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This article was downloaded by: [Giorgio Nebbia] On: 01 May 2012, At: 09:13 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Capitalism Nature Socialism Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: ht t p:/ / www.tand fonli ne.com/ loi/ rcns 20 The Unsustainability of Sustainability Giorgio Nebbia Available online: 01 May 2012 To cite this article: G i orgio N ebbia ( 2012 ): The U nsust ainabil i t y of S us t ainabil i t y, C apit ali s m N atur e S oci al i sm, 23 :2, 95-107 T o link t o this art icle: ht t p:/ / dx.doi. org / 10.108 0/ 10455752.2012.675236 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms- and-conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.

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This article was downloaded by: [Giorgio Nebbia]On: 01 May 2012, At: 09:13Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

Capitalism Nature SocialismPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:ht tp:/ / www.t andfonline.com/ loi/ rcns20

The Unsustainability ofSustainabilityGiorgio Nebbia

Available online: 01 May 2012

To cite this article: Giorgio Nebbia (2012): The Unsustainabil it y of Sustainabil ity,

Capit alism Nature Socialism, 23:2, 95-107

To link to this art icle: http:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 10455752.2012.675236

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expresslyforbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make anyrepresentation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up todate. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should beindependently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable

for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damageswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith or arising out of the use of this material.

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ESSAY  

The Unsustainability of Sustainability 

Giorgio Nebbia* 

The 20th century has been one of hopes and disappointments. Thepopulation of the world has increased almost fivefold, which has entailed a tenfoldincrease in the demand for food, energy, metals, space, housing, and water. There hasalso been a tenfold increase in the number of people living in urban agglomerations.How long can this last? The early doubts on the continuous growth of the populationand of the goods and services may be found in the works of Malthus, who in 1798published what was known as the ‘‘first essay’’ on population (Anon. 1798), arguing that no matter what technical efforts are made, planet Earth cannot provide thenatural resources from which ‘‘food’’ (and by extension water, energy, paper, etc.)can be extracted in sufficient quantities to support the continuous growth of theworld population.

This position * though Malthus had no way of knowing it * derives from anecological knowledge that recognizes the existence of physical and biological limits tothe resources of nature. The relentless removal of natural resources  * water, minerals,fossil fuels, agricultural products and animals * from physically limited reserves andspaces means that the extent of these resources not only does not grow along with thepopulation, but that these resources decrease as the population grows. In addition,the transformation of natural resources into goods and objects entails the productionof residuals and wastes whose emission into natural bodies * water, the soil, and theair * degrades the quality of such bodies and makes them less usable for human

purposes. As far back as 1865, the British economist William Stanley Jevons (1906)asked himself how long his country’s coal reserves could last if they continued to beexploited at the rate he observed. The subsequent discovery of extensive petroleumdeposits obviated the problem of the exhaustion of coal reserves feared by Jevons, andmost British coalmines were gradually closed before they were fully exploited.

In the last century, ecologists and biologists have recognized that each territory of the biosphere has limited resources and a limited capacity to sustain life. In the

*[email protected]

ISSN 1045-5752 print/ISSN 1548-3290 online

# 2012 The Center for Political Ecology  www.cnsjournal.org 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2012.675236

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mid-19th century, Justus von Liebig explained that in a given area of land, thescarcity of even a single nutritional element for a crop was sufficient to cause a decline in harvests. The early decades of the 19th century saw an increase in theknowledge of biological cycles and equilibria. It was realized that the number of 

individual animals that can live in a pasture or lake depends on the amount of spaceand food available. As the animal population grows and the availability of space andfood consequently decreases, self-limitation mechanisms come into play, and thepopulations slow their growth until they reach a  ‘‘limit,’’ which is the carrying capacity of the territory in question. It is possible that the toxification of theenvironment by metabolic wastes will lead to population decline.

