Easter Sunday - the day we start living off others

[garyoak99]

UK uses more than three times its share of global resources

 

It's a couple of days late, but the dinner you eat tonight is the last supper. From tomorrow, Britain starts living off the rest of the world. At midnight, less than a third of the way through the year, the UK ceases to be a self-sufficient country.

 

So says a report by the New Economics Foundation, which illustrates how Britain's way of life now depends on sucking in resources from the rest of the world. Without the doctors and nurses from Africa and Asia, the NHS would grind to a halt. Supermarket shelves would be bare without the green beans from Kenya, the cabernet sauvignon from Chile, the braeburn apples from New Zealand.

 

Nor does Britain just have a deficit in medical personnel and food. Three decades after crude started to gush out of the North Sea, stocks of oil and gas are dwindling fast: the UK became a net importer of energy in 2004. And when it comes to our national game, the foreign dominance at the top level is complete. Half the teams in the Premiership this season would have been putting out six-a-side teams if they were forced to choose from home-grown players; Arsenal will fly the flag for England in the Champions League semi-final this week but they will probably do so without a single player born in the United Kingdom or Ireland in the starting lineup.

 

The above is the bad news; the good news is the UK is still better than the US!

 

Ecological debt

 

Does it matter? NEF says it does. If every country had Britain's level of consumption, it says, there would need to be not just one world but 3.1 worlds to cope with the demand. At just 22 weeks old, an average British citizen will be responsible for the equivalent emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide that someone in Tanzania will generate in a lifetime.

 

The UK is not quite in the same league as the US; it would take 5.3 worlds to supply the necessary resources if the 6 billion people on the planet had the same appetite as the 300 million Americans. But Britain's position has changed radically in the past 45 years and, lacking North America's natural resources, it goes into what NEF calls "ecological debt" long before the US.

 

Back in 1961, according to the NEF calculations, the UK could manage until the second half of the year under its own steam. It was July 9 before we started to call on the rest of the world to top up our own efforts. Twenty years later, the end of national self-sufficiency came on May 14; the date this year falls on April 16 - one of the earliest in the developed world.

 

This brings us to the question; what other countries are this bad or worse?

 

The Dutch and the Japanese are the first to hit the buffers in terms of sustainability. By the first few days in March, consumers in Amsterdam and Tokyo are starting to live off others. Italy comes next, on April 13, followed by the UK. The Germans manage for themselves until the end of May, and the abundance of natural resources in the US means that Americans are self-sustainable for almost half the year.

 

France's support for home-grown production, from camembert to Citroën, ensures that it can fend for itself until July 27, while the Austrians manage until October 1 - almost six months longer than we can in the UK.

 

What do you think of all this?

[Lucandrake]

The end of the world as we speak tsk tsk, what a shame.