I am going to need a source to believe that the consumption of a country of 180M in 1960 is less than the consumption of a country of 330M in 2022.
Just looking at changes in life expectancy and the amount of resources consumed in the final years/months/days of life in 1960 vs 2022 would lead mento throw out the claim.
Resources aren’t used per person, and having more working people gives us more brainpower, the only thing that can invent ways to use less of them.
It was probably the worst when we’d just invented industrialization, yes; we were still nearly Malthusian but also had horribly polluting wood and coal fires everywhere. Technology improvements have let us move away from that.
I am betting the above chart does not incorporate all the manufacturing activity that was outsourced from 1960 to 2022.
I like to think of it in terms of basic physics. Consumption = energy = mass * distance. The more mass that is moving more distance, the more “resources” has to be consumed. Perhaps not in the form of trees, but at the end of the day, the reduction in entropy has to be made up somewhere.
So you have more people, moving more mass (including themselves), means more resources consumed. Materials becoming lightweight does help, technology obviating and consolidating devices of course helps, and efficiency gains in energy conversion mechanisms helps too.
But I doubt those advancements have offset increases in living standards and expectations of qualify of life. And a lot of people around the world are stepping up their consumption big time, and they are not even close to reaching 1960s level of American lifestyle, much less 2022.
> I cannot read the Bloomberg link, but I think fossil fuel usage is a better proxy of total resource consumption than trees.
Replaced it with Substack.
Yearly CO2 emissions are down since 1990 excluding consumption, including that it's a bit up but the recent trend is good. Water and other things are flat including consumption/outsourcing.
But that also shows the issue - transportation emissions aren't caused by having a lot of people! They're caused by land use regulations. More people with sensible density means more close by destinations you don't have to drive to.
(Note the climate change issue is cumulative CO2, not that emissions are actually going up.)
> But that also shows the issue - transportation emissions aren't caused by having a lot of people!
Perhaps so technically, but not practically. Space itself is a resource, and people want space. More people means more space consumption. And that has always been the US’s great luxury. Lots of desirable space per person, in conjunction with low fossil fuel prices.
And while one can theorize about how densely people can and should live together, the reality is it will be politically unpopular if the population has an option (i.e. is not too poor to have to live super densely). Notwithstanding one’s 20s when a tiny apartment in a dense urban core satisfies one’s desires.
Eventually, that expectation of quality of life always gives out to the luxuries of space and individual cars.
Just looking at changes in life expectancy and the amount of resources consumed in the final years/months/days of life in 1960 vs 2022 would lead mento throw out the claim.