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I'm not talking about an 'ordinary' Westerners consumption.
I know you go on to address this slightly but we should talk about it. Yes the ultra wealthy are highly destructive from a resource consumption point of view but the ordinary western consumption, especially in areas like the southern US states, middle east, affluent far east pockets is not sustainable if others aspire to it.
I don't have time to look for it but there are reasonable estimates that the global population could live a western 1970's-80's level of consumption sustainably. This would see a massive uplift in living standards for the global majority, a minor reduction for many and a unthinkable level of reduction for the wealthy.
We can't afford to perpetuate that the current 'typical' western lifestyle is without harm or just
There is a large body of work in the degrowth/ steady state economics looking at this but it challenges societies political and economic expectations of endless growth
greentricky-
We can't afford to perpetuate that the current 'typical' western lifestyle is without harm
Completely agree. I was just trying to make the point of the exponential sides of the pyramid. Yes, the 'energy crises' of the 70s were a major tipping point when use of technology increased massively (smaller, but far more, cars, computer technology (unrelatedly) coming along for mass consumption, etc.).
Oliver Schick
It's well-established that the main driver of extreme population growth is poverty. Obviously, public health is a complex subject, and you need to factor in the impact of hygiene, etc., but populations have grown the most in the past century in areas where there is comparatively little technology (understood in the modern sense; I guess you could also interpret traditional modes of sustainable agriculture like in India and China as technology).
I'm not talking about an 'ordinary' Westerners consumption. Astonishingly, the worst polluters are just a few thousand people. That's not to try and oversimplify it; of course it has an impact if 'ordinary' Westerners fly to the Maldives on holiday. However, we're talking about people who take at least several flights a week. The ratio of that to an 'ordinary' Western household is mind-boggling.
Obviously, even if all those people changed their ways, it would still leave that kind of 'lifestyle' as 'aspirational' and the cycle would begin all over again of people jockeying to get into that kind of position and perpetuate the nonsense that got us here in the first place.