Nice piece by Diamond on consumption rates

OP-ED: "What's Your Consumption Factor?," by Jared Diamond, New York Times, 2 January 2007, p. A19.

A very Amory Lovins-style piece.

Kenyans consume at 1. Americans consume 32 times that much. China is more like 3 but heading north fast.

Diamond's point: the average globally is around 8, making for the effect that 9 billion in 2050 will feel like 72--unless the more high-consumption come down to some lesser footprint.

A worse lifestyle?

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.

Good example? We waste a lot of oil. Amory says the energy used in a car is split between 97 percent that keeps car running and 3 percent that actually propels it forward. Can that be improved?

Our problem is that we're relatively rich, well-endowed and free of bad pollution, so we're not much incentivized to change, security being a weak connection ("Don't we end up going to the Mideast anyway? Or somewhere else, even if we don't import oil?").

That's why focusing on Asia's rise is crucial. Getting them to top out on footprint at a sustainable level will result in a product line that should be transferable--easily--to our own environment, thus bringing down our consumption factor.

This transfer will depend much on cultural change in the U.S. regarding "cool."

We need the right sort of "Blade Runner" mash-up.

Comments

[jim]

Although I found Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel to be interesting, his later work on environmental collapse was very weak. He resorted to drastically oversimplified analogies (like directly comparing simple Easter Island society with the orders-of-magnitude more complex and resilient 300 million strong American society.) It would be like giving advice to GM or Wal-mart based on my experience as captain of my high school basketball team -- the issues just aren't comparable.

Diamond seems to have fallen into a rut of neo-Malthusian thinking. I also am glad that he is offering to be the arbiter of what counts as wasteful or not. Especially ironic considering he is a well-known globe-trotter and has undoubtedly used more energy traipsing about than all the "wasteful" Americans with their giant TVs in their suburban homes.

[Michael]

I haven't read COLLAPSE yet (it's on my ever-expanding list of books to get to), but the general point of it I've heard bandied about seems reasonable; if you don't adapt to change, or pick the wrong approach to change, Bad Things Happen. All he seems to be doing here is giving some numbers and pointing out a few adaptions that would be a good idea.

It would have been nice to see more details about those numbers, though: What, for example, does it mean that 97% of oil is spent keeping the car running? I can guess some factors (lubrication and spare parts, idle time, inefficiencies in fuel production, transport and consumption), but what are the percentages?