Every metric indicates growth is reducing overconsumption and enabling environmental rebound. Negative trends can reverse.

This book is not about the present state of environmental science, the causes and the extent of global warming, and the precise nature and potential consequences of climatic changes. That said, it is worth noting that even within the environmental sphere, there is plenty of positive news. Between 1982 and 2016, for example, the global tree canopy cover increased by an area larger than Alaska and Montana combined.69 As Reason magazine science correspondent Ronald Bailey put it, “Expanding woodlands suggests that humanity has begun the process of withdrawing from the natural world, which in turn will provide greater scope for other species to rebound and thrive.”70

According to the same author, “The chance of a person dying in a natural catastrophe—earthquake, flood, drought, storm, wildfire, landslide or epidemic—has declined by nearly 99 percent since the 1920s and 1930s.... Buildings are better constructed to survive earthquakes; weather satellites and sophisticated computer models provide early storm warnings that give folks time to prepare and evacuate; and broad disease surveillance enables swift medical interventions to halt developing epidemics.”71

The Rockefeller University environmentalist Jesse H. Ausubel estimated in 2014 that due to the continued improvements in the efficiency of farming practices, including rising crop yields, the world will see “a net reduction in use of arable land (i.e., land used for farming) in about 50 years totaling 10 times the area of Iowa, and shrinking global cropland to the level of 1960.”72

In 2017, the World Database on Protected Areas reported that 15 percent of the planet’s land surface was covered by protected areas. That’s an area almost double the size of the United States. Marine protected areas covered nearly 7 percent of the world’s oceans. That’s an area more than twice the size of South America.73

Part of the reason for rising marine conservancy is fish farming, which enables humans to consume increasing quantities of fish without decimating aquatic wildlife. “In 1950,” noted Bailey, “aquaculture produced less than a million metric tons of fish. In 2016, aquaculturists raised more than 80 million metric tons of fish—51 million tons on inland fish farms and 29 million tons at sea.”74

We are also getting better at producing goods and services in ways that are less harmful to the environment. For example, the global sulphur dioxide emissions (SO2 is a toxic gas that is a byproduct of copper extraction and the burning of fossil fuels) declined from a peak of 152 million metric tons in 1980 to 97 million metric tons in 2010—a reduction of 36 percent over a comparatively short period of 30 years.75 The volume of SO2 emissions in the United States decreased from about 31 million metric tons in 1970 to about 2 million metric tons in 2019, a reduction of 94 percent.76

Speaking of burning fossil fuels, the average global CO2 emissions per dollar of output declined by 41 percent between 1960 and 2014 from 0.84 kilograms to 0.5 kilograms.77 Those are the latest figures that we had access to. We suspect that the recent switch from burning coal to burning natural gas in many countries (natural gas emits between 50 and 60 percent less CO2 when combusted in a new, efficient natural gas power plant compared with emissions from a typical new coal plant)78 will help reduce CO2 emissions per dollar of output even further, and that’s not accounting for the rise in non–fossil fuel sources of power such as wind and solar.

The long-term relationship between the intensity of CO2 emissions and economic development is furthermore quite notable. “On average,” wrote Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser from Our World in Data, a non-profit organization based in the United Kingdom, “we see low carbon intensities at low incomes; carbon intensity rises as countries transition from low-to- middle incomes, especially in rapidly growing industrial economies; and as countries move towards higher incomes, carbon intensity falls again.”79

That’s precisely what we are seeing in the data. To be sure, global CO2 emissions are still rising—they reached 36.44 billion metric tons in 2019— but looking at individual countries provides a more positive picture. For example, in the United States, CO2 emissions declined from a high of 6.13 billion metric tons in 2007 to 5.28 billion metric tons in 2019, a 14 percent reduction in 12 years. In the European Union, they fell from a peak of 4.1 billion metric tons in 1979 to 2.92 billion metric tons in 2019.80

We are also getting better at saving freshwater, which is used widely in agriculture as well as in industrial production. The World Bank estimates that the United States increased its water productivity, or inflation-adjusted dollars of GDP per cubic meter of freshwater withdrawn, from $13 in 1980 to $36 in 2010; China from $0.8 in 1980 to $15 in 2015; Japan from $34 in 1980 to $67 in 2009; Germany from $58 in 1991 to $104 in 2010; and the United Kingdom from $91 in 1980 to $314 in 2012.81

Finally, consider the revolutionary findings of Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Andrew McAfee in his 2019 book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources—and What Happens Next. For a long time, economists knew that the profit motive compels companies to decrease the use of natural resources per dollar of output. When aluminum cans were introduced in 1959, for example, they weighed 85 grams. By 2011, they weighed 13 grams.82 Why pay more for inputs if you don’t have to?

But as McAfee discovered by looking at the U.S. consumption of 72 resources from aluminum to zinc, the absolute annual use of 66 resources peaked prior to 2019. Likewise, energy use decreased between 2008 and 2017, even though the U.S. economy expanded by 15 percent over the same period. The U.S. economy, in other words, has reached such a level of efficiency and sophistication that it is possible for it to produce an ever-increasing amount of goods and services while at the same time using ever-fewer resources.83 There is every reason to expect that as other economies become similarly advanced, they too will reduce their absolute consumption of resources.