Thread by @Sustainable2050

Materials extracted and used globally, now two times the sustainable threshold. "Virtually all of this overshoot is being driven by excess consumption in high-income nations."
@jasonhickel in Less is More

That's 12 tonnes of material per year per person, and no doubt very unevenly distributed. A tonne of stuff on your doorstep for each person in your household, every month. More if you live in a rich country. Whoa.

Ah wait, there's the distribution already! Make that 28 tonnes of materials per person per year, for a high-income country...

So somewhat more than 60 tonnes of materials per year for the average 2.2-2.4 person household in a high-income country.
That's 5 tonnes per month, 170 kilos per day.

"Growth sounds good. Children grow, crops grow ... and so too the economy should grow. But this is a false analogy. The natural process of growth is always finite. We want our children to grow, but not to the point of becoming obese, or 9 feet tall."

"We want our children to grow to a point of maturity, and then maintain a healthy balance. We want our crops to grow, but only until they are ripe, when we harvest them and plant afresh. This is how growth works in the living world. It levels off."
[@jasonhickel, Less is More]

(I sometimes hear we have to keep growing our global resource use because people in developing countries want everything we have too. Seems to be more popular than the thought of sharing the resources in an equitable way. And at odds with us still taking a share of the growth.)

"It is astonishing that the dominant belief in economics holds that no matter how rich a country has become, their GDP should keep rising, year after year, with no identifiable end point."

"The problem with the Limits to Growth report, groundbreaking in 1972, is that it focused only on the finite nature of the resources that we need to keep the economy running. This way of thinking about limits is vulnerable to ..

.. those who point out that if we can find new reserves, or substitute new resources for old, and if we develop methods of improving the yields of renewable resources, then we don't have to worry about those limits."

"But this isn't how ecology actually works. The problem with economic growth isn't just that we might run out of resources at some point. The problem is that it progressively degrades the integrity of ecosystems."

"Trying to predict when we might bump into the limits to growth is exactly the wrong way to think about it. We will find ourselves plunging into ecological collapse well before we run into the limits to growth."

"If we want to have any chance of surviving the Anthropocene, we can't just wait and sit around and wait for growth to crash into some kind of external limit."

"We must choose to limit growth ourselves. We need to reorganise the economy so that it operates within planetary boundaries, to maintain the Earth's life-supporting systems which we depend on for our existence."
[Quoting @g_kallis' book Limits]

(The section on the Paris Agreement is a weak part of the book. Strange caricature, in which countries only commit to 3.3⁰C because they've been tricked into believing in BECCS at scale. Doesn't even mention the Agreement's ratcheting up mechanism, now starting to work. A pity.)

On decoupling resource use from GDP growth: "The much-celebrated shift to services has delivered no improvements at all when it comes to the resource intensity of rich nations."

"Services represent 74% of GDP in high-income nations, having grown rapidly since the 1990s, and yet the material use of these nations is outpacing GDP growth. They have the highest share of services in GDP and also the highest per capita material footprints."

"What explains this strange result?
1) Income earned in services is used to buy material goods.
2) Services turn out to be resource-intensive in their own right. Take tourism: that takes an enormous material infrastructure to keep it going: airports, planes, hotels, etc."

"Also, it becomes more and more difficult to extract the same amount of materials from the earth.
For oil, companies have to use fracking and deep sea drilling now, using up more energy and materials to get the same amount of fuel."

"Same for mining. According to @UNEP, today three times more material has to be extracted per unit of metal than a century ago."

"And there's something else: The technological innovations that have contributed most to growth have done so not because they enable us to use *less* nature, but because they enable us to use *more*."

"Take the chainsaw: a remarkable invention that enables loggers to fell trees, say, ten times faster than they are able to do by hand. But logging companies don't tell their workers to finish the job early and go home. They get them to cut down 10 times more trees."