What Would Happen If The Entire World Lived Like Americans?

After making an infographic depicting how much space would be needed to house the entire world’s population based on the densities of various global cities, Tim De Chant of Per Square Mile got to thinking about the land resources it takes to support those same cities. “Just looking at a city’s geographic extents ignores its more important ecological footprint,” he writes. “How much land would we really need if everyone lived like New Yorkers versus Houstonians?”

As it turns out, data on the resources gobbled up by cities can be hard to measure–impossibly so, in many cases. But we can measure the resources used by people in entire countries. With a little help from the National Footprint Account from the Global Footprint Network, de Chant was able to show how much space we’d need if the entire world’s population consumed resources in the manner of Bangladesh, India, Uganda, China, Costa Rica, Nepal, France, the U.S.A., and the United Arab Emirates. The graphic compares those countries’ terrestrial sub-footprints, taking into account components like land use, carbon footprint, urbanization, fishing grounds, and more.

The result is, in many ways, the opposite of de Chant’s earlier work. While everyone in the world could fit into a small chunk of America if they all lived in the density of New York, the world wouldn’t survive at all if everyone in the world decided to consume like those New Yorkers (or any Americans). While those of us in the U.S. consume enough resources to take up 4.1 Earth’s worth of resources, the only reason we haven’t eaten through everything is that the rest of the world is balancing us out by using far more reasonable percentages of the Earth.

7 Comments on "What Would Happen If The Entire World Lived Like Americans?"

dsula on Fri, 17th Aug 2012 5:59 pm 



Yeah, we should tell that to the high performance breeder nations. Stop breeding, you then have a better chance of achieving a good life.

DC on Fri, 17th Aug 2012 6:44 pm 



The last line of this article is very revealing,

Q/the only reason we haven’t eaten through everything is that the rest of the world is balancing us out by using far more reasonable percentages of the Earth.

What this article fails to mention, is not everyone else on the Earth is doing this voluntarily, or out of the goodness of there hearts, though to be sure, some are, but most are not. No the imbalance of resource use is because amerika has been diverting the lions share of the planets wealth towards itself. Through financial manipulation, co-ercive ‘free-trade agreements, military threat, IMF , WTO and so. The rest of the world is poor, because amerika steals 1/3 of the planets resources for itself, not because the poor of this world are being ‘reasonable’. In fact, quite of few of those folks are well aware of where there resources are going and fairly pissed about it too.

The US calls people like that, ‘Terrorists’.

DMyers on Sat, 18th Aug 2012 12:23 am 



dsula

You make a good point that the article doesn’t accent, that the population number carries a lot of weight in this particular equation. If considered, the population factor would tend to lead the discussion toward “will there be food and shelter?” rather then “can we all live like Americkans?”

As far as breeding goes, we are the animal we are.

DC

Good post. We could take a different turn on the sentence you quoted. Part of the Zeitgeist here involves the insertion of Americkanized living into a larger segment of the world’s population. Much of the previous absence of the same was the product of certain dominant economic systems, i.e., Communism. As Communism Westernized, those economies began consuming more, a huge competition for resources, one that did not even exist a short time ago. The Middle Eastern countries are consuming more as well.

Whatever Americka has done throwing its fat ass around and getting while the getting was good, the wide open prairie of resource consumption is now under claim by others. If there was a balance born of economic retardation, that balance is rapidly retreating. We will now have to fight for, rather than steal, our advantages.

BillT on Sat, 18th Aug 2012 12:28 am 



“America’s way of life is non-negotiable” said someone who has continued to wage wars to make that possible. Soon the trash dumpster ca;;ed America will be trashed by the other 95.9% who want their share. Wait and see. It makes no difference what the numbers are, that is not going to change, but the rebalance of use is going to happen. Wait and see.

Newfie on Sat, 18th Aug 2012 1:30 am 



“The American way of life is not negotiable”.

Yes that’s true. Because Reality does not negotiate. And Reality does not give a rat’s azz about the American way of life.

cipi604 on Sat, 18th Aug 2012 12:33 pm 



This situation will be solved by going into space.

BillT on Sat, 18th Aug 2012 1:17 pm 



cipi…what are YOU smoking? You should share. I think you have been confusing movie reality with the real thing. We lost that option in the 70s when we stopped the moon trips. Now we are fighting to survive, in case you hadn’t noticed. The Jetsons were just a cartoon and Star Trek is a nice fantasy, but nothing more. We blew it when we went to gasoline to run personal vehicles and oil and NG to heat the Swiss cheese boxes we call homes. We chose fission over fusion because we could make bombs with fission reactors. We chose to go to war with each other rather than explore the stars. We cannot even afford a new shuttle, so what makes you think we will go into space?