The climate emergency invites no end of finger pointing and it mainly comes down to rich countries getting the blame because, well, climate change.
Overall, rich countries have enjoyed a measure of prosperity that is tied to decades of heavy greenhouse gas emissions. We used abundant, cheap fossil fuel energy to drive economic growth. We got so good at it, we were able to consume Earth's natural resources at massively unsustainable levels. That's called "overshoot" and it's a time bomb.
The Lancet is an esteemed medical journal out of the UK. Over the years it has branched out into tangential issues. One of these is The Lancet, Planetary Health. The latest issue contains a paper, "National Reponsibility for Ecological Breakdown," that looks at which nations have been gorging themselves on both biological and mineral (including fossil fuel) resources, driving the world into perilous overshoot.
The conclusion: high-income nations are the primary drivers of global ecological breakdown and they need to urgently reduce their resource use to fair and sustainable levels. Achieving sufficient reductions will likely require high-income nations to adopt transformative post-growth and degrowth approaches.
Global material use has increased markedly over the past half century, to the point where, as of 2017, the world economy is consuming over 90 billion tonnes of materials per year—well in excess of what industrial ecologists consider to be the sustainable limit. This increasing trend holds across all categories of materials, including biomass, metals, non-metallic minerals, and fossil fuels.
However, not all nations are equally responsible for this trend; some nations use substantially more resources per capita than others.
The results indicate that the USA is the single largest contributor to excess resource use and is responsible for 27% of the world total. EU countries and the UK are together responsible for 25% of the world total of excess resource use. China, an upper–middle-income country, is responsible for 15%, and the rest of the Global South (ie, the low-income and middle-income countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia) is responsible for 8%. There are 58 countries, representing 3·6 billion people, that have remained within their fair shares of the boundary over the whole period from 1970–2017 (including India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and other large populous countries), and therefore bear no responsibility for excess resource use, according to our analysis.
National responsibility for excess resource use has changed over the period analysed. Although the USA's overshoot has grown consistently in absolute terms, its share of global overshoot has gradually diminished over the past two decades. A similar trend is visible for Europe and other high-income nations. This change is due primarily to increasing resource use in China, which is mostly comprised of construction materials. China's overshoot began only in 2001, but has grown rapidly in the years since.
The paper presents a rogues gallery of nations contributing most to ecological breakdown. There's good news and bad news. The good news - Australia is the worst, per capita. The bad news - Canada is a close second, tucked between Australia and third place, USA.
Our results show that high-income nations need to urgently scale down aggregate resource use to sustainable levels. On average, resource use needs to decline by at least 70% to reach the sustainable range. Such reductions will require strong legislation on both domestic extraction and material footprints. The European Parliament recently took steps in this direction by calling on the European Commission to adopt binding targets to reduce resource footprints by 2030 and bring them within planetary boundaries by 2050.
It is unlikely that such reductions can be achieved while pursuing economic growth. There is no evidence of long-term absolute decoupling of economic growth from resource use occurring either in historical data or in modelled projections, even under high-efficiency scenarios.
Indeed, global gross domestic product (GDP) and global resource use are tightly coupled, and have increased in parallel for 50 years, despite substantial technological innovation and an increase in the contribution of services to GDP.
Therefore, the transition to sustainable levels of resource use will probably require adopting transformative post-growth and degrowth approaches, including abandoning GDP growth as a goal, reducing inequality, and organising the economy around human needs, while scaling down unnecessary commodity production.
Empirical evidence shows that degrowth strategies can be deployed to achieve substantial reductions in resource use while providing good lives for all people.
However, such a shift will require confronting the powerful network of think tanks, trade associations, lobby groups, philanthropic foundations, and other actors that develop and spread misinformation (such as so-called green growth narratives) in an attempt to legitimise an unsustainable status quo.
This paper identifies an inescapable problem. It's not going away, certainly not on its own. Most politicians continue to pursue GDP growth - perpetual, exponential growth. They see growth as the solution to their problems even though it is the problem, especially for future generations. The scary part is that we're not just chasing the unattainable goal of perpetual, exponential growth - we're totally dependent on its continuation.
We have a weak sense of this dangerous predicament. We'll clog up a city with angry truckers who consider vaccination an affront to their personal liberties. That is not a society much interested in "degrowth strategies" or reductions in resource use.
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