Current Events > Economy Keeps Growing, but Americans Using Less Steel, Paper, Fertilizer, Energy

(+) Yeah! (+)

80/80

https://reason.com/2019/10/09/the-economy-keeps-growing-but-americans-are-using-less-steel-paper-fertilizer-and-energy/

Environmental scientist Jesse Ausubel remembers the moment his research trajectory changed. Over dinner one night in 1987, his friend and colleague Robert Herman, a physicist with a wide range of interests, wondered aloud, "Are buildings getting lighter?" That apparently simple question inspired the pair to begin looking into the "material intensity" of the modern world.

In 2015, Ausubel published an essay titled "The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment." He had found substantial evidence not only that Americans were consuming fewer resources per capita but also that they were consuming less in total of some of the most important building blocks of an economy: things such as steel, copper, fertilizer, timber, and paper. Total annual U.S. consumption of all of these had been increasing rapidly prior to 1970. But since then, consumption had reached a peak and then declined.

This was unexpected, to put it mildly. "The reversal in use of some of the materials so surprised me that [a few colleagues] and I undertook a detailed study of the use of 100 commodities in the United States from 1900 to 2010," Ausubel wrote. "We found that 36 have peaked in absolute useAnother 53 commodities have peaked relative to the size of the economy, though not yet absolutely. Most of them now seem poised to fall."

A few years earlier, a writer and researcher named Chris Goodall had noticed something similar in the United Kingdom's Material Flow Accounts, "a set of dry and largely ignored data published annually by the Office for National Statistics," as the Guardian put it. He summarized his findings in a 2011 paper titled "'Peak Stuff ': Did the UK Reach a Maximum Use of Material Resources in the Early Part of the Last Decade?"

Goodall's answer to his own question was, essentially, yes: "Evidence presented in this paper supports a hypothesis that the United Kingdom began to reduce its consumption of physical resources in the early years of the last decade, well before the economic slowdown that started in 2008. This conclusion applies to a wide variety of different physical goods, for example water, building materials and paper and includes the impact of items imported from overseas. Both the weight of goods entering the economy and the amounts finally ending up as waste probably began to fall from sometime between 2001 and 2003."

Goodall was eloquent about the significance of dematerialization: "If correct, this finding is important. It suggests that economic growth in a mature economy does not necessarily increase the pressure on the world's reserves of natural resources and on its physical environment. An advanced country may be able to decouple economic growth and increasing volumes of material goods consumed. A sustainable economy does not necessarily have to be a no-growth economy."

Pinging Economics peeps:

@s0nicfan
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@Balrog0
@Antifar
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tl;dr?
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Machete posted...

tl;dr?

Millenials...basically.

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me: ok
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SquantoZ posted...

Machete posted...

tl;dr?

Millenials...basically.

lmao
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@SquantoZ

Are you illiterate? It's about how economic growth and resource consumption are decoupled in mature economies.
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pls posted...

@SquantoZ

Are you illiterate? It's about how economic growth and resource consumption are decoupled in mature economies.

Pipe down, Saint Manlet Bagelcel.

I didn't even read your post. Topic title reeked of something that would blame millenials. Learn to take a joke with your soft small sensitive manleticles.


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Most of these jobs are for retail and food service

So instead of taking the L you double down with another bad post. Yikes.
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pls posted...

So instead of taking the L you double down with another bad post. Yikes.

Millennials killed Gamefaqs posting too.
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SquantoZ posted...

Saint Manlet Bagelcel.

Lmfao

Master_Bass posted...

Millennials killed Gamefaqs posting too.

This is true. I am a millenial.

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SquantoZ posted...

Learn to take a joke with your soft small sensitive manleticles.

LOL
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It's fascinating that we would see results like that, especially in a country like the United States that is still growing in terms of population size. I almost wonder, if they mapped out the different materials in terms of which ones were shrinking, stagnating, or still growing, if you would be able to separate out the different stages of a nation's economic stability and growth by which materials they choose to use.

Put another way, we may one day look at the relative use of cement versus silicon as a measure of when a country goes from developed to truly first world.
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millennials will save us
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this makes sense--efficiency reduces costs and drives up profit margins, so there's certainly plenty of motivation for companies to embrace it, esp when it's a one time update that has permanent impact.

it's produced an effect already seen in the energy sector. i could see that having ripple effects since growth of power production is a major driver of basic materials consumption.

consumer-goods side, while i will continue to buy shoes and physical books because i like them, we don't need to fill our homes with tools we'll almost never use because the growth of the gig economy (thanks to app development connecting us) makes it easy for us to find a cheap person to take care of those tasks. i don't know what other crap our parents generation were filling their homes with.

good find, also this is me bumping your topic.
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Sackgurl posted...

this makes sense--efficiency reduces costs and drives up profit margins, so there's certainly plenty of motivation for companies to embrace it, esp when it's a one time update that has permanent impact.

it's produced an effect already seen in the energy sector. i could see that having ripple effects since growth of power production is a major driver of basic materials consumption.

consumer-goods side, while i will continue to buy shoes and physical books because i like them, we don't need to fill our homes with tools we'll almost never use because the growth of the gig economy (thanks to app development connecting us) makes it easy for us to find a cheap person to take care of those tasks. i don't know what other crap our parents generation were filling their homes with.

good find, also this is me bumping your topic.

Are you a Darkman alt
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no.

might be that this is just a consequence of services replacing manufacturing, i don't know for sure
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What is your main account buddy
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Sackgurl posted...

might be that this is just a consequence of services replacing manufacturing, i don't know for sure

And this is probably a portion of it, but also mostly a result of efficiency gains in production. We need a lot less inputs to produce stuff these days.
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EIiza posted...

What's a bagelcel?

A miserable doughy circle of secrets. But enough talk!
*throws cream cheese on the floor*
HAVE AT YOU!
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