2001年是世事紛擾的一年。之後的十多年裡，(9-11恐怖襲擊、阿富汗戰爭、古吉拉特大地震等)各種紀念日讓我們應接不暇。當我們回首這些陳年舊事的時候，2001年的一件事恐怕記得的人不多。 那就是英國物質流計量中有關2001年的一組數據， 英國國家統計局每年都會發布的枯燥無味、無人問津的一組數據。
然而，在環境作家克裡斯•古多爾看來，這些統計數據能夠反映很重要的問題。他積極地解釋道：“從這些數字來看，2001年或許是英國的“物質”消耗、也就是從食物和燃料到板式家具等我們用的所有東西的總重量達到頂峰並且開始減少的一年。”
古多爾的這番話，雖然波瀾不驚，但卻極富智慧。古多爾是一位顧問兼作家，過去十多年裡已經躋身於頂尖能源和氣候問題分析家的行列。他或許還是綠黨唯一的議會候選人。不僅如此，他還曾供職於全球管理咨詢公司麥肯錫。他的專長就是對那些讓傳統環保衛士昏昏欲睡的環境統計數據進行分析。
“很顯著的一件事就是，經濟衰退後，我們對於資源的使用出現大幅度的下降，”古多爾繼續說道，“幾年的時間裡就退回到1970年開始這項紀錄以來的倒數第二低點。盡管2010年和2011年的數據還未公布，但是，目前我們所消耗的物質極有可能要比以往任何時期都低。”
古多爾在撰寫一篇有關英國資源消耗方面的研究報告時發現了物質流計量的這一趨勢。這一意外發現令他吃驚不已：英國人的資源消耗量和垃圾生成量似乎都在不斷地減少。而讓他最為吃驚的是，消耗量似乎從新千年伊始就已經開始下降，而那個時候，經濟還依然處於快速增長的階段。
古多爾認為，2001年，英國的紙制品和硬紙板的消耗終於開始下滑。緊接著，2002年，一次能源，即各種化石燃料和其它能源資源產生的初級熱能和電力的消耗也開始減少。之後的一年，也就是2003年，（包括可再生性垃圾在內的）人均生活垃圾的數量開始下降。不久，商業和建築行業的垃圾產出也開始呈下降趨勢。
2004年，新車購置量開始減少。水資源的消耗也是同樣。其後的一年，2005年，家庭能源消耗開始減少（盡管之前一年的電力消耗由於冬季的異常寒冷而出現增長）。2006年，人們似乎對公路交通和鐵路交通失去了興趣。駕車和乘坐公共交通工具出行的平均裡程出現下滑。而這一切都是在GDP——還有人口數量——增長的同時發生的。
古多爾還指出，其它消費大類下滑持續的時間則要長些。盡管英國的農業密集度不斷增強、工業化程度的不斷提高令國民感到擔憂，但是，氮、磷、鉀等化肥的使用從1980年代起就開始呈下降趨勢。水泥的消耗也幾乎同期達到高點。
甚至我們的食物攝入也正在減少。雖然肥胖呈上升趨勢，但是，英國人的卡路裡攝入總量卻在半個世紀裡持續減少。而導致這種現像的原因就是，與上一代人相比，如今我們的運動量較少，同時居住環境也更為溫暖。更引人注意的或許是，作為環境問題而倍受關注的肉類食品攝入似乎從2003年起也開始減少。
古多爾的研究所傳達的信息似乎有悖常理。2008年金融危機之後，我們的物質消費或許有所減少，但是，在經濟繁榮的1990年代和2000年代，我們的物質消耗難道不是隨著GDP在亦步亦趨地增長嗎？
古多爾認為，答案是否定的。然而，他的論斷說得通嗎？一個很明顯的反方論據就是，我們將資源消耗型產業“外包”給了中國等其它發展中國家。要知道，各類研究報告已經證明，雖然英國國內的石油、煤炭、天然氣等資源的消耗正在減少，但是，如果將中國企業為我們生產的所有筆記本電腦、玩具、服裝等考慮在內的話，我們的碳排放卻在持續穩步地升高。
然而，奇怪的是，從整個資源的使用情況來看（從玉米到金屬的所有資源），同樣的結論卻似乎並不成立。至少，如果我們采信英國國家統計局公布的官方數字的話，情況就是如此。每年，國家統計局的統計人員都會統計英國的物質總需求，即我們所消耗的所有商品，以及國內外生產這些商品所消耗的全部物質的總量。
這些數字龐大的令人頭暈目眩。如果將礦產、燃料、農作物、動植物產品等加起來的話，英國每年消耗的物質大約在20億公噸左右，平攤到這個國家的每個人頭上就是30多公噸，其重量堪比四輛雙層巴士。（ 古多爾具體指的是四輛老式路霸巴士的重量，然而一些新型高效巴士的重量幾乎是老款的兩倍。）
盡管消耗率依然龐大，並且毋庸置疑是不可持續的，但是古多爾的觀點卻是，我們對於材料的需求最終有可能會呈現出下降的趨勢。特別令他感到興奮的是，在過去的數十年裡，我們的經濟獲得了顯著的增長，而資源的使用卻未出現明顯的增加。用行話來說就是，古多爾認為，英國最終實現了經濟增長與物質消耗的“脫鉤”。
