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Peak planet: are we starting to consume less?
Over th Is humanity’s ever-rising demand for materials and energy about to go into reverse? Fred Pearce investigates the controversial claim of “peak stuff”
H
UMANITY is doomed. Or it was in 1798, when English scholar Robert Malthus published his influential An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus predicted that unchecked growth in human numbers would condemn our species to a “perpetual struggle for room and food” and an unbreakable cycle of squalor, famine and disease. Nearly two centuries later, biologist Paul Ehrlich was no less pessimistic. We had exceeded the planet’s “carrying capacity”, he declared in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. “The battle to feed humanity is over. Sometime between 1970 and 1985, the world will undergo vast famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” 38 | NewScientist | 16 June 2012
In 2012, our mood has hardly improved. The focus has shifted from how to feed ourselves to our rapacious appetite for energy and raw materials, and the greenhouse gases we pump into the atmosphere to satisfy it. Sooner or later, the argument goes, we must send our planet’s climate and ourselves past the point of no return – if we haven’t done so already. Might these reports of our imminent demise also be exaggerated? That is the reasoning of those who see a pattern in recent statistics from the industrialised world. People in the US are driving less. Europeans are using less energy. Water use is down in countries such as the US and UK; so is calorie consumption in the UK.
The talk is of “peak stuff”: that beyond a certain level of economic development, people simply stop consuming so much. Technology and the course of economic evolution allow prosperity to keep rising without a linked increase in our use of energy and materials. Our demands on planetary resources stabilise – and ultimately begin to fall. Others are unconvinced, seeing in peak stuff a dangerous myth and a thinly veiled excuse to abandon efforts to limit our planetary impact. Without large-scale intervention to curb our excesses now, they argue, peak stuff, if it exists, will be too little, too late. So who is right? Is humanity really about to lose its appetite for stuff – and if so, will it help?
Lorenzo De Filippi/Getty
he top Predictions such as those of Malthus and planet is down to the first factor, population. Ehrlich fell down on a simple point: they failed Thanks largely to medical advances ensuring to see what came next. Malthus missed the that, for the first time in human history, most industrial revolution and its ways of mass children get to grow up, our numbers have production, which ultimately allowed more quadrupled over the past century to seven people to live longer and more comfortably. billion. We are adjusting our behaviour at the Ehrlich failed to factor in the “green same time: women today have 2.5 children revolution”, the widespread use of more on average, half as many as 40 years ago. productive crop strains and chemical fertilisers In much of Europe and east Asia, including and pesticides that has kept food production China, that number is 1.6 or lower, below the ahead of the population curve since the 1960s. rate needed to maintain population sizes. That Perhaps we are missing a similar trend now. leads demographer Joel Cohen of Columbia Although Ehrlich arrived at the wrong conclusion, his analysis provides a useful framework for assessing arguments about peak stuff. Ehrlich described our planetary ”Past predictions of footprint as the product of three factors: how many of us there are, how much each of humanity’s doom fell down us consumes and how we produce what we on a simple point: they consume – that is, the prevailing technology. didn’t see what came next” Much of our ballooning impact on the
University in New York to predict that “many of us may live to see population peak in the middle of this century”. If so, that would fulfil the first necessary condition to begin to reduce our demands on the planet. Not everyone is so sanguine. For a start, even small changes in fertility make a big difference to our numbers over time, and in sub-Saharan Africa fertility rates are still mostly above 4. “African fertility is falling, but more slowly than many of us expected,” says Hania Zlotnik, until recently chief demographer at the United Nations. The UN’s projections for world population in 2100 range from 15.8 billion and rising to 6.2 billion and falling. The middle projection is for a roughly stable 10 billion (see “Population peaking”, page 40). Even if population growth is at the lower end of expectations, reaching peak stuff would still require each of us to consume less – which brings us to Ehrlich’s second metric. > 16 June 2012 | NewScientist | 39
Are people in the developed world really travelling less by car?
Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
the UK’s Office of National Statistics, he says, the country’s “total material requirement” peaked at 2.17 billion tonnes in 2001 and had fallen by 4 per cent to 2.09 billion tonnes by 2007, even though GDP rose by 18 per cent in that time. “Water use is down, travel and car ownership are down, metals and paper use down, cement use down, calorie consumption and meat eating is falling,” Goodall says. What’s more, between 2000 and 2009, household energy demand fell by almost a tenth across the 27 countries of the European Union; in Sweden, France and the Netherlands, it was down 15 per cent. Water use has also fallen in other countries. US consumption in 2005 was 5 per cent below the peak year of 1980, the US Geological Survey found, although in recent years the trend has been again slightly upwards (see “No more stuff?”, right). In 2010, calorie consumption in the UK
On past performance, falling consumption ”Water use is down, metals looks like wishful thinking. Since 1950, world and paper use down, population has risen by a factor of 2.7, but our use of materials such as metals and oil has calorie consumption and quadrupled, and greenhouse gas emissions are up more than fivefold. Proponents of peak meat eating are falling” stuff point out that this masks one significant positive trend, however. Since 1950, the world’s economy has grown sevenfold, easily outpacing our resource consumption. Every year between 1973 and 2008, according to the US Energy Information Administration, the US gained an average of just under 3 per cent more economic benefit from every unit of energy consumed. United Nations projections of global population growth vary widely, largely depending on how fertility rates change in less developed countries An analysis by Jesse Ausubel and Paul Waggoner of Rockefeller University in New 28 York City suggests that this trend of more 26 economic bang per resource buck is widespread among developing economies, following 24 an initial “cheap and dirty” phase of growth. 22 In 2008, they drew on data covering 1980 to 2006 to argue that there had been “declining 20 intensities of impact, from energy use and carbon emission to food consumption 18 CONSTANT SCENARIO and fertiliser use, globally and in countries (if current fertility rates do not change) 16 ranging from the US and France to China, India, Brazil and Indonesia” (Proceedings 14 of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, HIGH SCENARIO 12 p 12774). They referred to the trend as economic “dematerialisation”. 10 MOST PROBABLE SCENARIO That still doesn’t get us near peak stuff: the 8 LOW SCENARIO overall amount we consume has still had to grow to feed economic growth. It is this trend 6 tries that, by some measures and in some places, oun ed c ntries p lo 4 ve ou might now have reversed. e de ed c Mor evelop British environment analyst and author ss d e L 2 Chris Goodall, for example, argues that people 0 in the UK are consuming no more stuff than 1960 1980 2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100 they did in the 1990s. According to data from 40 | NewScientist | 16 June 2012
SOURCE: UNITED NATIONS POPULATION DIVISION
Population (billions)
Population peaking
No more stuff? Certain measures of consumption – the water we use, the waste we toss, the distance we travel – have started to plateau or show declines in some parts of the developed world over recent years
Water abstraction US
UK
-13%
GERMANY
JAPAN
-25%
-6.5%
FRANCE
+10%
+2.5%
1995–2005
1995–2008
1995–2007
1995–2007
Municipal waste
Car usage 5
Millions of tonnes
250 US
Are such apparently dematerialising trends 200 significant, or might factors other than CHINA actual reduced consumption explain them? 150 For example, the past few decades have 100 seen the outsourcing of large swathes of manufacturing, with its huge demands on GERMANY 50 materials, energy and water, from developed UK economies to lower-wage ones. Metrics such 0 1995 2000 2005 2009 as total material requirement already attempt to take this shift into account, however, and water consumption in the UK has dropped by comparable amounts in private households largely be explained by efficiency gains for and in industry. The recession of the past few large electrical appliances and heating systems. years has depressed consumption, too, but the As far as peak car is concerned, Richard Florida, downward trajectories were established before an urban studies theorist at the University of it began. And as Millard-Ball and Schipper Toronto, Canada, suggests that smartphones, note, although fuel prices have been rising social media and internet shopping are slowly since 2002, trends such as “peak car” substituting for travel, and so owning your own predate the dramatic oil-price fluctuations wheels has lost its social cachet for the young. we have experienced since 2007. Such conclusions are disputed. Tim Jackson Ausubel suggests instead that the effects at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, of longer-term cultural and economic shifts doubts the trends will make a significant are beginning to be seen. Beyond a certain level difference to our overall consumption, of affluence, he says, we spend proportionally because resource efficiency in one area tends less on resource-intensive staples such as food, to be cancelled out by increased profligacy housing and clothing, and more on services. elsewhere. In 2009, he and his colleague For meals in swanky restaurants, for example, Nick Hogg showed how digitising the way much of the cost goes into paying for the skills we receive recorded music has not contributed of the chef and the ambience rather than large to dematerialisation, essentially because quantities of the ingredients. Although the we buy more hardware to play it on. That meal creates more economic value, it does not hardware might be getting smaller, too, but require much more material or energy than food cooked at home. Similarly, we may use our extra cash to buy better-quality goods that last longer, or make conscious “ecological” choices, often guided ”Smartphones, social media by government regulations or something and internet shopping as simple as labelling. Bruno Lapillonne of mean owning your own Enerdata, the agency that compiled the EU wheels has lost its cachet” energy-use data, says the declining trend can
Billion passenger kilometres
300
Cultural shifts
1997–2009
US
4 3 2
CHINA GERMANY UK
1 0 1995
2000
2005
2009
SOURCE: OECD
was 4 per cent below its 2001 peak, according to a government analysis that reports a “clear picture of longer-term downward trend”. Adam Millard-Ball of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and the late Lee Schipper of Stanford University in California reported last year that car use has been falling in countries including Germany, the UK, Australia, France and Japan. In the US, car mileage per capita decreased by 5 per cent between 2004 and 2008, according to Robert Puentes and Adie Tomer of the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington DC. The young are leading the way: the proportion of US 17-year-olds with a driving licence has fallen from about three-quarters to a half since 1998.
