Consume more, conserve more: sorry, but we just can’t do both | George Monbiot
by George Monbiot from on (#VMHT)
Economic growth is tearing the planet apart, and new research suggests that it can't be reconciled with sustainability
We 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 monarchs 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 absolute. 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 economists believe that decoupling - relative or absolute - is an inexorable feature of economic growth.
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