In the 1930s, in what has been called the Golden Age of ecology, variousscientists * the American Alfred Lotka, the Italian Vito Volterra, the Soviet Georgi

Gause, the French-Russian A. Kostitzin, and others * elaborated mathematicaltreatments of the ‘‘laws’’ that describe population growth and decline in confinedspaces and with a limited availability of resources and competition among populations living in the same environment. The books of the biologists UmbertoD’ Ancona (1942) and George Evelyn Hutchinson (1978) offer excellent reviews of the early reconnaissance of the limited carrying capacity of the Earth. In the samedecades that human society experienced an unexpected increase in technologicalinnovations and available sources of energy and resources, there was also a corresponding rise in available commodities. Such abundant growth worked todismiss any pessimistic view of the future.

The cornucopians * the great-grandchildren of Condorcet and Godwin, theauthors against whom Malthus wrote his essay  * hold that adequate politicalstructures and inventions are able to make available a growing quantity of goodsfor a growing population, which can look forward to a future of plenty and affluence.Major optimistic writings include those produced in the 1920s in the series Today and Tomorrow , published by Kegan Paul in London and Dutton in New York. In the1950s, various forecasts of the use of natural and energy resources were published inthe volumes Resources for Freedom  (Paley Commission 1952) and other books andessays (Putnam 1953; Landsberg, et al. 1963; Barnett and Morse 1963; Kahn and Wiener 1967; Weinberg and Hammond 1971; and Smith 1979).

 A deeper insight into the relations between ‘‘technical’’ activities and thesurrounding environment began in the 1950s with the protest movements againstthe explosion of atomic bombs in the atmosphere. The bomb testing released largequantities of long-lasting radioactive isotopes in the earth’s atmosphere and thence

into living systems * 

soil, plants, animals, and humans. Protests also erupted againstthe use and abuse of synthetic chlorinated pesticides, another source of poisoning of the planetary biosphere, which was denounced by Rachel Carson in her landmark book  Silent Spring  (1962).

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In reaction to these acts of violence against nature, a segment of the public in theindustrialized countries, who live in a situation of satisfied needs, demanded an endor limit to actions that could damage the health of present and future generations.Their pressure led to the nuclear test ban treaties, the prohibition of the use of DDT,

and various antipollution laws. At the same time, a number of economists andintellectuals (Galbraith 1958; Kapp 1963; Marcuse 1964; Hardin 1968; Ehrlich1968; Boulding 1970; Commoner 1971; Georgescu-Roegen 1974) recognized thevery root of the ecological crisis in the myth of economic ‘‘growth’’ and the endlessincrease of its only form of measurement, the individual money income, or thenational Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

In this climate, a protest movement grew involving students and workers,starting in Berkeley in 1964 and then spreading to Germany, France, and Italy. In

Europe it is often belittlingly labelled the ‘‘’68 Movement.’’ The ‘‘movement’’protested against, among other things, the devastating effects that economic growthin industrialized countries had on the rights of individuals and poor classes and onthe natural environment, continuously contaminated and depleted by the destructionof forests, the expansion of cities, traffic, polluting industries, goods and machineries(Nebbia 1994). As far as I know, the first use of the word ‘‘dedevelopment,’’ as aninvitation to stop such crises, was by Paul Ehrlich in an article in the journalChemistry , in February 1970.

The ferment of this climate was clearly understood by the Italian intellectual andentrepreneur Aurelio Peccei, who invited a group of engineers to investigate thepossible future of humanity. Peccei commissioned Jay Forrester, an Americanspecialist in systems analysis, and his colleagues, the Meadows, to formulate a forecasting model. They essentially rewrote and numerically solved some of Lotka and Volterra ’s differential equations, introducing factors of slowdown and decline inhuman population growth under the effect of the production of commodities andresulting pollution. In early 1971, their first results began to circulate. A specialecological commission of the Italian Senate (Senato della Reppublica 1971) analyzedtheir work, and a special issue of the journal The Ecologist released an advanced copy of their report in January 1972. The final results were set out in The Limits to Growth , published in May 1972 (Meadows, et al. 1972), to coincide with the UnitedNations conference on the human environment, held in Stockholm. The book  * 

substantially a manifesto of what has subsequently come to be known as‘‘degrowth’’ * contains economic and social forecasts projected to an unspecifieddate in the 21st  century. It did not say what will  happen, but what could happen inthe case of a concatenation of events affecting the whole of the Earth ’s population:

