Success Quote by Maurice Strong

Strong’s line lands like a polite accusation: the countries most likely to speak in the language of “global responsibility” are also the ones doing the most damage. By quantifying the imbalance - “40 to 50 times” - he converts what can sound like moral hand-wringing into a ratio, a ledger. It’s the businessman’s move: translate ethics into scale, make denial harder, make accountability measurable.

The specific intent is to redirect environmental debate away from population-blaming and toward consumption, energy systems, and industrial supply chains. “We in the industrialized world” is doing strategic work here. It’s collective, almost diplomatic, but it also pins culpability where it hurts: on the affluent everyday baseline of cars, flights, meat, air-conditioning, plastics, and the upstream extraction that props them up. The subtext is that climate and ecological breakdown aren’t primarily a problem of “those people” having too many children; they’re a problem of “us” having too many conveniences, too cheaply priced.

Context matters: Strong helped architect modern global environmental governance (Stockholm 1972, Rio 1992). In that arena, numbers function as bargaining chips. This quote supports the principle later summarized as “common but differentiated responsibilities”: everyone is in the same storm, but some built the ship and some are clinging to the wreckage. Strong isn’t just scolding; he’s setting terms for policy - tighter obligations on rich nations, and a moral rationale for finance, technology transfer, and restraint that goes beyond charity.