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For Immediate Release
September, 15 2015, 12:45pm EDT
Contact:
Gaelle Gourmelon
Communications Director Phone: +1 (202) 745-8092 x 510
E-mail: ggourmelon@worldwatch.org
Global Consumption Trends Break New Records
Worldwatch Institute's Vital Signs exposes latest global peaks of production and consumption, as well as associated impacts
WASHINGTON
From coal to cars to coffee, consumption levels are breaking records. According to the Worldwatch Institute's latest report, Vital Signs, Volume 22: The Trends That Are Shaping Our Future, the acceleration of resource depletion, pollution, and climate change may come with underappreciated social and environmental costs (www.worldwatch.org).
Drawing on a wide range of sources, Vital Signs shows trends related to today's often record-breaking levels of consumption by providing data and concise analyses of significant global trends in food and agriculture, population and society, and energy and climate.
"Consumers often do not know the full footprint of the products they are buying, such as the embedded water in a t-shirt or steak, the pesticide exposure of cotton farmers, or the local devastation caused by timber companies cutting down forests to produce paper," says Michael Renner, Vital Signs Project Director.
The 24 trends tracked in Vital Signs illustrate these and other consequences of consumption on a scale never before experienced on Earth. With a global population of over 7 billion and growing, the need to preserve ecosystems is undeniable. Yet, for many products, the growth of consumption is reaching new levels:
- Global meat production has more than quadrupled in the last half century to over 308 million tons in 2013, bringing with it considerable environmental and health costs due to its large-scale draw on water, feedgrains, antibiotics, and grazing land.
- Coffee production has doubled since the early 1960s. However, an estimated 25 million coffee growers worldwide are at the mercy of extreme price volatility.
- For more than 50 years, global plastic production has continued to rise, with 299 million tons of plastics produced in 2013 alone. Recycling rates remain low, however, and the majority of plastics end up in landfills and oceans-polluting ecosystems, entangling wildlife, and blighting communities.
- The world's fleet of automobiles now surpasses 1 billion, with each vehicle contributing greenhouse gases and reducing air quality.
Vital Signs, Volume 22 presents these and other global trends and analyses of our planet and civilization. The book uses straightforward language and easy-to-read graphs to present each indicator. Vital Signs is created as a guide to inform governments, businesses, teachers, and concerned citizens everywhere to make the changes needed to build a sustainable world.
"Untrammeled consumerism lies at the heart of many of these challenges," writes Renner. "As various articles in this edition of Vital Signs show, consumption choices matter greatly."
The Worldwatch Institute was a globally focused environmental research organization based in Washington, D.C., founded by Lester R. Brown. Worldwatch was named as one of the top ten sustainable development research organizations by Globescan Survey of Sustainability Experts. Brown left to found the Earth Policy Institute in 2000. The Institute was wound up in 2017, after publication of its last State of the World Report. Worldwatch.org was unreachable from mid-2019.
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Amid fears over President-elect Donald Trump's pick to lead the Environmental Protection Agency, a government watchdog on Thursday called out the EPA for letting the plastics industry pollute U.S. waterways with about half a billion gallons of wastewater every day.
The new report—Plastic's Toxic River: EPA's Failure to Regulate the Petrochemical Plants That Make Plastic—is based on an Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) analysis of records for "70 petrochemical plants that manufacture the most common plastics and their primary chemical ingredients and discharge wastewater directly into rivers, lakes, and other water bodies."
The publication provides just a snapshot of the industry's pollution of U.S. waters. The group focused on plants "that make raw or pure plastics, sometimes referred to as resins, pellets, or nurdles, that are eventually turned into plastic products, like plastic bottles," and did not examine oil refineries or facilities that only make the end-use or consumer products.
"Federal regulations on the wastewater from plastics manufacturing plants have not been updated in over 30 years, are grossly outdated, and fail to protect waterways and downstream communities."
The document explains that "many harmful chemicals released by plastics manufacturers are completely unregulated" by the federal agency, including "dioxins, which are known cancer-causing agents that are highly toxic and persist in the environment; and 1,4-dioxane, a likely carcinogen that EPA scientists recently indicated is threatening drinking water sources."
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U.S. Geological Survey scientists last month published a study on forever chemicals in the journal Science and released an interactive, online map for the Lower 48 states. They estimated that "71 to 95 million people in the conterminous United States potentially rely on groundwater with detectable concentrations of PFAS for their drinking water supplies prior to any treatment."
