More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next

by Andrew McAfee

We have not as a society embraced degrowth. Instead, we’ve done something far stranger and more profound: we’ve decoupled growth—in consumption, prosperity, and our economy—from resource use.

As economist Edward Glaeser summarizes, “If you want to be good to the environment, stay away from it. Move to high-rise apartments surrounded by plenty of concrete.… Living in the country is not the right way to care for the Earth. The best thing that we can do for the planet is build more skyscrapers.”

From 1980 to 2015, total emissions of six principal air pollutants decreased by 65 percent.

In 1950 we got 117 billion pounds of milk from 22 million cows. In 2015 we got 209 billion pounds from just 9 million animals. The average milk cow’s productivity thus improved by over 330 percent during that time.

According to one estimate, the total amount of energy that humans consume each year could be supplied by just seven thousand tons of uranium fuel.

As I said in the previous chapter, all of the rich countries that meet my definition of capitalist have welfare systems that include support for the poor and unemployed, subsidized health care for at least some groups, child and elder care, and so on. Advanced capitalist countries have tremendous variations in their social safety nets—Norway’s, for example, is very different from America’s—but all such countries have one.

The United States, for example, which accounts for approximately 25 percent of the world’s overall economy, contributes less than 1 percent of total global river-sourced plastic ocean trash.

China, meanwhile, is responsible for about 15 percent of the world’s economy, yet contributes 28 percent of total oceanic plastic trash from rivers.