如果這一觀點正確的話，這就意味著，我們已經實現了很多綠色評論員認為無法實現的目標。蒂姆•傑克遜在他2009年出版的一本非常具有影響力的書、《非增長式繁榮》中認為，當經濟能夠更加有效地利用資源的時候，實現真正的脫鉤，即資源消耗隨著GDP的增長而下降，卻依然是一個“神話”。這一觀點，以及由此而來的我們應該力爭實現零增長經濟的論點在環境領域廣泛得到認可。
根據英國國家統計局的數據，再結合自己的研究，古多爾向這一假設提出了挑戰。古多爾說：“2007年，金融危機爆發之前，我們的物質消耗總量與1989年的數字幾乎相等。盡管這些年間經濟規模已經增加了兩倍 。資源的消耗似乎在2001年達到了頂峰。這一時間點要比經濟增長停滯的蕭條期早了很多年。”
傑克遜非常認可古多爾的研究，稱其為“期待已久”，而且是 “一份政策層面非常缺乏、綠色經濟迫切需要的分析報告”。但是，他同時也提出了警告，認為不能簡單地得出結論。他指出，即便是我們自身對資源的消費開始減少，然而我們的經濟對這些資源的消耗卻可以一直保持增長，而這都應歸功於英國在全球商品市場的投資。傑克遜還補充道：“對於那些迫切希望實現非物質化增長的人而言，這些統計資料無疑是給他們潑了一頭冷水。”
新經濟基金會（nef）的安德魯·希姆斯也對英國“物質消耗達到頂峰”的意義提出了質疑。
“如果不跟地球的承載能力掛鉤，衡量環境影響的指標就沒有意義。要讓這些發現具有重要意義，我們就要證明我們正朝著能夠在生態承載能力限度內生存的方向發展。這麼看的話，我們離目標還遠著呢 。”
傑克遜和希姆斯說的沒錯，即便是英國的資源消耗開始減少，也救不了地球。全球範圍內資源的開采在增長，碳排放在增加，雨林面積在縮減，海洋在酸化，物種在消失。而解決這些問題遠不止是英國這樣的成熟經濟的資源消耗趨於穩定那麼簡單。
古多爾也承認，“我從未曾想過要否認世界正面臨著大規模的環境挑戰。但是，我發現的數據卻表明，經濟增長與應對挑戰之間有可能——只是有可能——並非無法兼顧。如果增長能夠幫助我們提高資源使用效率，從而實際減少我們的物質消耗的話，那麼，環保人士們所宣傳的零增長經濟就有待商榷。”
當回過頭來，從現實角度進行討論時，他補充說道，“盡管這只是一個很小的例子，但是，經濟增長，以及隨之而來的創新讓我們有了金讀，使我們可以不需消耗大量能源造紙就有書可讀。與實物相比，數字產品對環境的影響通常較小。如果增長能夠推動虛擬化進程，那麼，它對環境的影響就是積極的，而不是消極的。”
變得更環保的最佳途徑就是變得更富有。這種觀念由來已久。經濟學家西蒙·庫茲涅茨幾十年前提出，只有當國家達到一定的富裕程度的時候，才會開始降低他們對環境的影響。而在綠色環保領域，這種思想備受爭議。環保人士雖然承認貧窮國家需要發展經濟擺脫貧困，但是，對於傳統的以增長為導向的經濟與拯救地球二者之間是否能夠兼顧的問題，絕大多數人卻完全表示懷疑。
然而，一種支持增長的環保觀點卻浮出水面。今年年初， 馬克•萊納斯所著的《上帝的物種》一書引起了熱議。在這本書中，他打破禁忌，呼吁環保人士應接納轉基因（GM）食品、核能和以增長為核心的資本主義。萊納斯寫道，轉基因食品能夠讓世界上更多的原野免受人類侵擾；核能可以幫助我們擺脫對煤炭的依賴；經濟增長能夠讓我們戰勝全球貧困，能夠為技術革命提供所需的資金，從而使能源和商品的生產更加綠色環保。
希姆斯則認為，將經濟增長作為應對地球所面臨的災難的解決方案就是沒有抓住問題的關鍵。“一個重要的問題就是，經濟所產生的影響是否是有益的，這些影響是否在環境限度之內？如果我們想要創造一個安樂祥和的低碳世界的話，除了拼命地擴大經濟之外，還有更好的方式。需要記住的是，英國五十年來的GDP增長和資源消耗的增加並沒有使我們的生活滿意度增加。”
且不論古多爾的觀點從生態和經濟的角度引發了多少爭論，他的英國的資源消耗或許已經達到峰值的觀點也牽扯出很多有趣的問題，其中大部分都是最基本的問題：例如，這種說法是真的嗎？當全球經濟最終回暖時，怎麼才能確定資源消耗不會創新高？如果我們真的已經達到了峰值，我們是怎樣辦到的？是否只是因為轉為發展服務性經濟的原因？是應該歸功於互聯網，還是應該歸功於數十年來的綠色運動？是不是因為我們這個擁擠的島國已經容納不下新的建築、機動車和大件物品了？像eBay(在線拍賣和購物網站)和免費回收網(使可再利用的廢舊物品免遭填埋厄運的網站)這樣能夠延長商品流轉壽命的網站是否也是原因之一？還是因為有更多的人生活在城市裡？
如果我們能夠搞清楚英國的資源消耗是如何趨於平緩的話，或許其它國家就可以效法 。畢竟，對於一個人口快要達到90億的世界而言，在“物質消耗”這個問題上，還有什麼比“少即是多”這句話更有價值呢？