EIP's new report highlights that "federal regulations on the wastewater from plastics manufacturing plants have not been updated in over 30 years, are grossly outdated, and fail to protect waterways and downstream communities," despite the Clean Water Act's requirement that the EPA "set wastewater discharge limits (called 'effluent limitation guidelines') for harmful pollutants based on the best available technology economically achievable."
"Because treatment technologies improve over time, EPA is supposed to review existing limits every five years and strengthen them when data show treatment options have improved," the document details. "EPA has failed to comply with this mandate, resulting in an excessive amount of potentially dangerous water pollution pouring from plastics manufacturers into America's waterways."
The group's recommendations are to mandate the use of modern wastewater pollution controls, prohibit plastic discharges into waterways, increase accountability at the state and federal level, enhance monitoring requirements in permitting, and improve permit transparency and recordkeeping.
"It is inexcusable that EPA is not following the Clean Water Act and failing to require the multibillion-dollar plastics industry to install modern pollution control systems," EIP executive director Jen Duggan said in a statement. "Plastics plants are poisoning our waters and contaminating our bodies—and EPA needs to do its job and protect our waterways and downstream communities."
Local groups in Lousiana, South Carolina, Texas, and West Virginia also responded to the report with calls for action.
"Decades of unchecked pollution have transformed the Calcasieu River into a dumping ground for toxic chemicals, with little accountability for the companies responsible," said James Hiatt, executive director of the Louisiana-based For a Better Bayou. "It's unacceptable that these plastics plants, profiting from our natural resources, are allowed to continue to release carcinogens like dioxins into our waterways. We need to hold these polluters accountable—and make them clean up the damage they've caused."
Despite such demands for action, environmental advocates have grave concerns about the EPA's future under Trump, including over his pick of Lee Zeldin, a former Republican member of Congress, to head the agency.
During Trump's first term, his administration rolled back over 100 environmental rules. Although Zeldin, as a congressman, was sometimes "willing and even eager to address environmental problems at home on coastal Long Island," as The New York Timesnoted Tuesday, his voting record and fealty to Trump have green groups fearful for the future.
As Common Dreamsreported earlier this week, Sierra Club executive director Ben Jealous declared that choosing a candidate "who opposes efforts to safeguard our clean air and water lays bare Donald Trump's intentions to, once again, sell our health, our communities, our jobs, and our future out to corporate polluters."
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Existing policies and actions taken by world governments put the world on track for a median estimate of 2.7°C of warming by the end of the century, Climate Action Tracker revealed on Thursday at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.
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"The combined global effect of government action on climate change has flatlined over the last three years, underscoring a critical disconnect between the reality of climate change and the lack of urgency on policies to cut emissions," Climate Action Tracker (CAT) announced during its annual update at COP29.
The report attributes the lack of progress to the fact that few governments announced new climate targets in 2024 while they continued to facilitate the increased burning of fossil fuels, despite the pledge made at last year's COP28 to transition away from oil, gas, and coal.
It comes on the heels of a series of reports released ahead of or during COP29 that paint a consistent picture of escalating greenhouse gas emissions and climate extremes paired with government inaction. The U.N. Emissions Gap Report, published in late October, projected that the world was on track for 3.1°C of warming based on current policies. The World Meteorological Organization's (WMO) Greenhouse Gas Bulletin, also published last month, found that all three main greenhouse gases reached record atmospheric levels in 2023.
"The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dramatic, yet we still see no sign that burning of fossil fuels has peaked."
2023 was also the hottest year on record, but the WMO's State of the Climate 2024 update for COP29 warned that 2024 was likely to surpass it. Further, global temperatures from January to September averaged 1.54°C above preindustrial levels, temporarily surpassing the 1.5°C warming limit enshrined in the Paris agreement.
"The record-breaking rainfall and flooding, rapidly intensifying tropical cyclones, deadly heat, relentless drought, and raging wildfires that we have seen in different parts of the world this year are unfortunately our new reality and a foretaste of our future," WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo said in a statement. "We urgently need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and strengthen our monitoring and understanding of our changing climate."
Yet this is precisely what is not happening: Another study from the Global Carbon Budget released on Wednesday projected that carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels would increase by 0.8% from 2023 to reach 37.4 billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent, a record high.
