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.