in total it takes more juice to run. In another sphere Ausubel, although a proponent of dematerialisation, points out that we are driving less but flying more. That leads Julian Allwood, a resource specialist at the University of Cambridge, to say that “the vision of dematerialisation is alluring, but elusive”. And looking at overall metrics of consumption, such as the amount of carbon dioxide an economy pumps out, it is indeed hard to discern a consistent trend. From 1990 to 2008 the US increased its CO2 emissions by 12 per cent while the EU decreased its by 9 per cent, despite broadly similar economic growth trends (see “Carbon economy”, page 42). Peak stuff might be part of the story, but it is clearly not all of it. There is a more basic objection, however: even if peak stuff is reached soon, it will only apply to the billion or so people living in rich countries out of the global population of 7 billion. Achieving worldwide peak stuff, critics argue, would require heading off rising demand in the developing world, while seeing a much more sustained fall in consumption among richer nations. Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation, a think tank based in London, points out that the environment does not much care who is doing what where. > 16 June 2012 | NewScientist | 41
Carbon economy Although total CO2 emissions are climbing, countries the world over have been steadily emitting less for each unit of economic growth
6 US 4
EU 27
2
INDIA UK
AUSTRALIA
0 1960
BRAZIL
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
8
6
4
2
0 1980
1990
2000
2010
“Measures of our impact are only meaningful that there is no one right answer: it all when they are related to the planet’s ability to depends on technology. And it is here, in keep up,” he says. the third of Ehrlich’s metrics, that there Take steel, a material that is ubiquitous might be a glimmer of hope for peak stuff. in modern infrastructure such as homes, Technology has always had a hand in offices, cars and factories. Making steel determining how many of us can survive accounts for almost 5 per cent of all CO2 on the planet. When humanity turned from emissions, according to the International hunter-gathering to farming, the world was Energy Agency. In Europe and North America, able to sustain vastly more people because steel consumption has plateaued and even the breeding and cultivation of crops hugely declined slightly over the past four decades, upped the potential food source. Industrial but global demand rose by 40 per cent society raised the carrying capacity again between 2000 and 2010 as the rest of the by exploiting fossil fuels, not least to world played catch-up. Chinese demand for produce artificial fertiliser. The problems of steel nearly quadrupled, hitting 400 kilograms overconsumption and resource depletion per head per year, a level comparable to that in we face today arguably stem from such Europe and North America before the current innovations. But a further technological recession. There is potentially plenty more revolution might help us use resources more growth to come, with global per-capita steel efficiently, without trashing vital ecosystems, consumption still only about half that level and allow billions more to live safely and well. (see “Steeling ourselves”, right). We might be seeing some positive signs. Critics of peak stuff see that as sufficient Countries developing their economies now grounds to end the discussion. “Evidence of have access to a range of technologies that can substantial absolute dematerialisation in the allow them to leapfrog inefficient processes rich economies is thin at best,” says Jackson. used in developed nations. China has greatly “At the global level, it is non-existent.” On that expanded its coal-burning capacity in the reading, worldwide consumption will continue past decade, but it has also recently become to rise fast, depleting resources and pumping the world’s largest generator of solar and out dangerous levels of greenhouse gases. wind energy. According to figures from the Over the years, many attempts have been made to estimate Earth’s “carrying capacity” – that is, how many humans the planet can take, and consuming at what level. The conclusions ”The carbon intensity of the as to a sustainable population level have varied wildly, from Ehrlich’s 1968 estimate Chinese economy is falling of 1.5 billion to tens of billions. This year, the faster than that of any UK’s Royal Society tried its hand. In a report economy in history” entitled People and the Planet, it concluded 42 | NewScientist | 16 June 2012
SOURCE: WORLD BANK
CHINA
CO2 emitted per US$ GDP in 2000 (kg)
Total CO2 emissions (billion tonnes)
CO2 intensity
CO2 emissions
8
World Bank, the Chinese economy’s carbon intensity – the amount of CO2 emissions relative to the size of economic output – has decreased by almost 70 per cent over the past three decades (see “Carbon economy”, left), and a further 20 per cent reduction from current levels is promised by 2020. If it succeeds, China will have achieved that cut faster than any country at a comparable stage of development. With the price of fossil fuels and other commodities rising, a lot of that is down to economic self-interest. “The problem is not an absolute lack of supply, but the increasing energy and monetary cost of extraction,” says Allwood. That makes investment in energy and material efficiency more attractive. At the same time, the price of low-carbon energy sources such as solar panels is falling fast. Consultants McKinsey forecast that solar energy will be as cheap as coal and nuclear by 2020. And according to a detailed analysis by Nan Zhou and colleagues at the China Energy Group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California such trends, coupled with the breakneck pace of China’s development, means peak stuff could arrive there much sooner than anticipated. In their favoured scenario, they concluded that “ownership of appliances, construction of residential and commercial floor area, roads, railways, fertiliser use, and urbanisation will peak around 2030 with slowing population growth” – as will Chinese CO2 emissions.
