Think Global Warming is real? Think it may be the biggest problem facing humankind today? Worried about Peak Oil and $100 a barrel oil? Do you think we may be able to find answers in time, if we build enough wind turbines, put up solar panels, grow enough biofuel? I've got bad news - it's a much bigger problem than many people realize. Why? Jared Diamond lays it out today in a NY Time Op Ed.
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.
(emphasis added)
Jared Diamond's name should not be unfamiliar to Kos readers. Among other things he's the author of "Collapse - How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed." Michael J. Kavanagh at Grist summarizes Diamond's thesis thusly:
Through a grab bag of case studies that range from the Mayan Empire to modern China, Diamond tries to distill a unified theory about why societies fail or succeed. He identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners (that is, alternative sources of essential goods), environmental problems, and, finally, a society's response to its environmental problems. The first four may or may not prove significant in each society's demise, Diamond claims, but the fifth always does. The salient point, of course, is that a society's response to environmental problems is completely within its control, which is not always true of the other factors. In other words, as his subtitle puts it, a society can "choose to fail."
In today's NY Times Op Ed, Diamond looks at a factor behind Global Warming that doesn't get addressed very often - how it is driven by consumption, and how that consumption is not parceled out evenly across the globe.
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.
Think about that for a moment. It's not just a carbon footprint; it's all kinds of natural resources. The U.S. is only now starting to think seriously about cutting back on CO2 emissions and switching to alternative sources of energy. What Diamond reminds us is that our life style has a much larger cumulative impact on the planet than just carbon - and the rest of the world would like to live as well as we do.
And it may be impossible. If everyone in the world suddenly jumped to the standard of living enjoyed by the First World, in terms of consumption of global resources it would be like a massive population increase.
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.
Many discussions about Global Warming focus on how to cut back our energy use, and how to shift it to technologies that don't cause as much damage to the environment. Sustainable development would let us maintain a status quo - but for whom and how many? We could do a great deal to cut back on energy use if the First World shifted to a Kenyan level of consumption - but I don't think it would be a popular program. Keeping Kenyans (and all the rest) at their current levels of consumption would also make a difference - and create a powder keg of resentment around the world.
Raising standards of living takes years. It's far easier to move to a country where living standards are higher than it is to raise them locally. This is a major impetus behind immigration, legal or otherwise. If the U.S. and other developed countries can not find a way to bring the rest of the world up, but is unwilling or unable to find some good alternatives, then the border fences the right wing keeps talking about may become the bad alternative of choice.
And not much of a choice at that. Do we really want to live in the national equivalent of a gated community? Rising consumption can be held back by plague, famine, and war. Do those sound like good alternatives? Meanwhile, would-be presidents are criss-crossing Iowa and making promises that the next generation of Americans won't be worse off than the current one. How do they expect to pull that off?
Diamond does not end on a gloomy note. He notes that a high standard of living does not have to mean high consumption. Changing attitudes, changing expectations, and eliminating waste as much as possible can be part of the solution. There are many things we can do - and will have to do, regardless. As Diamond notes,
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.
Personally, I'm afraid Diamond may be a little too optimistic. There is a great deal of political will out there - but way too much of it is directed at willfully denying reality. It is going to take a determined effort to grasp just how big the challenges facing us really are, and even more determination to cope with what we will have to do to meet them.