[SustainableTompkins] Fwd: What's Your Consumption Factor?-Jared Diamond

[Joel and Sarah Gagnon]

Good point. When do we curtail the extravagance of the wealthy for the sake 
of the common good, or does freedom of choice trump all other values? The 
sense of entitlement got the upper class in trouble in France 
pre-revolution. When the few party at the expense of the many, the many can 
be expected to want to level the field.

I expect market forces to reduce consumption, but the reduction will be 
much more effective and dramatic for the poor than the rich. Transportation 
will become much more expensive as the cost of energy rises. For a poor 
person who needs a car, the cost of fuel is a much higher part of the 
operating cost than for a wealthy person. This is true because they drive 
very used vehicles that cost less to acquire, insure and register. They may 
cost more in repairs, but depreciation swamps that cost. The big expense is 
fuel, and that expense will rise rapidly. $10 a gallon gasoline will not be 
much of an inhibition for someone with a six figure income, but for many of 
us it will mean giving up driving around with a ton of metal wrapped around 
us. The same thing goes for air travel. Double the cost of fuel and the 
fares will increase about 40% -- enough to chop off the lower tier of 
fliers, perhaps, but not enough to curtail air travel the 80% or more 
needed to get it in line with CO2 reduction targets.

It isn't going to be easy to get consumption down, and I am skeptical about 
the effectiveness of voluntary efforts, important though they are. What 
about a carbon tax? That will get us to the target, and it may be more 
politically palatable to the wealthy, since it would preserve freedom of 
choice. I predict that as conspicuous consumption is concentrated ever more 
into the economic elite, they (and some of us are among them) will become 
ever-more attractive targets for resentment, and worse. Perhaps it will 
become necessary to cut a lower profile so as not to be seen as an outlier. 
I hope so.