. if   the population grows, so will demand for food, materials, and goods;

. if   the demand for food grows, agricultural production will have to increase;

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. if  agricultural production increases, the use of fertilisers and pesticides will haveto increase also, triggering further depletion and erosion of arable land;

. if  the depletion of land increases, agricultural production will decrease and with

it the supply of food;

. if  the supply of food falls, the number of undernourished or starving people willincrease;

. if  the demand for materials, energy, and goods increases, industrial productionand the extraction of minerals, water, and fuels from natural reserves willincrease;

. if  the depletion of reserves of natural economic resources increases, there will bean increase in wars and conflicts for the conquest of scarce resources;

. if   industrial production increases, environmental pollution and contaminationwill increase;

. if   environmental contamination increases, human health will be impaired.

In short, if  the population continues to grow (in 1970 the world population was

3.7 billion and is increasing at the rate of 70 million a year; in 2011 worldpopulation reached 7 billion, still rising by 70 million a year), there will be anincrease in the conditions * disease, epidemics, hunger, wars and conflicts * that leadto a decrease * perhaps a traumatic one * in the rate of growth of the humanpopulation and economies. In order to avoid traumatic situations, a rapid decline inthe growth rate of the population (with a consequent slowing in agricultural andindustrial production and environmental degradation) should be sought. This wouldhelp achieve a stationary society, as suggested much earlier by economists like JohnStuart Mill (1865) and Cecil Pigou (1935).

The book published by the Peccei Club of Rome met with contrasting reactions.One was enthusiastic. The book seemed to indicate one way of achieving anecological and economic balance. Its recipe provided one response to the ferment of student protest, ecological protest, and the claims of workers and underdevelopedcountries. It also spoke to the sudden spike in the prices of raw materials andcommodities that had begun in the autumn of 1973. Authoritative figures,enchanted by the publicity received by the book, argued that the ‘‘limits’’ couldbe incorporated into government programs. Sicco Mansholt made them into a 

manifesto that attracted some public support.

The other reaction was condemnation, with attacks from various fronts. Thefirst and most authoritative was that of vested economic interests, which saw the callfor a slowdown in economic growth as a form of subversion that would threaten

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business, products, industry, and technological development. It mattered little thatthe call to limit growth came from a group that also included authoritativerepresentatives of the industrial and financial establishment. At that time, they werelabelled class traitors who were spellbound and taken in by the tall tales of 

ecologists * or even communist infiltrators * who preached a halt to the growth of capitalist countries in order to open the gates to the bolshevization of the world.

 Another barrage of attacks came from professional economists, who accused thebook ’s authors of ignorance. They argued that the economy was able to cope, andhad always coped, with the problems of scarcity of resources and money  * indeed,economics was by definition the science of facing scarcity. Problems had always beenand would always be overcome by market providence, which had been invented forthe precise purpose of leading us towards the alternative materials and technologies

that ensure continuous economic growth, humanity ’s only real value and virtue. Inan interesting and ironic article, the British scholar Wilfred Beckerman (1972) wrote:‘‘So you can now all go home and sleep peacefully in your beds tonight secure in theknowledge that in the sober and considered opinion of the latest occupant of thesecond oldest Chair in Political Economy in this country, although life on this Earthis very far from perfect, there is no reason to think that continued economic growthwill make it any worse.’’