Doing our dirty work If China’s use of renewable and nuclear energy grows at a plausible rate, and the country captures some of its emissions from coalburning power stations and keeps making improvements in energy efficiency, by 2050 its total emissions could end up 4 per cent lower than today, says Zhou. Ajay Gambhir and his colleagues from the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London are even more optimistic. They conclude that by continuing to adopt low-carbon technologies, China could plausibly cut its emissions by as much as two-thirds by 2050, from 9 gigatonnes to 3 gigatonnes. For the world’s most populous country, which recently also became its largest CO2 emitter, that would be a remarkable achievement. And what China can do, other major developing nations such as India, Indonesia and Nigeria can also do. None of this is certain, Zhou stresses – and
we should not sit on our hands and expect China to do our dirty work in cleaning up. Curbing global warming to 2 °C above the average pre-industrial temperature, the generally accepted “safe” level, will probably require carbon emissions to peak within a decade, to be followed by global cuts of more than 50 per cent by mid-century, according to the UN Environment Programme. Even if China limits its emissions to 5 gigatonnes, an ambitious figure, developed countries would need to cut theirs by some 80 per cent to meet that target. The way we use stuff provides some ways to do that. Allwood points out that more than half of our industrial CO2 emissions come from producing and processing five sorts of stuff: steel, cement, plastic, paper and aluminium. According to the International Energy Agency, energy consumption in the global steel industry could be cut by 34 per cent by adopting proven technologies to save and recycle waste heat and reduce material waste. The paper industry could achieve 38 per cent and cement 40 per cent. That still won’t be enough on its own. “Even with the strongest possible assumptions, we cannot hit carbon emissions targets by energy and process efficiency within the existing system,” says Allwood.
Cary Wolinsky/Aurora
Demand for steel accounts for 5 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions
Jackson puts it more trenchantly:“The idea that the transition to a sustainable economy will emerge spontaneously by giving free rein to markets is patently false,” he says. One alternative is to switch to using more plant-based materials rather than energy-intensive minerals and hydrocarbons. In April, the US government launched a National Bioeconomy Blueprint, which foresees hugely increased biofuel use and the construction of giant refineries that churn out plastics, fibres and chemicals made by genetically engineered plants. But this is not necessarily a good way to reduce our impact on the planet. It would massively increase the pressure on two other crucial finite resources – land and water – and imply even more use of nitrogen-based fertilisers that
Steeling ourselves
1400
500
WORLD
1200
CHINA
400
1000
EU
300
CHINA
400
US
200 100
200
EU US 2003
2005
2007
2009
0 2001
2003
2005
2007
WORLD
2009
SOURCE: WORLD STEEL ASSOCIATION
600
RECESSION
800
0 2001
Steel consumption per head per year (kg)
Crude steel consumption (millions of tonnes)
World steel consumption has risen by 40% in the past decade on the back of a huge increase in China’s demand – but world average consumption per capita is still only half that of pre-recession Europe
acidify soils, upset the natural nitrogen cycle and create dead zones in rivers and oceans. Or we might let markets decide – but give them the right signals first. In its People and the Planet report, the Royal Society supports the idea of giving cash value to finite “natural capital” just as we do to finite material resources. Through this we would put a price on forests, soils, water supplies and other essential ecological services – an approach that China has been pioneering (see news story, p 8). Tinkering with the tax system would also help, says Cameron Hepburn, an economist at the London School of Economics. Switching from income and labour taxes to taxing the use of resources could be a big incentive to change our habits faster and more profoundly in developed economies, where few are in need. Will we grasp the nettle? The Danish agricultural economist Ester Boserup argued that throughout history, population growth and the pressure of shortages have been necessary spurs to technological developments, which seem to arrive just in time to avert the sort of disasters that exercised the likes of Malthus and Ehrlich. The signs are that we already have the know-how to live long and prosper without demanding ever more from a finite planet. The question is whether we will make the decisions to realise that promise before “just in time” becomes “just too late”. n Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist based in London. Further reading: relevant sources are linked to in the online version at newscientist.com/ article/dn21886 16 June 2012 | NewScientist | 43
H
UMANITY is doomed. Or it was in 1798, when English scholar Robert Malthus published his influential An Essay on the Principle of Population. Malthus predicted that unchecked growth in human numbers would condemn our species to a “perpetual struggle for room and food” and an unbreakable cycle of squalor, famine and disease. Nearly two centuries later, biologist Paul Ehrlich was no less pessimistic. We had exceeded the planet’s “carrying capacity”, he declared in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. “The battle to feed humanity is over. Sometime between 1970 and 1985, the world will undergo vast famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” 38 | NewScientist | 16 June 2012
In 2012, our mood has hardly improved. The focus has shifted from how to feed ourselves to our rapacious appetite for energy and raw materials, and the greenhouse gases we pump into the atmosphere to satisfy it. Sooner or later, the argument goes, we must send our planet’s climate and ourselves past the point of no return – if we haven’t done so already. Might these reports of our imminent demise also be exaggerated? That is the reasoning of those who see a pattern in recent statistics from the industrialised world. People in the US are driving less. Europeans are using less energy. Water use is down in countries such as the US and UK; so is calorie consumption in the UK.
