The world is speeding to hell in a shopping cart

We need to move away from consumerism and find better measures of economic progress – if we want to avoid a climate catastrophe

David Dodwell

Published: 5:30am, 24 Aug 2024

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Do you remember Earth Overshoot Day – the day on which our consumption for the year overshoots the Earth’s capacity to produce resources? Back in the 1970s, it passed somewhere in December or November. By 2015, overshoot occurred on August 7. This year it passed unnoticed on August 1.

This suggests we need 1.75 earths to supply the world’s 8.2 billion consumers and their indulgences.

Some countries overindulge more egregiously and overshoot much earlier in the year. The worst, Qatar, overshoots on February 11, with the United Arab Emirates following closely on March 4 – both are prodigious suppliers of oil and gas. The “consumerholic” United States overshoots on March 14. China and Britain sit together in the first days of June. We in Hong Kong are massively out of equilibrium – overshooting by March 24.

Overshoot Day is among an increasing number of indicators reminding us of the rising challenge of global warming, pollution, depleting resources, the oft-unnoticed extinction of animal and plant species, and the unsustainability of our “stuff-obsessed” lifestyles. Population growth and our success in lifting communities out of poverty are only augmenting our assumption of infinite growth on a finite planet.

My concern is not simply that these indicators point in a very bad direction, but that they do so unnoticed. I think I am part of the majority who read nothing in the news about the worryingly earlier passage of Overshoot Day this year.

Similarly, did anyone read about the International Degrowth Conference in Pontevedra, Spain, in mid-June? Not even the official website reported on the conference outcomes. My quick search for press coverage came up blank. For a global movement aimed at shifting us away from unsustainable consumerism and getting governments to reconsider their blind pursuit of gross domestic product growth, the silence speaks volumes.

15:12

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The call for degrowth surged into fashion in the early 2000s, up to the 2008 Lehman Brothers crash, and again during the shocking economic contraction of the Covid-19 pandemic, in particular across the political left, and in the environmental movements concerned about the perilous pace of global warming.

Among mainstream economists, for whom GDP growth has, for more than a century, been the aspiration of governments across the world, talk of the need for degrowth has a heretical feel about it, and the concept was always set to be controversial.

At the heart of degrowth was a frustration with the shortcomings of GDP as a measure of progress, which took no account of crime, resource depletion, housework, volunteerism or the value of higher education, but at the same time measured prison-building or defence spending as a positive. Degrowthers chafed that pollution was counted twice in GDP measures – first upon creation and again when cleaned up.

Degrowthers sought additional indicators for a better measure of progress – like universally accessible healthcare and education, and taxation of the rich, of status consumption and of environmentally damaging products and services. They championed a universal basic income, community cooperation and greater reliance on public transport.

Most of all, they sought to replace our reliance on GDP as the key measure of progress, alighting in 1995 on the genuine progress indicator, or GPI – a measure that has a strong and widespread appeal because of its inclusion of measures of well-being, wellness, social and economic justice, but remains dogged by the inclusion of subjective values.

Women in traditional clothing at Bhutan’s Royal Highland Festival, a mix of music, dance and sport, in 2023. The kingdom is famous for its Gross National Happiness Index. Photo: Bassem Nimah

Many have dabbled with such indicators, including a team at the University of Maryland’s Quality of Life Initiative. Baptist University’s Claudio O. Delang and Yi Hang Yu took a GPI measure to Hong Kong from 1968 to 2010 and found that while most countries saw a steady GPI decline, Hong Kong’s had risen.

Why? First, the migration of manufacturing into the rest of the Greater Bay Area led to an economic restructuring away from labour-intensive manufacturing and a move of polluting industries to the mainland. Second, the absence of subsidies for declining industries allowed for more efficient investment. And third, Hong Kong’s small physical size allowed for lower transport costs and more efficient public investment. Sadly, no GPI has been calculated since 2010, so we are left to wonder how it might have tracked in the past 14 years.

The uncomfortable reality is that there is strong common sense in the need to improve how we measure our economic progress. Sadly, GPI has provided no silver bullet. And the degrowth movement seems to be contributing little. In March this year, Alessio Terzi at Cambridge University came to a depressing conclusion that degrowth is a politically impractical dead end: “The most degrowthers can hope to achieve is to prod a privileged few toward more sustainable consumption habits.”

No matter how glaringly obvious the global need to cut consumption, getting Western consumers to give up meat, sports utility vehicles, flying and other carbon-intensive products and services is unrealistic, because “betting on the moral improvement of humankind is a poor wager”, he wrote.

“Avoiding a climate catastrophe demands a multifaceted strategy comprising multiple solutions. But degrowth is not one of them,” he concluded. The imperative to cut sharply our consumption of global resources and to create a measure akin to GDP that measures human well-being more effectively is as pressing as ever. Sadly, those we have so far created are going largely unnoticed.

David Dodwell is CEO of the trade policy and international relations consultancy Strategic Access, focused on developments and challenges facing the Asia-Pacific over the past four decades