterns. To wit: Kenya's population -- about 30 million and growing fast -- might be a problem, but their consumption factor is 1, compared to the aforementioned 32 here in the States. As such, "A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does."
As you can surmise, were the rest of the world, perhaps most especially a country like China, catch up to our consumption patterns (currently, per capita consumption in China is about 11 times lower than the US) it wouldn't be pretty. So, please, repeat after TreeHugger: less is more, less is more ...
Yeah but I'm 32 times happier than the average Kenyan, and 11 times happier than most Chinese.
No argument with the point, although do keep in mind that the population growth in the 'developed nations' is nearly flat, whereas in the 'developing nations' it is growing rapidly. It is safe to assume that once China and other countries reaches our '32' level, that their population will level off.
So, the world population growth is not the problem. The problem is that there are already too many of us that want to live like Americans. We need to change how Americans (and the rest of the developed world) lives, and then (hopefully) this will not be a problem anymore.
interesting post....
MY - are you saying that waste = happiness? Because in the article it argues that this is far from the truth. The standard of living in many European countries and Japan better than that in the US, and their consumption rate is lower than the US's.
Level of consumption is probably a lot like income, once you reach a certain point, that extra income doesn't really add any extra happiness. Profligate waste doesn't bring us happiness, but certain types of consumption certainly do.
What number, if not 32, would be a sustainable level of consumption for the developed world? Is it 10? If everyone consumed at that rate, this would mean that total global consumption at today's levels would be still very much higher than it is today.
This line of reasoning leads to this conclusion: consuming resources unsustainably is only made possible by the gross poverty and "underconsumption" by much of the developing world. In order for us to be rich, they have to be poor. Otherwise we would simply run out of resources.
So I guess the choice is sustainability or exploitation.
'This line of reasoning leads to this conclusion: consuming resources unsustainably is only made possible by the gross poverty and "underconsumption" by much of the developing world. In order for us to be rich, they have to be poor. Otherwise we would simply run out of resources.'
---Direct, succinct, and 100% accurate.