The third source of criticism was the Catholic Church, which had been torn

apart by internal divisions on the question of birth control. The Encyclical of PopePaul VI, Humanae vitae  (1968), while recognizing the right to responsibleprocreation, was opposed to the means of limiting births  * whether by abortion,the pill, or other contraceptives. This position was supported by the Catholiceconomist Colin Clark (1977 [1967]), who argued that the Earth could provideenough water, food, and material goods to support 40 or 45 billion people. Thedebate on the limits to population growth and the means to achieve this objectivedeepened the divisions among Catholic women who were sensitive to the burgeoning women’s liberation movements and the new issue of women’s employment. For

them, these issues were hard to reconcile with the high number of pregnanciesoccurring, and also within the Catholic female community in Protestant countries aswell as Third World and poor countries. The information in the Limits to Growth  * 

i.e., that an ‘‘excessive’’ increase in the population did not solely concern the privatelives of couples, but could exhaust the gifts of nature and threaten futuregenerations * presented a serious challenge to the dictates of the Roman CatholicChurch.

The fourth front of criticism came from the Left, both the communist parties

and the non-parliamentary Left, which in Italy at that time spoke through a numberof newspapers and journals * Il manifesto , Aut aut , Bandiera rossa , Potere operaio ,Quaderni piacentini , Quaderni rossi , etc. Perhaps the most interesting voice from thispart of the political spectrum was that of the Italian writer Dario Paccino whosebestselling book  L’imbroglio ecologico  (Ecological Fraud  1972) prompted numerous

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debates and university seminars. Paccino argued that the call for limits to growth wasyet another bourgeois trick designed to preserve the privileged position of the ruling class, whose needs were amply satisfied, while keeping the working class in subjectionand poverty, both in industrialized countries and in the Third World. The French

writer Paul Braillard (1982) also wrote a pamphlet against the Club of Rome and itsconclusions.

 A rather crude reaction came from the communist countries, where Limits  wassubjected to fairly close scrutiny. Their basic position was that the disasters foretoldin the book were to be expected in capitalist countries, dominated as they were by theperverse laws of individual profit. In a planned socialist society, they argued, theextent of production and population pressure on natural resources and environ-mental degradation could be regulated by central authorities * that is, by the

people * without any danger of disaster or crisis. The Marxists also asserted that theproblem of rising populations affected capitalist countries more than the communistworld. These strictures were na ı̈ve. By the end of the 1960s, the socialist countriesalready had clear signs of environmental disasters caused by reckless economicplanning. Besides considerable environmental pollution, the environmental degrada-tion included significant losses in soil fertility as a result of excess production, forexample.

 All on its own was the critique formulated by the Romanian-American

economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen (1974) in a number of essays beginning in1971. To him it was illusory to suggest, as Limits  did, to strive for ecologicalsalvation in the achievement of limits to growth. He argued that ecological disaster isinevitable even in a ‘‘stationary-state’’ society with a stable population, production of material goods (however distributed), and use of natural resources. The reason is thatentropic depletion is intrinsic not only to the use of energy resources, but to the use of materials extracted from nature. A feasible salvation for humanity was to be foundonly in ‘‘degrowth,’’ ‘‘la de ́ croissance ,’’ which was the title of a collection of essays by Georgescu-Roegen (1979), [1995]), first published in Switzerland in 1979.

The rapid rise in crude oil prices that started in 1973 and went on until 1985,the long Iran-Iraq war, and the local wars over raw materials that punctuated the1970s and 1980s seemed to corroborate the predictions advanced by the Club of Rome. The same proposal of ‘‘halting growth’’ was reached by a book commissionedby U.S. President Jimmy Carter and published at the end of his term of office in1980 under the title Global 2000 (Barney 1980). Although the book was rich in data that are still worth reading today, the reaction that greeted it was much morelukewarm than that aroused by Limits because it presented prospects that ran counter

to the intentions of Ronald Reagan’s new Republican administration, which wasbent on launching a new era of economic growth.

