Excerpt from my upcoming book, chapter 6, on the global equitable burn rate:
"Imagine you're in line at a buffet,” I say. “You're near the front of the line, because you're a white American middle class guy. The table is piled with food. Everyone ahead of you in line is loading up their plates in a frenzy, some people even are getting wheelbarrows and shoveling stuff in. Got the picture?”
“Sure. Feeding frenzy at the buffet,” he smiles. We’ve always been a sucker for buffets.
“Now look behind you,” I say. “What do you see?"
His smile fades. "--Oh. I see about eight billion people, don’t I."
I nod. "And you start to wonder if there is enough food for all of them, too. You start to ponder the ethical implications of taking more food than you really need."
"That's quite a metaphor," he says. "The food on the table represents global GDP, doesn't it."
"That's right,” I say. “But it's not as simple as dividing global GDP by population and saying that's what's fair. Because the global economy is consuming resources at a rate that would take more than one earth to supply. There’s actually too much food on the table. So the sustainable fair share of consumption is GDP divided by the global human footprint, divided by population."
"What is that number?" he asks.
"A little over seven thousand dollars a year," I say. “As far as calculations go, you can make all kinds of arguments against it. If everyone only spent seven grand, the economy would collapse. It doesn't take into account the impact of specific purchasing decisions, like taking a train vs flying. Seven thousand dollars consumes more in rural Ohio than it does in New York City." I wave my hand. "It's just a rough calculation, a guideline, not a precise moral mandate. It paints a picture of how ridiculously out of bounds the normal western lifestyle expectation is. The standard American lifestyle is not a few small eco-consumerist tweaks away from a sustainable civilization. Also, having this number in mind can help with eco-analysis paralysis."
"You mean like how people agonize over whether they should buy a stainless steel straw to drink out of rather than use disposable recycled paper ones?"
"Yeah,” I say. “People agonize over tiny bullshit like that when they're blowing seventy a year like I was, flying to Bali for yoga retreats for a long weekend and burning a barrel of gasoline every weekend going to the mountains. The sustainable equitable consumption calculation is nice because it gives you something to aim for and you can focus on more important stuff than if your fucking toothbrush handle is made from ethically sourced bamboo or not."
“But does it matter?” he asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Will a few people reducing their consumption to the global equitable burn rate make a difference?”
“Of course not,” I say. “That’s not the point. The point is that learning how to build a good life that doesn’t cost so much money is a prerequisite for becoming a post-consumer and blazing the path to the successor cultures that will, one way or another, consume no more than the carrying capacity of the earth and make space for people to live better lives. It’s a way to deprogram consumer ideology in your own mind. It’s a way to crowbar your way to economic freedom as quickly as possible. And, as someone who claims to be bothered by the fact that global civilization is in overshoot, it’s a way of putting your money where your mouth is. It is, in other words, a matter of character. There’s a whole bucket of reasons to do it and very few good ones not to.”
Reading
The GDP Buffet metaphor is from Jim Merkel’s book Radical Simplicity, which I highly recommend.