A recent op-ed piece in the New York Times by Jared Diamond talks of the disparity in “consumption rates’ between the first world and the developing world. He posits that the wide disparity in this consumption factor (with the first world consuming 32 times what the developing world consumes)is even more important than population growth for the future of the earth, and the political relationships between developed and third world countries. He posts some amazing numbers that need to be thought about, and should certainly be cause for debate. But first lets look at the underlying consumption factor numbers.

The average rates at which people consume resources like oil and metals, and produce wastes like plastics and greenhouse gases, are about 32 times higher in North America, Western Europe, Japan and Australia than they are in the developing world. That factor of 32 has big consequences.

What does that wide disparity mean, and does it factor into concerns about third world population growth? Diamond looks at Kenya as an example.

The population especially of the developing world is growing, and some people remain fixated on this. They note that populations of countries like Kenya are growing rapidly, and they say that’s a big problem. Yes, it is a problem for Kenya’s more than 30 million people, but it’s not a burden on the whole world, because Kenyans consume so little. (Their relative per capita rate is 1.) A real problem for the world is that each of us 300 million Americans consumes as much as 32 Kenyans. With 10 times the population, the United States consumes 320 times more resources than Kenya does.

And so before my conservative friends begin to holler that this theory is about a political attack on the American system, lets look at some of the numbers that follow in this piece. They are sobering, and intuitively seem to me to have some validity. With the price of many raw materials soaring on greatly increased demand from China the following has to at least make us think about the issues raised.

Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption — that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China’s) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.

Those are some sobering numbers. What about additional scenarios such as India growing substantially?

If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

72 billion is a lot of people. What does Diamond say about that?

Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.

And so as Diamond gets to some solutions that are general in nature he talks about what reduced consumption in the first world and America would mean.

Real sacrifice wouldn’t be required, however, because living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts. Ask yourself whether Americans’ wasteful use of gasoline contributes positively to any of those measures.

Other aspects of our consumption are wasteful, too. Most of the world’s fisheries are still operated non-sustainably, and many have already collapsed or fallen to low yields — even though we know how to manage them in such a way as to preserve the environment and the fish supply. If we were to operate all fisheries sustainably, we could extract fish from the oceans at maximum historical rates and carry on indefinitely.

There are some real ideas here, and some cold, hard facts to be considered. Is Washington in its current state of partisan paralysis capable of the real work necessary to prepare us for the changes ahead. Whatever one thinks of this article I think most folks feel that the existing political structure is incapable of anything but short term political thinking.

Read the op-ed piece in the Times here.