The only way is down
Consumption of “stuff” – the weight of all that we use – may have peaked in the UK in 2001 and begun to decline, a green analyst says. Duncan Clark explores Chris Goodall’s claim – and possible lessons.
The year 2001 was more eventful than most and, a decade on, we’re inundated with anniversaries [among them, those of the “9/11” terror attacks in the United States, the invasion of Afghanistan and the Gujarat earthquake]. With so many significant events to look back on, one thing that few people will remember 2001 for is its entry in the United Kingdom’s Material Flow Accounts, a set of dry and largely ignored data published annually by the Office for National Statistics.
But, according to environment writer Chris Goodall, those statistics tell an important story. “What the figures suggest”, Goodall says enthusiastically, “is that 2001 may turn out to be the year that the UK’s consumption of ‘stuff’ – the total weight of everything we use, from food and fuel to flat-pack furniture – reached its peak and began to decline.”
Quietly spoken but fiercely intelligent, Goodall is a consultant and author who, over the last decade or so, has established himself as a leading analyst on energy and climate issues. Probably the only Green Party parliamentary candidate who also used to work at the global management-consulting firm McKinsey, his speciality is trawling through environment statistics that would send traditional eco-warriors to sleep.
“One thing that’s remarkable is the sheer speed with which our resource use has crashed since the recession,” Goodall continues. “In the space of a couple of years, we’ve dropped back to the second-lowest level since we started keeping track in 1970. And although the figures aren’t yet available for 2010 and 2011, it seems highly likely that we are now using fewer materials than at any time on record.”