 Almost as if to erase any memory of Global 2000 , a book by two cornucopians, J.L. Simon and H. Kahn (1984), was distributed on a massive scale through the

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commercial publishing circuit. Its deliberate aim was to demolish the forecasts of Global 2000 and explain that the earth’s resources were available in abundance and inno way hindered the new political project of expanded trade to spur economicgrowth that is now remembered as ‘‘the 1980s.’’ One essay by Cesare Marchetti

(1979) examined the possibility of an Earth inhabited by 1,000 billion people!

To appease the economic establishment, in 1987 the United NationsCommission on Environment and Development published Our Common Future ,also known as the Brundtland report (UN World Commission on Environment andDevelopment 1987). This reassuring report suggested that it is possible to build a society through ‘‘sustainable development’’ in order ‘‘to meet the needs of the presentwithout compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.’’The idea of sustainability has since become both a popular myth and a term devoid

of meaning. Although the adjective ‘‘sustainable’’ is attached to numerous politicalactivities, products and services, this improbable idea, which a popular proverbsummarizes as ‘‘you can’t have your cake and eat it, too,’’ is too rarely questioned.

 When the first proposals of  ‘‘degrowth’’ were presented, the geopolitics of theworld and of natural resources was very different from what they are now. In the1970s the world was conventionally divided into three parts along the lines suggestedby the French demographer Alfred Sauvy. The First World was made up of industrialized capitalist countries, basically the American empire and its satellites.

The Second World included the communist or socialist countries, basically theSoviet Union and its European satellites, which were industrialized to varying degrees. The Third World comprised a large number of other countries, somegravitating around the First or the Second World, some non-aligned, someindustrialized, others in the process of industrializing, others poor, and still othersextremely poor.

 A brisk interchange of raw materials, goods and technology took place among these three groups. Some exported raw materials taken from their stock of natural

resources (forestry products, livestock, minerals, energy sources). Others exported orsold labor, and still others exported technology, machinery, or manufactured goods.

The capitalist countries thought that the satisfaction of their citizens’ needscould be assured by private property and its obedience to the ‘‘market,’’ an entity based on the concept that from work and raw materials each individual must gain themaximum amount of money that will enable her/him to purchase the maximumpossible amount of goods and services. By their own intrinsic laws, capitalist societiescan survive only through a continuous growth in the production and consumption of 

goods. This, of course, occurs at the cost of a growing extraction and contaminationof the planet’s natural resources.

The socialist countries thought that the human needs of their citizens could besatisfied by the state, which not only owned the material assets of the land and the

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means of production, but also planned how to use and distribute those assets andhow to employ human labor. A society with a planned economy would, in principle,be able to extract and use its natural resources frugally to best ensure the satisfactionof its citizens’ needs, with goods and services planned by the government while

slowing the depletion of its natural resources. However, what actually happened wasthat the Soviet Union engaged in a race to reach and overtake the United States inthe production of goods. Widespread ecological ignorance or underestimation of theenvironmental impacts of this course led to environmental devastation and poverty for both the society as a whole and the individuals living in it.

For their part, the countries of the Third World correctly recognized that they could achieve freedom from poverty with growth in production and the supply of goods and services. Mass media  * especially television * in developing countries

artfully propagandized their populations with the capitalist creed, which preachesthat the greatest happiness is to be found in the possession of goods similar to thosetelevision portrays as filling the homes of the industrialized West.

