HOW CAN WE SUPPORT FUTURE ECONOMIC GROWTH? IS THERE A GLOBAL ENERGY DEMATERIALIZATION?

RECALDE, MARINA YESICA; ZILIO, MARIANA INES; GUZOWSKI, CARINA

Rio de Janeiro

Congreso; 2012 Conference of the International Society for Ecological Economics; 2012

The International Society for Ecological Economics

During the last decades, as a result of increasing concern about climate change consequencesand depletion of the most important energy sources, the discussion of how to sustain the increasing energy demand has arisen. In this frame pursing a decoupling or dematerialization path seems to be the best solution. However, the possibility to extend the ?successful? dematerialization experiences of developed economies to developing ones is at least doubtful.In this paper we study the historical evolution of energy intensity, energy consumption, CO2 emissions and product generational dematerialization (PGD) for a sample of Latin American and Caribbean and OECD countries for the 1960-2009 period. No evidence for global long term dematerialization was found. Therefore, we stress the relevance of building new environmental friendly strategies to reduce human ecological impact.