The talk is of “peak stuff”: that beyond a certain level of economic development, people simply stop consuming so much. Technology and the course of economic evolution allow prosperity to keep rising without a linked increase in our use of energy and materials. Our demands on planetary resources stabilise – and ultimately begin to fall. Others are unconvinced, seeing in peak stuff a dangerous myth and a thinly veiled excuse to abandon efforts to limit our planetary impact. Without large-scale intervention to curb our excesses now, they argue, peak stuff, if it exists, will be too little, too late. So who is right? Is humanity really about to lose its appetite for stuff – and if so, will it help?
Lorenzo De Filippi/Getty
he top Predictions such as those of Malthus and planet is down to the first factor, population. Ehrlich fell down on a simple point: they failed Thanks largely to medical advances ensuring to see what came next. Malthus missed the that, for the first time in human history, most industrial revolution and its ways of mass children get to grow up, our numbers have production, which ultimately allowed more quadrupled over the past century to seven people to live longer and more comfortably. billion. We are adjusting our behaviour at the Ehrlich failed to factor in the “green same time: women today have 2.5 children revolution”, the widespread use of more on average, half as many as 40 years ago. productive crop strains and chemical fertilisers In much of Europe and east Asia, including and pesticides that has kept food production China, that number is 1.6 or lower, below the ahead of the population curve since the 1960s. rate needed to maintain population sizes. That Perhaps we are missing a similar trend now. leads demographer Joel Cohen of Columbia Although Ehrlich arrived at the wrong conclusion, his analysis provides a useful framework for assessing arguments about peak stuff. Ehrlich described our planetary ”Past predictions of footprint as the product of three factors: how many of us there are, how much each of humanity’s doom fell down us consumes and how we produce what we on a simple point: they consume – that is, the prevailing technology. didn’t see what came next” Much of our ballooning impact on the
University in New York to predict that “many of us may live to see population peak in the middle of this century”. If so, that would fulfil the first necessary condition to begin to reduce our demands on the planet. Not everyone is so sanguine. For a start, even small changes in fertility make a big difference to our numbers over time, and in sub-Saharan Africa fertility rates are still mostly above 4. “African fertility is falling, but more slowly than many of us expected,” says Hania Zlotnik, until recently chief demographer at the United Nations. The UN’s projections for world population in 2100 range from 15.8 billion and rising to 6.2 billion and falling. The middle projection is for a roughly stable 10 billion (see “Population peaking”, page 40). Even if population growth is at the lower end of expectations, reaching peak stuff would still require each of us to consume less – which brings us to Ehrlich’s second metric. > 16 June 2012 | NewScientist | 39
Are people in the developed world really travelling less by car?