"The impacts of climate change are becoming increasingly dramatic, yet we still see no sign that burning of fossil fuels has peaked," study leader Pierre Friedlingstein, a professor at Exeter's Global Systems Institute, said in a statement. "Time is running out to meet the Paris agreement goals—and world leaders meeting at COP29 must bring about rapid and deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions to give us a chance of staying well below 2°C warming above preindustrial levels."
The Climate Action Tracker report adds to these findings, concluding that while renewables have surged in recent years, continued reliance on fossil fuels have undermined that progress. While clean energy like wind and solar and clean transit like electric vehicles now receive double the investments of oil, gas, and coal, funding for the latter still ballooned by a factor of four between 2021 and 2022 while fossil fuel subsidies are at a record high.
"We are clearly failing to bend the curve," Gonzales-Zuniga said. "As the world edges closer to these dangerous climate thresholds, the need for immediate, stronger action to reverse this trend becomes ever more urgent."
CAT called on the world's largest emitters to lead the way. It recommended 1.5°C-aligned 2035 targets for the world's seven biggest climate polluters—China, the U.S., India, the E.U., Indonesia, Japan, and Australia—as well as the "troika" countries of Brazil, UAE, and Azerbaijan. To bring its policies in line with the 1.5°C goal, the U.S. would have to cut its total emissions (including from land-use and forests) by 65% of 2005 levels by 2030 and 80% by 2035.
This is unlikely to happen under the administration of President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised to "drill, baby, drill" as soon as he retakes the White House in January. CAT concluded that Trump's promised energy policies would raise its projection for 2100 temperatures based on current actions by 0.04°C. However, if the U.S. permanently axes its net-zero goals, and if other countries decide to follow Trump's lead, that temperature increase could be higher.
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More than two dozen international relief groups operating in Gaza warned Thursday that humanitarian assistance entering the embattled Palestinian enclave "has fallen to an all-time low" as Israel continues to block lifesaving aid, fueling nascent famine in the north.
"An average of only 37 humanitarian trucks per day entered Gaza in October, and an average of 69 per day during the first week of November. This is still well below the average of 500 per day which entered Gaza... before October 7, 2023, and was insufficient to meet the needs of the population," the seventh Gaza Humanitarian Aid Snapshot notes.
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"Tragically, Israeli airstrikes killed at least 20 aid workers from both Palestinian and international organizations," the analysis laments. "Staff were killed in their homes, in displacement camps, and while delivering lifesaving aid. Many aid workers lost close family members and relatives."
One forcibly displaced resident of northern Gaza told the report's authors:
Everyone has received this call before: One of your friends or colleagues or relatives or cousins is under the siege or bombs. And they ask for help. And you can't do anything. You can't do anything for them. And they die. They die while they are asking us to help them. This is the worst thing.
The report also notes widespread looting by desperate Gaza residents—a consequence not only of the bombing, invasion, and siege but also of Israel's targeted killing of Palestinian police officers—and criminal gangs extorting aid groups for "protection" money.
The new analysis came on the same day that a United Nations committee published a report concluding that Israel's policies and practices in Gaza "are consistent with the characteristics of genocide" and two days after the Biden administration—which backs Israel with arms and diplomatic support—sparked worldwide anger by asserting that Israel is not violating humanitarian law during the war.
A scorecard published earlier this week by some of the same groups that compiled the Humanitarian Aid Snapshot detailed how Israel has failed to fully comply with any of the Biden administration's 19 demands indicating compliance with humanitarian law.
As children in Gaza began starving to death earlier this year, the International Court of Justice—which is weighing a genocide case against Israel—ordered the Israeli government to stop blocking aid from entering the enclave. Israel has been accused of ignoring the order.
As the Humanitarian Aid Snapshot notes, Israeli forces have killed more than 43,000 Palestinians in Gaza and wounded over 103,000 others as of November 12. Approximately 80% of Gazans are under forced displacement orders—a policy denounced by many as ethnic cleansing—and around 90% of Gaza residents have been forcibly displaced, most of them multiple times.
"The population in northern Gaza faces starvation, severe shortages of clean water, critical supply scarcity, and ever-increasing desperation," Mercy Corps, one of the groups that contributed to the analysis, said in a statement. "We call on all those with influence and power to take urgent action to de-escalate and halt the unrelenting violence in Gaza, to protect civilians and aid workers, and to do everything possible to achieve an immediate and lasting cease-fire."
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