Quel est votre indice de consommation?
Posté par bedoin le janvier 11, 2008
What’s Your Consumption Factor?
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 other
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.
Angeles, is the author of “Collapse” and “Guns, Germs and Steel.”
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