Stefan Wermuth/Reuters
the UK’s Office of National Statistics, he says, the country’s “total material requirement” peaked at 2.17 billion tonnes in 2001 and had fallen by 4 per cent to 2.09 billion tonnes by 2007, even though GDP rose by 18 per cent in that time. “Water use is down, travel and car ownership are down, metals and paper use down, cement use down, calorie consumption and meat eating is falling,” Goodall says. What’s more, between 2000 and 2009, household energy demand fell by almost a tenth across the 27 countries of the European Union; in Sweden, France and the Netherlands, it was down 15 per cent. Water use has also fallen in other countries. US consumption in 2005 was 5 per cent below the peak year of 1980, the US Geological Survey found, although in recent years the trend has been again slightly upwards (see “No more stuff?”, right). In 2010, calorie consumption in the UK
On past performance, falling consumption ”Water use is down, metals looks like wishful thinking. Since 1950, world and paper use down, population has risen by a factor of 2.7, but our use of materials such as metals and oil has calorie consumption and quadrupled, and greenhouse gas emissions are up more than fivefold. Proponents of peak meat eating are falling” stuff point out that this masks one significant positive trend, however. Since 1950, the world’s economy has grown sevenfold, easily outpacing our resource consumption. Every year between 1973 and 2008, according to the US Energy Information Administration, the US gained an average of just under 3 per cent more economic benefit from every unit of energy consumed. United Nations projections of global population growth vary widely, largely depending on how fertility rates change in less developed countries An analysis by Jesse Ausubel and Paul Waggoner of Rockefeller University in New 28 York City suggests that this trend of more 26 economic bang per resource buck is widespread among developing economies, following 24 an initial “cheap and dirty” phase of growth. 22 In 2008, they drew on data covering 1980 to 2006 to argue that there had been “declining 20 intensities of impact, from energy use and carbon emission to food consumption 18 CONSTANT SCENARIO and fertiliser use, globally and in countries (if current fertility rates do not change) 16 ranging from the US and France to China, India, Brazil and Indonesia” (Proceedings 14 of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 105, HIGH SCENARIO 12 p 12774). They referred to the trend as economic “dematerialisation”. 10 MOST PROBABLE SCENARIO That still doesn’t get us near peak stuff: the 8 LOW SCENARIO overall amount we consume has still had to grow to feed economic growth. It is this trend 6 tries that, by some measures and in some places, oun ed c ntries p lo 4 ve ou might now have reversed. e de ed c Mor evelop British environment analyst and author ss d e L 2 Chris Goodall, for example, argues that people 0 in the UK are consuming no more stuff than 1960 1980 2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100 they did in the 1990s. According to data from 40 | NewScientist | 16 June 2012
SOURCE: UNITED NATIONS POPULATION DIVISION
Population (billions)
Population peaking
No more stuff? Certain measures of consumption – the water we use, the waste we toss, the distance we travel – have started to plateau or show declines in some parts of the developed world over recent years
Water abstraction US
UK
-13%
GERMANY
JAPAN
-25%
-6.5%
FRANCE
+10%
+2.5%
1995–2005
1995–2008
1995–2007
1995–2007
Municipal waste
Car usage 5
Millions of tonnes
250 US
Are such apparently dematerialising trends 200 significant, or might factors other than CHINA actual reduced consumption explain them? 150 For example, the past few decades have 100 seen the outsourcing of large swathes of manufacturing, with its huge demands on GERMANY 50 materials, energy and water, from developed UK economies to lower-wage ones. Metrics such 0 1995 2000 2005 2009 as total material requirement already attempt to take this shift into account, however, and water consumption in the UK has dropped by comparable amounts in private households largely be explained by efficiency gains for and in industry. The recession of the past few large electrical appliances and heating systems. years has depressed consumption, too, but the As far as peak car is concerned, Richard Florida, downward trajectories were established before an urban studies theorist at the University of it began. And as Millard-Ball and Schipper Toronto, Canada, suggests that smartphones, note, although fuel prices have been rising social media and internet shopping are slowly since 2002, trends such as “peak car” substituting for travel, and so owning your own predate the dramatic oil-price fluctuations wheels has lost its social cachet for the young. we have experienced since 2007. Such conclusions are disputed. Tim Jackson Ausubel suggests instead that the effects at the University of Surrey in Guildford, UK, of longer-term cultural and economic shifts doubts the trends will make a significant are beginning to be seen. Beyond a certain level difference to our overall consumption, of affluence, he says, we spend proportionally because resource efficiency in one area tends less on resource-intensive staples such as food, to be cancelled out by increased profligacy housing and clothing, and more on services. elsewhere. In 2009, he and his colleague For meals in swanky restaurants, for example, Nick Hogg showed how digitising the way much of the cost goes into paying for the skills we receive recorded music has not contributed of the chef and the ambience rather than large to dematerialisation, essentially because quantities of the ingredients. Although the we buy more hardware to play it on. That meal creates more economic value, it does not hardware might be getting smaller, too, but require much more material or energy than food cooked at home. Similarly, we may use our extra cash to buy better-quality goods that last longer, or make conscious “ecological” choices, often guided ”Smartphones, social media by government regulations or something and internet shopping as simple as labelling. Bruno Lapillonne of mean owning your own Enerdata, the agency that compiled the EU wheels has lost its cachet” energy-use data, says the declining trend can
Billion passenger kilometres
300
Cultural shifts
1997–2009
US
4 3 2
CHINA GERMANY UK
1 0 1995
2000
2005
2009
SOURCE: OECD
was 4 per cent below its 2001 peak, according to a government analysis that reports a “clear picture of longer-term downward trend”. Adam Millard-Ball of McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and the late Lee Schipper of Stanford University in California reported last year that car use has been falling in countries including Germany, the UK, Australia, France and Japan. In the US, car mileage per capita decreased by 5 per cent between 2004 and 2008, according to Robert Puentes and Adie Tomer of the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington DC. The young are leading the way: the proportion of US 17-year-olds with a driving licence has fallen from about three-quarters to a half since 1998.