Goodall discovered the Material Flow Accounts while writing a research paper examining the UK’s consumption of resources. The pattern he stumbled upon caught him by surprise: time and time again, Britons seemed to be consuming fewer resources and producing less waste. What really surprised him was that consumption appears to have started dropping in the first years of the new millennium, when the economy was still rapidly growing.
In 2001, Goodall says, the UK’s consumption of paper and cardboard finally started to decline. This was followed, in 2002, by a fall in our use of primary energy: the raw heat and power generated by all fossil fuels and other energy sources. The following year, 2003, saw the start of a decline in the amount of household waste (including recycling) generated by each person in the country – a downward trend that before long could also be observed in the commercial and construction waste sectors.
In 2004, our purchases of new cars started to fall – as did our consumption of water. The next year, 2005, saw our household energy consumption starting to slump (notwithstanding an uptick last year due to the particularly cold winter). And in 2006 we seem to have got bored with roads and railways, with a decline in the average distance travelled on private and public transport. All of this while GDP – and population – went up.
Other consumption categories have been falling for much longer, Goodall points out. Despite concerns about the increasing intensity and industrialisation of our farming, the amount of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium fertilisers being applied to British fields has been falling since the 1980s. Our consumption of cement reached a peak at a similar time.
Even our intake of food is falling. Although obesity is on the rise, the total number of calories consumed by Britons has been on a downward slope for around half a century, driven by the fact that, compared with previous generations, we do less exercise now and live in warmer homes. Perhaps more remarkably, our intake of meat – the food most regularly highlighted as an environmental concern – seems to have been falling since 2003.
Goodall’s research sends a counter-intuitive message. We might expect to have been getting through less stuff since the financial crash of 2008; but surely throughout the boom years of the 1990s and 2000s, our rate of material consumption was steadily climbing in step with GDP?
Not according to Goodall. But do his claims stack up? One obvious counter-argument is the fact that we have “outsourced” our resource-hungry industries to China and other developing countries. After all, various reports have already made it clear that while the UK’s own use of oil, coal and gas is falling, our total carbon emissions, once you consider all Chinese factories producing our laptops, toys and clothes, continues to rise steadily.
Oddly, though, when it comes to overall resource use – everything from maize to metals – the same doesn’t seem to apply. At least, not if we believe the official figures from the Office of National Statistics. Each year, statisticians there estimate the UK’s Total Material Requirement, the grand total of all the goods we consume, plus all the materials used in the country and overseas to produce those goods.
The numbers are head-spinningly huge. Once you add up minerals, fuels, crops, wood and animal products, the UK churns its way through roughly two billion tonnes of stuff each year. That’s more than 30 tonnes for each man, woman and child in the country – a giant stack of raw materials as heavy as four double-decker buses. (Or, more specifically, as heavy as four old- fashioned Routemaster buses. In an exception to Goodall’s theory, some of the newer, more efficient buses are almost twice as heavy as the old ones.)
Although that’s still a massive – and doubtless unsustainable – rate of consumption, Goodall’s point is that our appetite for materials may finally be on a downward curve. In particular, he’s excited by the fact that over the past couple of decades, we’ve significantly grown the economy without noticeably increasing our resource use. To use the jargon, Goodall believes that Britain has finally “decoupled” economic growth and material consumption.
If correct, this means we’ve achieved something that many green commentators believed was impossible. In his influential 2009 book, Prosperity Without Growth, academic Tim Jackson argued that while economies could become more efficient in their use of resources, genuine decoupling – resource use falling while GDP rises – remained a “myth”. This view, and the argument that we therefore should aim for zero-growth economics, has become widely accepted in environment circles.
Goodall believes that the data from the Office of National Statistics, combined with his own research, challenges this assumption. “In 2007, just before the crash,” Goodall says, “our total use of materials was almost the same as it was in 1989, despite the economy having tripled in size in the intervening years. And the peak in resource use appears to have been in 2001 – many years before the recession halted economic growth.”
Jackson welcomed Goodall’s research, describing it as “long overdue” and “exactly the kind of analysis that is sadly lacking at policy level and desperately needed as the basis for a green economy”. But he also warned against drawing simple conclusions, pointing out that – thanks to Britain’s investments in the global commodity markets – our economy was continuing to increase resource use even if we had started consuming fewer of those resources ourselves. “For those hoping desperately for stuff-free growth”, Jackson added, “there is only cold comfort in these statistics.”
Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation (nef) also doubts the significance of the UK reaching “peak stuff”.
“Measures of our environmental impact are only meaningful when they’re related to the planet’s ability to keep up. For these findings to be significant, we’d need to be able to demonstrate that we’re on the way to being able to live within our ecological means. And on that measure we’re still a long way off target.”
Jackson and Simms are certainly right that – even if the UK has started consuming fewer resources – it’s hardly going to save the planet. Globally, resource extraction is rising, carbon emissions are climbing, rain forests are shrinking, oceans are acidifying and species are disappearing. Solving these problems will clearly take far more than stabilising resource use in mature economies like the UK.
Goodall acknowledges this. “I don’t want to suggest for a moment that the world doesn’t face massive environmental challenges. But the data I found does suggest the possibility – and it is only a possibility – that economic growth is not necessarily incompatible with addressing these challenges. If growth helps us get more efficient in our use of resources, and actually reduces our consumption of material things, then environmentalists may be very wrong to campaign for a zero-growth economy.”
Bringing the debate back to earth, he adds: “It is a trivial example but economic growth, and the innovation that comes with it, have given us the Kindle, a way of allowing us to read books without the high-energy consumption required to make paper. Digital goods generally have lower environmental impact than physical equivalents and if growth speeds up the process of ‘dematerialisation’, it has positive – not negative – environmental effects.”
The idea that the best way to get greener may be to get richer isn’t a new one. Economist Simon Kuznets argued decades ago that only when countries get to a certain level of wealth do they start to reduce their environmental impact. In green circles, however, such thinking is controversial. While environmentalists accept that poor countries need to grow economically to lift themselves out of poverty, most are thoroughly sceptical that conventional growth-focused economics is compatible with saving the planet from impending disaster.
There is, however, an emerging pro-growth seam of environmental thinking. Earlier this year, writer Mark Lynas caused a stir with his book The God Species, in which he broke a trio of green taboos by calling for environmentalists to embrace genetically modified (GM) foods, nuclear power and growth-based capitalism. GM food would allow us to leave more of the world as wilderness, Lynas wrote; nuclear energy would help us wean ourselves off coal; and climbing economic growth would give us the best chance of combating global poverty and funding the technical revolution required to green our production of energy and goods.
Simms says that to call for economic growth as the solution to the planet’s woes is to miss the point. “The important question is this: is your economy doing something useful, and doing it within environmental boundaries? If we want to create a happy, low-carbon world, there are better ways to do that than slavishly trying to enlarge our economies. Bear in mind that 50 years of GDP growth and increasing resource use in the UK has done nothing to increase our life satisfaction.”
Ecological and economic arguments aside, Goodall’s suggestion that the UK may have reached the point of maximum resource use throws up lots of interesting questions. Most fundamentally: is it definitely true? How can we be sure that consumption won’t soar to new, even greater, highs when the global economy eventually picks up? And if we really have reached a peak, how did we get there? Was it just a matter of shifting to a more service-based economy? Can the Internet – or even decades of green campaigning – claim the credit? Or could it be that our densely packed little island is running out of space for new buildings, vehicles and bulky goods? Could eBay [an online auction and shopping website] and Freecycle [a network that diverts reusable items from landfills] be a factor, helping to keep more goods in circulation for longer? Or the fact that more of us are living in cities?
If we can understand how we levelled off British resource use, perhaps that information could help other countries do the same. After all, in a world that may soon be home to nine billion people, there can be fewer more important messages than – when it comes to “stuff” – less can be more.
But, according to environment writer Chris Goodall, those statistics tell an important story. “What the figures suggest”, Goodall says enthusiastically, “is that 2001 may turn out to be the year that the UK’s consumption of ‘stuff’ – the total weight of everything we use, from food and fuel to flat-pack furniture – reached its peak and began to decline.”
Quietly spoken but fiercely intelligent, Goodall is a consultant and author who, over the last decade or so, has established himself as a leading analyst on energy and climate issues. Probably the only Green Party parliamentary candidate who also used to work at the global management-consulting firm McKinsey, his speciality is trawling through environment statistics that would send traditional eco-warriors to sleep.
