The animation movie Wall-e depicts in stunning colours a silent abandoned Earth buried deep in towering human garbage, with only a perky little garbage-crushing robot plus a friendly cockroach moving about.

An environmentalist metaphor for human destructiveness!

Wrong.

BBC radio today carried a story about tinned food, mentioning in passing how the tins themselves are so much lighter and less wasteful now than in years past. How precisely did that happen, I wonder?

Thence on to this fascinating account of how Americans use many of the earth’s materials far more sparingly as our wealth increases:

The idea that America’s output of garbage rises ever skyward — more trash, year by passing year — has become one of the great unchallenged assumptions about how the world works …

Daniel C. Walsh an adjunct professor at the Earth Institute at Columbia University, believed it too, until he began poking through the musty records in the New York City Archives and stumbled on a long-unread paper trail that he said might be unique among big American cities: 100 years of painstakingly kept records about what New Yorkers threw away…

Pounds of trash per person peaked not in the prosperous 1990’s, but in 1940…

The great trend of the 20th century, Dr. Walsh concluded, has been toward less garbage — or at least lighter garbage — because the economics demanded it and technology made it possible.

"There are very significant forces out there that are working to minimize the mass of the waste stream," he said. "The forces are strong and they’re incredibly effective"…

… the most profound conclusion that emerged from the records, Dr. Walsh said, was not the historical nuggets, but the underlying engine that produced them. The big economic drivers of the 20th century … all moved in one direction: toward less waste, not more…

"Everything relates to two principal factors — one is reducing costs, making things lighter and easier to transport, and the other is making them more convenient to the consumer…"

Look at specific materials:

Going through its listing from "abrasives" to "zirconium" I selected the 32 minerals with the highest levels of consumption in metric tons, all over 100,000 in 1965 (omitting a few like "crushed rock" and "salt" which even the most rabid of greens won’t allege we are depleting), and then compared the amounts of them consumed in 1965 and 2005.

Now, during those 40 years the GDP of the US multiplied to 3.444 times its 1965 level, and the US population grew by 52.6%, so GDP per capita consequently grew by 126% to 2.26 times its 1965 level — the average American grew that much richer.

The consumption levels of the 32 minerals most-consumed changed thusly:

… Per dollar of GDP, all 32 of 32 declined in consumption. Total metric tons consumed of all the minerals combined fell by 9%. With GDP multiplying 3.44-fold at the same time, this means the per dollar of GDP consumption of these minerals fell by 74%, to only 26% of its previous level…

Separately HobbitManor tries to work out what area of the USA would be buried in garbage if all the garbage produced by the USA over 140 years under the most lavishly profligate assumptions was dumped in one place. He shows the answer on a Google map.

Don’t trust them? Try the New York Times and this analysis of various Kuznets curves:

As their wealth grows, people consume more energy, but they move to more efficient and cleaner sources — from wood to coal and oil, and then to natural gas and nuclear power, progressively emitting less carbon per unit of energy. This global decarbonization trend has been proceeding at a remarkably steady rate since 1850…

The article by John Tierney offers two sensible predictions which EU policy makers need to think about:

  • There will be no green revolution in energy or anything else. No leader or law or treaty will radically change the energy sources for people and industries in the United States or other countries. No recession or depression will make a lasting change in consumers’ passions to use energy, make money and buy new technology — and that, believe it or not, is good news, because…
  • The richer everyone gets, the greener the planet will be in the long run.

For an amusing insight into the folly of supposedly serious people taking an opposite view, have a look at the list of fat-headed predictions about the state of the Earth in the year 2000 made back in 1970.

So when we read all those feverish articles in the Guardian about the need for ‘less capitalism’, we know that what they are calling for is an insane, radical slowing-down in the rate of innovation needed to develop all those light-touch new technologies which reduce the human footprint on the Planet.

Less Capitalism/Market = More Socialism = More Carbon = More Waste.

Now that that is established, can we start talking sense about all this please?