In the 1980s, the deification of the market, private property, and the conquestof goods also contributed to the gradual destruction not of realized communism(what fell apart was a perverted version of socialism, not true communism), but of any ideal of a different relationship between human beings, objects, and naturalresources. The result was unbridled competition between individuals, social groups,

companies, and states on a terrain that was never ideal but only commercial. Thisresulted in the acceptance of any form of violence as a means to increase money,and therefore goods, in one’s possession, along with the use of the Gross NationalProduct (GNP) and its continuous increase as the only index of well-being,happiness, and the prestige of both one country over another and of one individualover another. Because ‘‘globalization’’ has come to mean the realization of thegrand commercial ideal of capital, the spread of needs, and the ideal of consumption, the exploitation of nature and labor is now accelerated in allcountries. To obtain the growing quantities of goods, poor people have to exploittheir own bodies, sell their labor at an increasingly low cost, as well as sell the spacethey occupy, the water that feeds their land, the forests, etc. In the capitalist system,because the increase of monetary wealth in circulation works to impoverish themajority of the Earth’s individuals (Pope John Paul II at various times denouncedthe growing inequality between the rich and poor in global society as a scandal), itaccelerates the depletion and growing contamination of nature. In this social andeconomic context, characterized by the economic crisis of recent decades, thephilosophy of  ‘‘degrowth’’ has obtained some acceptance, especially in the middleclasses of industrialized countries. But the main question remains unresolved:degrowth of what and whose?

The welfare and survival of people depends on the availability of food and water,energy sources, machines, domestic appliances, buildings, means of transport and

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communication, education and sanitation. Apparently intangible needs also requirematerial goods: health, dignity, and freedom are not possible living from hand tomouth, with no home or food, surrounded by dirty water. Knowledge is moredifficult without paper and the material means of long-distance communication, be

they the skins on the drums of the jungle telegraph or the silicon in computers.Material goods can be obtained only through the human activity of extracting minerals, stones, fuels, vegetable matter, animals, water, air * all assets provided by nature * from the biosphere  and transforming them into the goods, objects, andmachines that go to make up the technosphere : the universe of manufactured objects.

 After varying lengths of time, the objects used in the technosphere are inevitably transformed into waste and refuse which return, in one form or another, to thebiosphere, decreasing the availability of natural resources because of pollution anddepletion.

Humanity survives by maintaining a continuous circulation of matter andenergy from the biosphere to the technosphere and back to the biosphere (nature-commodities-nature). Commodities are produced not by means of money orcommodities, but by means of nature. Since the resources of the biosphere arelimited * even though they seem enormous * because of the ineluctable principle of the ‘‘entropic’’ depletion of energy and matter (‘‘matter matters too,’’ Georgescu-Roegen [1974] explained) passing through the technosphere, depletion anddeterioration of the ‘‘natural’’ quality of the reserves remaining for present andfuture generations are part of the functioning  of the technosphere. Technology may reduce the mass of materials required per unit of service provided, but the advent of an intangible or dematerialized society is a myth. Irrespective of the rate of population growth and increased demand for material goods * whatever thecornucopians might say  * a steady-state society is neither conceivable nor achievable.The same applies to a  ‘‘sustainable’’ society and development. The current rates of extraction of material resources and contamination of the remainder areunsustainable. All we can do is to envisage a system of human and international

relations that are less unsustainable .

Let’s begin with population, whose degrowth cannot be reasonably foreseenbefore the second half of the 21st  century. In 2011, global population reached 7billion, increasing at the rate of about 70 million per year. The population of theindustrialized countries totals 1.5 billion inhabitants, and these populations areaging, with a strong increase in the elderly (65 and older). Many industrializedcountries are also seeing an increase in immigrants, especially from poor countries.There is some slowing of the rate of increase in the rapidly industrializing countries,

which collectively have about 3 billion people. The main increase in population istaking place in the poor and very poor countries, which together have approximately 2.5 billion people.

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Let’s assume the world population is divided into three classes: the ‘‘emergedcountries,’’ ‘‘emerging countries,’’ and ‘‘submerged countries.’’ Emerged countriesare those that have achieved a relative high level of consumption and satisfaction of the needs of the majority of its citizens. Emerging countries are those involved in a 

rapid industrialization and increase of consumption, at least for a fraction of thepopulation. Submerged countries are those where conditions for most of its citizensare below a reasonable (whatever this word may mean) standard of living, availability of food, shelter, energy, education, sanitation, and work. Human rights, which canonly be achieved through freedom from misery, are largely absent for inhabitants of submerged nations.