“One thing that’s remarkable is the sheer speed with which our resource use has crashed since the recession,” Goodall continues. “In the space of a couple of years, we’ve dropped back to the second-lowest level since we started keeping track in 1970. And although the figures aren’t yet available for 2010 and 2011, it seems highly likely that we are now using fewer materials than at any time on record.”
Goodall discovered the Material Flow Accounts while writing a research paper examining the UK’s consumption of resources. The pattern he stumbled upon caught him by surprise: time and time again, Britons seemed to be consuming fewer resources and producing less waste. What really surprised him was that consumption appears to have started dropping in the first years of the new millennium, when the economy was still rapidly growing.
In 2001, Goodall says, the UK’s consumption of paper and cardboard finally started to decline. This was followed, in 2002, by a fall in our use of primary energy: the raw heat and power generated by all fossil fuels and other energy sources. The following year, 2003, saw the start of a decline in the amount of household waste (including recycling) generated by each person in the country – a downward trend that before long could also be observed in the commercial and construction waste sectors.
In 2004, our purchases of new cars started to fall – as did our consumption of water. The next year, 2005, saw our household energy consumption starting to slump (notwithstanding an uptick last year due to the particularly cold winter). And in 2006 we seem to have got bored with roads and railways, with a decline in the average distance travelled on private and public transport. All of this while GDP – and population – went up.
Other consumption categories have been falling for much longer, Goodall points out. Despite concerns about the increasing intensity and industrialisation of our farming, the amount of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium fertilisers being applied to British fields has been falling since the 1980s. Our consumption of cement reached a peak at a similar time.
Even our intake of food is falling. Although obesity is on the rise, the total number of calories consumed by Britons has been on a downward slope for around half a century, driven by the fact that, compared with previous generations, we do less exercise now and live in warmer homes. Perhaps more remarkably, our intake of meat – the food most regularly highlighted as an environmental concern – seems to have been falling since 2003.
Goodall’s research sends a counter-intuitive message. We might expect to have been getting through less stuff since the financial crash of 2008; but surely throughout the boom years of the 1990s and 2000s, our rate of material consumption was steadily climbing in step with GDP?
Not according to Goodall. But do his claims stack up? One obvious counter-argument is the fact that we have “outsourced” our resource-hungry industries to China and other developing countries. After all, various reports have already made it clear that while the UK’s own use of oil, coal and gas is falling, our total carbon emissions, once you consider all Chinese factories producing our laptops, toys and clothes, continues to rise steadily.
Oddly, though, when it comes to overall resource use – everything from maize to metals – the same doesn’t seem to apply. At least, not if we believe the official figures from the Office of National Statistics. Each year, statisticians there estimate the UK’s Total Material Requirement, the grand total of all the goods we consume, plus all the materials used in the country and overseas to produce those goods.
The numbers are head-spinningly huge. Once you add up minerals, fuels, crops, wood and animal products, the UK churns its way through roughly two billion tonnes of stuff each year. That’s more than 30 tonnes for each man, woman and child in the country – a giant stack of raw materials as heavy as four double-decker buses. (Or, more specifically, as heavy as four old- fashioned Routemaster buses. In an exception to Goodall’s theory, some of the newer, more efficient buses are almost twice as heavy as the old ones.)
Although that’s still a massive – and doubtless unsustainable – rate of consumption, Goodall’s point is that our appetite for materials may finally be on a downward curve. In particular, he’s excited by the fact that over the past couple of decades, we’ve significantly grown the economy without noticeably increasing our resource use. To use the jargon, Goodall believes that Britain has finally “decoupled” economic growth and material consumption.
If correct, this means we’ve achieved something that many green commentators believed was impossible. In his influential 2009 book, Prosperity Without Growth, academic Tim Jackson argued that while economies could become more efficient in their use of resources, genuine decoupling – resource use falling while GDP rises – remained a “myth”. This view, and the argument that we therefore should aim for zero-growth economics, has become widely accepted in environment circles.