in total it takes more juice to run. In another sphere Ausubel, although a proponent of dematerialisation, points out that we are driving less but flying more. That leads Julian Allwood, a resource specialist at the University of Cambridge, to say that “the vision of dematerialisation is alluring, but elusive”. And looking at overall metrics of consumption, such as the amount of carbon dioxide an economy pumps out, it is indeed hard to discern a consistent trend. From 1990 to 2008 the US increased its CO2 emissions by 12 per cent while the EU decreased its by 9 per cent, despite broadly similar economic growth trends (see “Carbon economy”, page 42). Peak stuff might be part of the story, but it is clearly not all of it. There is a more basic objection, however: even if peak stuff is reached soon, it will only apply to the billion or so people living in rich countries out of the global population of 7 billion. Achieving worldwide peak stuff, critics argue, would require heading off rising demand in the developing world, while seeing a much more sustained fall in consumption among richer nations. Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation, a think tank based in London, points out that the environment does not much care who is doing what where. > 16 June 2012 | NewScientist | 41
Carbon economy Although total CO2 emissions are climbing, countries the world over have been steadily emitting less for each unit of economic growth
6 US 4
EU 27
2
INDIA UK
AUSTRALIA
0 1960
BRAZIL
1970
1980
1990
2000
2010
8
6
4
2
0 1980
1990
2000
2010
“Measures of our impact are only meaningful that there is no one right answer: it all when they are related to the planet’s ability to depends on technology. And it is here, in keep up,” he says. the third of Ehrlich’s metrics, that there Take steel, a material that is ubiquitous might be a glimmer of hope for peak stuff. in modern infrastructure such as homes, Technology has always had a hand in offices, cars and factories. Making steel determining how many of us can survive accounts for almost 5 per cent of all CO2 on the planet. When humanity turned from emissions, according to the International hunter-gathering to farming, the world was Energy Agency. In Europe and North America, able to sustain vastly more people because steel consumption has plateaued and even the breeding and cultivation of crops hugely declined slightly over the past four decades, upped the potential food source. Industrial but global demand rose by 40 per cent society raised the carrying capacity again between 2000 and 2010 as the rest of the by exploiting fossil fuels, not least to world played catch-up. Chinese demand for produce artificial fertiliser. The problems of steel nearly quadrupled, hitting 400 kilograms overconsumption and resource depletion per head per year, a level comparable to that in we face today arguably stem from such Europe and North America before the current innovations. But a further technological recession. There is potentially plenty more revolution might help us use resources more growth to come, with global per-capita steel efficiently, without trashing vital ecosystems, consumption still only about half that level and allow billions more to live safely and well. (see “Steeling ourselves”, right). We might be seeing some positive signs. Critics of peak stuff see that as sufficient Countries developing their economies now grounds to end the discussion. “Evidence of have access to a range of technologies that can substantial absolute dematerialisation in the allow them to leapfrog inefficient processes rich economies is thin at best,” says Jackson. used in developed nations. China has greatly “At the global level, it is non-existent.” On that expanded its coal-burning capacity in the reading, worldwide consumption will continue past decade, but it has also recently become to rise fast, depleting resources and pumping the world’s largest generator of solar and out dangerous levels of greenhouse gases. wind energy. According to figures from the Over the years, many attempts have been made to estimate Earth’s “carrying capacity” – that is, how many humans the planet can take, and consuming at what level. The conclusions ”The carbon intensity of the as to a sustainable population level have varied wildly, from Ehrlich’s 1968 estimate Chinese economy is falling of 1.5 billion to tens of billions. This year, the faster than that of any UK’s Royal Society tried its hand. In a report economy in history” entitled People and the Planet, it concluded 42 | NewScientist | 16 June 2012
SOURCE: WORLD BANK
CHINA
CO2 emitted per US$ GDP in 2000 (kg)
Total CO2 emissions (billion tonnes)
CO2 intensity
CO2 emissions
8
World Bank, the Chinese economy’s carbon intensity – the amount of CO2 emissions relative to the size of economic output – has decreased by almost 70 per cent over the past three decades (see “Carbon economy”, left), and a further 20 per cent reduction from current levels is promised by 2020. If it succeeds, China will have achieved that cut faster than any country at a comparable stage of development. With the price of fossil fuels and other commodities rising, a lot of that is down to economic self-interest. “The problem is not an absolute lack of supply, but the increasing energy and monetary cost of extraction,” says Allwood. That makes investment in energy and material efficiency more attractive. At the same time, the price of low-carbon energy sources such as solar panels is falling fast. Consultants McKinsey forecast that solar energy will be as cheap as coal and nuclear by 2020. And according to a detailed analysis by Nan Zhou and colleagues at the China Energy Group of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California such trends, coupled with the breakneck pace of China’s development, means peak stuff could arrive there much sooner than anticipated. In their favoured scenario, they concluded that “ownership of appliances, construction of residential and commercial floor area, roads, railways, fertiliser use, and urbanisation will peak around 2030 with slowing population growth” – as will Chinese CO2 emissions.