Let’s assume a distribution of the world population among these three classesand that their needs, both physical goods and services, may be expressed in an

arbitrary unit characterized as the amount of ‘‘energy ’’ available to the persons of thecountries of each ‘‘class.’’ Let’s also assume that the availability of global ‘‘energy ’’corresponds to about 500 EJ/year (1 EJ 0 1,000,000 GJ), similar to currentconsumption levels (Table 1).

Now let’s imagine a situation sometime between 2020 and 2025 in which theworld population has grown according to present trends and that the ‘‘goods’’ tosatisfy total needs remain steady, according to the ‘‘official’’ definition of ‘‘sustainable development’’ (Table 2). The situation is far from any  ‘‘degrowth’’

project or any demand for equity. In this scenario, the per capita availability of ‘‘goods’’ for poor countries increases slightly. The availability of goods for emerging countries also increases slightly, while the availability of goods for the steady-statepopulation of emerged countries ‘‘decreases’’ from 180 to 110 GJ/person per year.Such ‘‘degrowth’’ of the rich would result in only a small decrease in the misery of the poor. It would also mean a 30 to 40 percent decrease (compared to currentvalues) in the number of cars and amount of electricity, housing, winter heating,summer refrigeration, food, furniture, clothing, and so on in industrializedcountries.

 A less drastic situation (Table 3), assuming an increase of total ‘‘energy ’’consumption from 500 to 600 EJ/year, would at most achieve a small reduction in

Table 1. Consumption and distribution of ‘‘energy ’’ (physical goods and services) at current levels

Population

(millions)

‘‘Energy’’ per capita 

(GJ/person per year)

Total ‘‘energy’’

(EJ/year)

Emerged countries 1,500 180 270Emerging countries 3,000 50 180Submerged countries 2,500 20 50Total 7,000 *  500

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poverty for the poor, while leaving current levels of per capita energy consumption in

industrialized countries unchanged. This would mean further increases in theextraction of natural resources from natural bodies with corresponding rises inemissions of gases and other wastes in natural sinks. Furthermore, it would only marginally alleviate the misery for the expanding masses in the non-industrializedcountries.

These thought experiments suggest that a  ‘‘degrowth’’ project may be welland good for individual changes of attitudes and consumption by part of a smallhappy fraction of relatively wealthy people in industrialized countries. However,

even the decrease from 180 to 110 GJ/person per year in the emerged countriesdoes not seem to be enough of a decline in pressure on the planet aswhole. Because of the amount of ecological damage already done, any relief inpressure on natural resources will require severe changes in the economic rulesof the present society, which in turn will mean limits and curtailment of individual freedom and avidity. Major changes in the consumption patterns of the rich are required to alleviate just a little the misery of the poor. If for noother reason, apart from caring about the destiny of the planet and its ecologicalequilibrium, the powerful have a self-serving motive: to decrease the rebellion

and violence of the poor that may lead to a scenario of fear and instability forthe rich.

Table 2. Consumption and distribution of  ‘‘energy ’’ (physical goods and services) with a steady-state economy and population growth

Population

(millions)

‘‘Energy ’’ per capita 

(GJ/person per year)

Total ‘‘energy ’’

(EJ/year)

Emerged countries 1,500 110 170Emerging countries 3,500 70 240Submerged countries 3,000 30 90

Total 8,000 *  500

Table 3. Consumption and distribution of  ‘‘energy ’’ (physical goods and services) with a rise inworld consumption and steady-state population

Population(millions)

‘‘Energy ’’ per capita (GJ/person per year)

Total ‘‘energy ’’(EJ/year)

Emerged countries 1,500 180 270Emerging countries 3,500 70 240Submerged countries 3,000 30 90Total 8,000 *  600

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