Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario

TLDR

Averting ecological breakdown demands drastic societal and economic changes, yet billions still lack basic material needs. The study develops a simple, bottom‑up model to estimate a practical minimal threshold for final energy consumption needed to provide decent material livings worldwide. The model assumes a massive rollout of advanced technologies and radical demand‑side changes across all sectors to reduce consumption to sufficiency levels. It predicts that by 2050 global final energy consumption could fall to 1960s levels even with a population three times larger, and that sufficiency would be materially more generous than commonly assumed.

Abstract

It is increasingly clear that averting ecological breakdown will require drastic changes to contemporary human society and the global economy embedded within it. On the other hand, the basic material needs of billions of people across the planet remain unmet. Here, we develop a simple, bottom-up model to estimate a practical minimal threshold for the final energy consumption required to provide decent material livings to the entire global population. We find that global final energy consumption in 2050 could be reduced to the levels of the 1960s, despite a population three times larger. However, such a world requires a massive rollout of advanced technologies across all sectors, as well as radical demand-side changes to reduce consumption – regardless of income – to levels of sufficiency. Sufficiency is, however, far more materially generous in our model than what those opposed to strong reductions in consumption often assume.