Squandermania never went away

5 2 July 

e can have it all; that is the promise of

our age. We can own every gadget we are

capable of imagining – and quite a few

that we are not. We can live like mon-

archs without compromising the Earth’s

capacity to sustain us. The promise that makes all this

possible is that as economies develop, they become

more efﬁcient in their use of resources. In other words,

they decouple.

There are two kinds of decoupling: relative and abso-

lute. Relative decoupling means using less stuff with

every unit of economic growth. Absolute decoupling

means a total reduction in the use of resources, even

though the economy continues to grow. Almost all econ-

omists believe that decoupling – relative or absolute

– is an inexorable feature of economic growth.

On this notion rests the concept of sustainable devel-

opment. It sits at the heart of the climate talks in Paris

next month and of every other summit on environmen-

tal issues. But it appears to be unfounded.

A paper published earlier this year in Proceedings of

the National Academy of Sciences proposes that even

the relative decoupling we claim to have achieved is an

artefact of false accounting. It points out that govern-

ments and economists have measured our impacts in

a way that seems irrational.

Here’s how the false accounting works. It takes the

raw materials we extract in our own countries, adds

them to our imports of stuff from other countries, then

subtracts our exports, to end up with something called

“domestic material consumption”. But by measuring

only the products shifted from one nation to another,

rather than the raw materials needed to create those

products, it greatly underestimates the total use of

resources by the rich nations.

For example, if ores are mined and processed at

home, these raw materials, as well as the machinery

and infrastructure used to make ﬁnished metal, are

included in the domestic material consumption

accounts. But if we buy a ﬁnished product from abroad,

only the weight of the metal is counted. So as mining

and manufacturing shift from countries like the UK and

the US to countries like China and India, the rich nations

appear to be using fewer resources. A more rational

measure, called the 'material footprint', includes all the

raw materials an economy uses, wherever they happen

to be extracted. When these are taken into account, the

apparent improvements in efﬁciency disappear.

In the UK, for example, the absolute decoupling that

the domestic material consumption accounts appear to

show is replaced with an entirely different chart. Not

only is there no absolute decoupling; there is no rela-

tive decoupling either. In fact, until the ﬁnancial crisis

in 2007, the graph was heading in the opposite direc-

tion: even relative to the rise in our gross domestic

product, our economy was becoming less efﬁcient in

its use of materials. Against all predictions, a re-cou-

pling was taking place.

While the OECD has claimed that the richest coun-

tries have halved the intensity with which they use

resources, the new analysis suggests that in the EU, the

US, Japan and the other rich nations, there have been

“no improvements in resource productivity at all”. This

is astonishing news. It appears to makes a nonsense of

by George Monbiot

Squandermania

never went away

The belief that economic growth has been

decoupled from environmental destruction was

of course based on an accounting mistake

While the OECD has claimed that

the richest countries have halved

the intensity with which they use

resources, the new analysis suggests

that in rich nations, there have been “no

improvements in resource productivity at

all”. This is astonishing

ENVIRONMENT

July  5 3

While the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions

ofﬁcially fell by 194 million tonnes between

1990 and 2012, this apparent reduction is more

than cancelled out by the CO2 we commission

through buying stuff from abroad

everything we have been told about the trajec-

tory of our environmental impacts.

I sent the paper to one of Britain’s leading

thinkers on this issue, Chris Goodall, who has

argued that the UK appears to have reached

“peak stuff”: in other words that there has been

a total reduction in our use of resources, other-

wise known as absolute decoupling. What did

he think?

To his great credit, he responded that

“broadly, of course, they are right”, even

though the new analysis appears to undermine

the case he has made. He did have some reser-

vations, however, particularly about the way in

which the impacts of construction are calcu-

lated. I also consulted the country’s leading

academic expert on the subject, Professor John

Barrett. He told me that he and his colleagues

had conducted a similar analysis, in this case

of the UK’s energy use and greenhouse gas

emissions “and we ﬁnd a similar pattern”. One

of his papers reveals that while the UK’s carbon

dioxide emissions ofﬁcially fell by 194 million

tonnes between 1990 and 2012, this apparent

reduction is more than cancelled out by the CO2

we commission through buying stuff from

abroad. This rose by 280m tonnes in the same

period.

Dozens of other papers come to similar con-

clusions. For example, a report published in

the journal Global Environmental Change found

that with every doubling of income, a country

needs one third more land and ocean to sup-

port its economy, because of the rise in its

consumption of animal products. A recent

paper in the journal Resources found that the

global consumption of materials has risen by

94% over 30 years, and has accelerated since

2000. “For the past 10 years, not even a rela-

tive decoupling was achieved on the global

level”.

We can persuade ourselves that we are living

on thin air, ﬂoating through a weightless econ-

omy, as gullible futurologists predicted in the

1990s. But it’s an illusion, created by the irra-

tional accounting of our environmental impacts.

This illusion permits an apparent reconciliation

of incompatible policies.

Governments urge us both to consume more

and to conserve more. We must extract more

fossil fuel from the ground, but burn less of it.

We should reduce, reuse and recycle the stuff

that enters our homes, and at the same time

increase, discard and replace it. How else can

the consumer economy grow? We should eat

less meat, to protect the living planet, and eat

more meat, to boost the farming industry.

These policies are irreconcilable. The new anal-

yses suggest that economic growth is the

problem, whether or not the word sustainable

is bolted to the front of it.

It’s not just that we don’t address this contra-

diction. Scarcely anyone dares even to name it.

It’s as if the issue is too big, too frightening to

contemplate. We seem unable to face the fact

that our utopia is also our dystopia; that pro-

duction appears to be indistinguishable from

destruction.

This article ﬁrst appeared in the Guardian

newspaper. www.monbiot.com

Two aspects of ‘decoupling’

Human well-being

Economic activity (GDP)

Resource use

Environmental impact

TIME

THE CONCEPT OF DECOUPLING

(UNEP, 2011)

Resource decoupling

Impact decoupling