Joel

At 03:06 PM 1/2/08 -0500, you wrote:
>Thank You for the article. I was able to get the link. Here it is Jeanne 
>http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/02/opinion/02diamond.html?_r=1&oref=slogin 
>Â Â  Btw I have a real problem...and this has come up many times so I'm 
>not just picking on this piece...with statements such as this  "A real 
>problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as 
>much as 32 Kenyans". Each of us?!  For some the figure would be 
>significantly less, for the very privileged probably 100 to 1000 times 
>more.  No, there is, obviously, a huge difference between wealthy and 
>poor even in the  "wealthy" countries. It bothers me intensely to see 
>people like those my agency serves, for instance, most of whom live on 
>incomes of $10,000/yr or less--some much less--lumped in as guilty 
>Americans with those who own 2 or more huge homes, private planes, yachts 
>etc. Or, if they don't own, travel, especially, by plane for pure 
>self-indulgence many times in one year.   In the book Climate Change 
>Begins at Home, British writer David Reay said the carbon footprint of one 
>transcontinental/oceanic flight was equal to that of a good sized car for 
>a year.  But until very recently, at least, it was the working commuter 
>who must drive to work bwecause s/he can't afford to live close by and 
>who drives for their livelihood, not personal or recreational indulgance, 
>who tended to be the most maligned. It should go without saying but most 
>poor & working  people have nil resources and little access to real 
>information, and would most likely not be able to convert to a life of 
>'radical simplicity.'Â  I once tried to express this to the late Rev 
>William Gibson of Eco-Justice/CRESP who summed it up most aptly, "There 
>is a drastic difference between poverty as simplicity and poverty as 
>misery." If the world weren't saddled with the super-extravangance of the 
>super-rich that alone would go a long way to reducing the global carbon 
>footprint and resource consumption.  For another, example, even the 
>difference between those who can afford (even if they must take a loan)Â 
>ridiculously excessive out of sight college tuitions, and the situation of 
>most working people is drastic enough to put them in very different 
>categories. This tendency to lump the poor or even the "average" working 
>person with the rich in the 'western' world in much of the 
>environmental/alternative thinking has disturbed me for decades.    
>  Jeanne   -----Original Message----- From: Thomas Shelley 
><tjs1 at cornell.edu> To: sustainabletompkins at lists.mutualaid.org Sent: Wed, 
>2 Jan 2008 1:49 pm Subject: [SustainableTompkins] Fwd: What's Your 
>Consumption Factor?-Jared Diamond Dear Friends--Forwarded from another 
>mailing list.  A well-written and nformative article, from today's New 
>York Times.   (Sorry, I couldn't find link to the article.)  Tom >January 
>2, 2008 Op-Ed Contributor What’s Your Consumption Factor? By JARED 
>DIAMOND Los Angeles TO mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 
>2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To 
>economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in 
>lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average 
>rates 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. That factor of 32 has big consequences. To understand 
>them, consider our concern with world population. 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. If most of the 
>world’s 6.5 billion people were in cold storage and not metabolizing or 
>consuming, they would create no resource problem. What really matters is 
>total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the 
>product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate. 
>The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a 
>relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 
>5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per 
>capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1. The population 
>especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain 
>fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are 
>growing rapidly, and they say that’s a big problem. Yes, it is a problem 
>for Kenya’s more than 30 million people, but it’s not a burden on the 
>whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita 
>rate is 1.) 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. 
>People in the third world are aware of this difference in per capita 
>consumption, although most of them couldn’t specify that it’s by a 
>factor of 32. When they believe their chances of catching up to be 
>hopeless, they sometimes get frustrated and angry, and some become 
>terrorists, or tolerate or support terrorists. Since Sept. 11, 2001, it 
>has become clear that the oceans that once protected the United States no 
>longer do so. There will be more terrorist attacks against us and Europe, 
>and perhaps against Japan and Australia, as long as that factorial 
>difference of 32 in consumption rates persists. People who consume little 
>want to enjoy the high-consumption lifestyle. Governments of developing 
>countries make an increase in living standards a primary goal of national 
>policy. And tens of millions of people in the developing world seek the 
>first-world lifestyle on their own, by emigrating, especially to the 
>United States and Western Europe, Japan and Australia. Each such transfer 
>of a person to a high-consumption country raises world consumption rates, 
>even though most immigrants don’t succeed immediately in multiplying 
>their consumption by 32. Among the developing countries that are seeking 
>to increase per capita consumption rates at home, China stands out. It has 
>the world’s fastest growing economy, and there are 1.3 billion Chinese, 
>four times the United States population. The world is already running out 
>of resources, and it will do so even sooner if China achieves 
>American-level consumption rates. Already, China is competing with us for 
>oil and metals on world markets. Per capita consumption rates in China are 
>still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our 
>level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else 
>happens to increase world consumption — that is, no otther country 
>increases its consumption, all national populations (including China’s) 
>remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China’s catching up alone would 
>roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 
>106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent. If 
>India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would 
>triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world 
>rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population 
>ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates). Some 
>optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. 
>But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 
>billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only 
>adopt good policies — for example,, institute honest government and a 
>free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world 
>lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having 
>difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one 
>billion people. We Americans may think of China’s growing consumption as 
>a problem. But the Chinese are only reaching for the consumption rate we 
>already have. To tell them not to try would be futile. The only approach 
>that China and other developing countries will accept is to aim to make 
>consumption rates and living standards more equal around the world. But 
>the world doesn’t have enough resources to allow for raising China’s 
>consumption rates, let alone those of the rest of the world, to our 
>levels. Does this mean we’re headed for disaster? No, we could have a 
>stable outcome in which all countries converge on consumption rates 
>considerably below the current highest levels. Americans might object: 
>there is no way we would sacrifice our living standards for the benefit of 
>people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there 
>willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our 
>present rates are unsustainable. Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, 
>however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption 
>rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or 
>nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in 
>Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of 
>living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, 
>health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after 
>retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the 
>arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline 
>contributes positively to any of those measures. Other aspects of our 
>consumption are wasteful, too. Most of the world’s fisheries are still 
>operated non-sustainably, and many have already collapsed or fallen to low 
>yields — even though we know how to manage them in such a way as to 
>preserve the environment and the fish supply. If we were to operate all 
>fisheries sustainably, we could extract fish from the oceans at maximum 
>historical rates and carry on indefinitely. The same is true of forests: 
>we already know how to log them sustainably, and if we did so worldwide, 
>we could extract enough timber to meet the world’s wood and paper needs. 
>Yet most forests are managed non-sustainably, with decreasing yields. Just 
>as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming 
>less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates 
>in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. 
>These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already 
>know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been 
>political will. Fortunately, in the last year there have been encouraging 
>signs. Australia held a recent election in which a large majority of 
>voters reversed the head-in-the-sand political course their government had 
>followed for a decade; the new government immediately supported the Kyoto 
>Protocol on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Also in the last year, 
>concern about climate change has increased greatly in the United States. 
>Even in China, vigorous arguments about environmental policy are taking 
>place, and public protests recently halted construction of a huge chemical 
>plant near the center of Xiamen. Hence I am cautiously optimistic. The 
>world has serious consumption problems, but we can solve them if we choose 
>to do so. Jared Diamond, a professor of geography at the University of 
>California, Los Angeles, is the author of “Collapse” and “Guns, 
>Germs and Steel.” Tom Shelley 18 E. Court St. thaca, NY 14850 07 
>342-0864 js1 at cornell.edu ttp://www.myspace.com/99319958 I thank you for 
>printing this e-mail only if it is necessary "Sustainable development is 
>development that meets the needs of the present ithout compromising the 
>ability of future generations to meet their own eeds." The World 
>Commission on Environment and Development, ro Harlem Brundtland ur Common 
>Future, Oxford University Press, 1987 MY NOTE:  Sustainable development 
>does not mean "sustainable growth" as rowth per se is not 
>sustainable.  And the term "sustainable" has to mean for a very long time" 
>(A. Bartlett).  ______________________________________________ SS, 
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