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The culprit: Consumption or population growth?
The number 32 didn’t mean much to me until today, when I read an op-ed by the amazing Jared Diamond in The New York Times. According to him:
“To mathematicians, 32 is an interesting number: it’s 2 raised to the fifth power, 2 times 2 times 2 times 2 times 2. To economists, 32 is even more special, because it measures the difference in lifestyles between the first world and the developing world. The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.”
We all know that many are concerned about the world population, but Diamond argues that we should be concerned with consumption and who consumes what and how much. He argues that growing population is not the problem because the part of the world where population is growing fastest is where there is least consumption. To read more, check out the article.
Jared Diamond is also the author of Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs and Steel and Collapse, a study of environmental degradation and its role in the breakdown of historical societies.