Doing our dirty work If China’s use of renewable and nuclear energy grows at a plausible rate, and the country captures some of its emissions from coalburning power stations and keeps making improvements in energy efficiency, by 2050 its total emissions could end up 4 per cent lower than today, says Zhou. Ajay Gambhir and his colleagues from the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London are even more optimistic. They conclude that by continuing to adopt low-carbon technologies, China could plausibly cut its emissions by as much as two-thirds by 2050, from 9 gigatonnes to 3 gigatonnes. For the world’s most populous country, which recently also became its largest CO2 emitter, that would be a remarkable achievement. And what China can do, other major developing nations such as India, Indonesia and Nigeria can also do. None of this is certain, Zhou stresses – and
we should not sit on our hands and expect China to do our dirty work in cleaning up. Curbing global warming to 2 °C above the average pre-industrial temperature, the generally accepted “safe” level, will probably require carbon emissions to peak within a decade, to be followed by global cuts of more than 50 per cent by mid-century, according to the UN Environment Programme. Even if China limits its emissions to 5 gigatonnes, an ambitious figure, developed countries would need to cut theirs by some 80 per cent to meet that target. The way we use stuff provides some ways to do that. Allwood points out that more than half of our industrial CO2 emissions come from producing and processing five sorts of stuff: steel, cement, plastic, paper and aluminium. According to the International Energy Agency, energy consumption in the global steel industry could be cut by 34 per cent by adopting proven technologies to save and recycle waste heat and reduce material waste. The paper industry could achieve 38 per cent and cement 40 per cent. That still won’t be enough on its own. “Even with the strongest possible assumptions, we cannot hit carbon emissions targets by energy and process efficiency within the existing system,” says Allwood.
Cary Wolinsky/Aurora
Demand for steel accounts for 5 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions
Jackson puts it more trenchantly:“The idea that the transition to a sustainable economy will emerge spontaneously by giving free rein to markets is patently false,” he says. One alternative is to switch to using more plant-based materials rather than energy-intensive minerals and hydrocarbons. In April, the US government launched a National Bioeconomy Blueprint, which foresees hugely increased biofuel use and the construction of giant refineries that churn out plastics, fibres and chemicals made by genetically engineered plants. But this is not necessarily a good way to reduce our impact on the planet. It would massively increase the pressure on two other crucial finite resources – land and water – and imply even more use of nitrogen-based fertilisers that
Steeling ourselves
1400
500
WORLD
1200
CHINA
400
1000
EU
300
CHINA
400
US
200 100
200
EU US 2003
2005
2007
2009
0 2001
2003
2005
2007
WORLD
2009
SOURCE: WORLD STEEL ASSOCIATION
600
RECESSION
800
0 2001
Steel consumption per head per year (kg)
Crude steel consumption (millions of tonnes)
World steel consumption has risen by 40% in the past decade on the back of a huge increase in China’s demand – but world average consumption per capita is still only half that of pre-recession Europe
acidify soils, upset the natural nitrogen cycle and create dead zones in rivers and oceans. Or we might let markets decide – but give them the right signals first. In its People and the Planet report, the Royal Society supports the idea of giving cash value to finite “natural capital” just as we do to finite material resources. Through this we would put a price on forests, soils, water supplies and other essential ecological services – an approach that China has been pioneering (see news story, p 8). Tinkering with the tax system would also help, says Cameron Hepburn, an economist at the London School of Economics. Switching from income and labour taxes to taxing the use of resources could be a big incentive to change our habits faster and more profoundly in developed economies, where few are in need. Will we grasp the nettle? The Danish agricultural economist Ester Boserup argued that throughout history, population growth and the pressure of shortages have been necessary spurs to technological developments, which seem to arrive just in time to avert the sort of disasters that exercised the likes of Malthus and Ehrlich. The signs are that we already have the know-how to live long and prosper without demanding ever more from a finite planet. The question is whether we will make the decisions to realise that promise before “just in time” becomes “just too late”. n Fred Pearce is a consultant for New Scientist based in London. Further reading: relevant sources are linked to in the online version at newscientist.com/ article/dn21886 16 June 2012 | NewScientist | 43