As long as the dominant ethos is the drive for more consumption

Through technological and organizational change, supported by proper pricing (internalizing the currently externalized costs and environmental risks of material consumption and waste production), we canĪlmost certainly provide for the needs of the projected population, at a good standard of living. And there’s tremendous scope for greater efficiency and de-materialization in our consumption. Material consumption is critical to easing down below these limits and building a more sustainable society. In particular, the new “Planetary Boundaries” paper, forthcoming in Nature, makes the case that humanity has overshot the global carryingĬapacity in a variety of key areas, including GHGs, nitrogen, phosphorus, fresh water, land use, and biodiversity. Number of new studies are consistent with these results. Of course, carrying capacity is dynamic, partly endogenous, affected by technology as well as consumption, and a notoriously slippery notion to nail down. (originally in PNAS see updates at ) document these dynamics, arguing that we have already overshot

Have been consuming natural capital far faster than it regenerates, whether it’s fossil fuels, fish, forests, wetlands, or the capacity of the oceans and other sinks to take up greenhouse gases. households, businesses, or the Fed, but on the balance sheet of natural capital, the resources that generate the ecosystem services upon which we depend. The relevant dynamics don’t depend so much on the balance sheet The real question is how consumption relates to the long-term growth path and ability of planetary ecosystems to support our economy. Imbalances are worked off, the economy will recover, and growth will eventually resume. Even this recession, though longer and deeper than most due to the role of the housing bubble, credit crisis, and huge over-leveraging of the U.S. To cuts in employment, production, and investment, reinforcing the original decline in consumer income, confidence, and consumption, in the familiar dynamics of business cycles. Thus the faster consumption drops, the greater will be the buildup of excess inventories and the drop in capital spending as demand for plant and equipment dries up. But these are short-term and disequilibrium impacts arising, because the drop in demand occurs very quickly compared to the rate at which firms can adjust productionĪnd capacity. In the short run (months to perhaps several years), drops in consumption remove aggregate demand from the economy and affect Impact of consumption on the ability of the global ecosystem to support our economy. It’s critical to separate the short-run, disequilibrium impact of consumer spending on business cycle dynamics from the long-run You ask whether the downshift in consumer spending during this recession is bad for the economy in the long run. Sterman’s analysis of my questions about consumption amid a short-term slowdown in humanity’s blazing growth spurt:

Or a happier population, I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it” “…If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger but not a better Who provides an apt quotation from John Stuart Mill, circa 1848. Also, I’ve got to direct your attention to a comment posted by Gary Peters, His comments below, exploring the “hedonic treadmill,” follow those of Kenneth Arrow,

John Sterman, whose work comparing the building greenhouse effect to a clogged, filling bathtub has been explored here, has weighed in on the questions I posed about whether the recent consumption slowdown is, in the long run, a good thing.

Hedonic treadmil