Goodall believes that the data from the Office of National Statistics, combined with his own research, challenges this assumption. “In 2007, just before the crash,” Goodall says, “our total use of materials was almost the same as it was in 1989, despite the economy having tripled in size in the intervening years. And the peak in resource use appears to have been in 2001 – many years before the recession halted economic growth.”
Jackson welcomed Goodall’s research, describing it as “long overdue” and “exactly the kind of analysis that is sadly lacking at policy level and desperately needed as the basis for a green economy”. But he also warned against drawing simple conclusions, pointing out that – thanks to Britain’s investments in the global commodity markets – our economy was continuing to increase resource use even if we had started consuming fewer of those resources ourselves. “For those hoping desperately for stuff-free growth”, Jackson added, “there is only cold comfort in these statistics.”
Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation (nef) also doubts the significance of the UK reaching “peak stuff”.
“Measures of our environmental impact are only meaningful when they’re related to the planet’s ability to keep up. For these findings to be significant, we’d need to be able to demonstrate that we’re on the way to being able to live within our ecological means. And on that measure we’re still a long way off target.”
Jackson and Simms are certainly right that – even if the UK has started consuming fewer resources – it’s hardly going to save the planet. Globally, resource extraction is rising, carbon emissions are climbing, rain forests are shrinking, oceans are acidifying and species are disappearing. Solving these problems will clearly take far more than stabilising resource use in mature economies like the UK.
Goodall acknowledges this. “I don’t want to suggest for a moment that the world doesn’t face massive environmental challenges. But the data I found does suggest the possibility – and it is only a possibility – that economic growth is not necessarily incompatible with addressing these challenges. If growth helps us get more efficient in our use of resources, and actually reduces our consumption of material things, then environmentalists may be very wrong to campaign for a zero-growth economy.”
Bringing the debate back to earth, he adds: “It is a trivial example but economic growth, and the innovation that comes with it, have given us the Kindle, a way of allowing us to read books without the high-energy consumption required to make paper. Digital goods generally have lower environmental impact than physical equivalents and if growth speeds up the process of ‘dematerialisation’, it has positive – not negative – environmental effects.”
The idea that the best way to get greener may be to get richer isn’t a new one. Economist Simon Kuznets argued decades ago that only when countries get to a certain level of wealth do they start to reduce their environmental impact. In green circles, however, such thinking is controversial. While environmentalists accept that poor countries need to grow economically to lift themselves out of poverty, most are thoroughly sceptical that conventional growth-focused economics is compatible with saving the planet from impending disaster.
There is, however, an emerging pro-growth seam of environmental thinking. Earlier this year, writer Mark Lynas caused a stir with his book The God Species, in which he broke a trio of green taboos by calling for environmentalists to embrace genetically modified (GM) foods, nuclear power and growth-based capitalism. GM food would allow us to leave more of the world as wilderness, Lynas wrote; nuclear energy would help us wean ourselves off coal; and climbing economic growth would give us the best chance of combating global poverty and funding the technical revolution required to green our production of energy and goods.
Simms says that to call for economic growth as the solution to the planet’s woes is to miss the point. “The important question is this: is your economy doing something useful, and doing it within environmental boundaries? If we want to create a happy, low-carbon world, there are better ways to do that than slavishly trying to enlarge our economies. Bear in mind that 50 years of GDP growth and increasing resource use in the UK has done nothing to increase our life satisfaction.”
Ecological and economic arguments aside, Goodall’s suggestion that the UK may have reached the point of maximum resource use throws up lots of interesting questions. Most fundamentally: is it definitely true? How can we be sure that consumption won’t soar to new, even greater, highs when the global economy eventually picks up? And if we really have reached a peak, how did we get there? Was it just a matter of shifting to a more service-based economy? Can the Internet – or even decades of green campaigning – claim the credit? Or could it be that our densely packed little island is running out of space for new buildings, vehicles and bulky goods? Could eBay [an online auction and shopping website] and Freecycle [a network that diverts reusable items from landfills] be a factor, helping to keep more goods in circulation for longer? Or the fact that more of us are living in cities?
If we can understand how we levelled off British resource use, perhaps that information could help other countries do the same. After all, in a world that may soon be home to nine billion people, there can be fewer more important messages than – when it comes to “stuff” – less can be more.
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