Providing decent living with minimum energy: A global scenario

[PETRUS]

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.

link to the full paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378020307512?via%3Dihub

[Pantagruel]

1. Will never happen:

"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."


Too complicated and expensive. But a simple albeit draconian global mandate ,
"one child" families , could reduce consumption and combined with technology and sustainability efforts might stabilize the situation. Frankly , I think we're doomed.

[PETRUS]

2. I don't see it happening in the foreseeable future, either.

Not for the same reasons, though. (In fact, I don't think complexity or expense are real problems at all.) In my opinion, the main impediments are political. All the rich countries are still pursuing pro-growth policies that increase energy and material use, and there's no hint of any possible change. Almost nobody - maybe literally nobody - in a position of real influence is open to alternatives, and for the most part the people with real power are actively hostile to those kinds of changes. Nor is there significant public pressure.

[hunter]

3. This is a wonderful article. Yeah, I'd live in that cave... life is pretty decent there.

Safe comfortable housing, good food, clean water, hot showers, nice neighbors, great schools, thirty hour work weeks, all sorts of travel options...

All our cities should be like that.

We have the technologies to quit fossil fuels without going back to the stone age.

I think the most important step forward is to build attractive affordable cities; places where automobile ownership is unnecessary and it's easy to find a job that affords a nice place to live.

Next we need a society that educates and empowers women. Sex education should be realistic and practical and birth control easily available. That's how human populations are stabilized.

The current human population being what it is I no longer believe we can quit fossil fuels without nuclear power. A purely "renewable energy" economy isn't able to support the affluent lifestyle many people are now accustomed to, and might not even be able to feed eight billion people or more.

I think the most dangerous fuel is natural gas. There's enough gas in the ground to destroy the earth's environment as we know it. Yet too many people perceive gas as a "clean" fuel and good "backup" power to their solar and wind energy fantasies.

In reality natural gas is merely a slower poison than coal. Both will kill a world civilization.

Keeping some cities viable as the climate heats up and the oceans rise is going to take some hard work and a lot of energy. Reconstructing and relocating coastal cities is going to be the hardest work. Keeping the air conditioners running and the toilets flushing in places like Phoenix or Las Vegas is going to take some serious energy.

[PETRUS]

4. Thanks for your comments.

For me, the main value of the paper is to emphasize that there's plenty to go around, and it's possible for everyone to lead decent lives (that include a variety of modern conveniences) without also wrecking our habitat, as long as we're reasonable and responsible.

I agree that nuclear power needs to be part of the strategy. My impression is that it's not possible to scale it up quickly enough (or even high enough) to handle rising power demands, though. And even if can find a clean solution for meeting higher energy use, that doesn't solve the problem of material throughput, which is also threatening to provoke ecological collapse. That's why I believe we need to figure out a way to scale back both energy and material use.

Finally, I want to highlight something you wrote because I think it's really important: "Next we need a society that educates and empowers women. Sex education should be realistic and practical and birth control easily available. That's how human populations are stabilized." It's true that providing women with educational opportunity and allowing them to control their own reproduction tends to lower birthrates. But even if that weren't the case, this is still the right thing to do. All humans are equally deserving of dignity, respect, and autonomy.

[Progressive dog]

5. That is not going to happen

If governents are willing to force people to drastically reduce their consumption and change their lifestyles, those governments will have to be authoritarian. The authoritarian part would have to come first and unless there is a single world government, those authoritarian governments are unlikely to work together.

[hunter]

6. No force required.

There's plenty of people who hate their jobs in environmentally destructive industries, hate their long commutes, hate their energy and water guzzling homes, hate mowing their lawns, hate their automobiles, hate their business travel... etc.

Given an opportunity to reduce the stress in their lives, and reduce their environmental footprints, many would eagerly "change their lifestyles."

I think the key to this is affordable urban housing -- neighborhoods with good jobs, grocery stores, and interesting shops within easy walking distance.

I'm not talking about science fiction concrete multi-story urban arcologies, just smaller homes with small gardens, in places with good public transportation... much as all cities were built before the automobile age, but better without the coal furnaces and dirty air, without the horse shit in the streets, and all the modern conveniences including high speed optical fiber internet.

It's not a coincidence that some of these pre-automobile age urban areas are now posh neighborhoods.

Homes in the San Francisco neighborhood where my grandmother was born, just after the Great Earthquake, now sell for at least one and a half million dollars. That's for a smaller home that's been subdivided into apartments and run down by absentee landlords and struggling tenants. Restored these homes sell for two million dollars or more. These homes, built shoulder-to-shoulder, weren't anything special when new, the tract homes of their day, and became less desirable when automobile culture opened up the suburbs and affluent white people left. But now they are desirable again and much finer places to live than they ever were in the past.

(My great-great grandfather's San Francisco home is a colorful gilded Beauty Queen. My grandma and her sister didn't stay in San Francisco, which they considered a stodgy working class town, and went on to run wild in Hollywood.)

The old downtown of my own small city used to be a place people avoided at night. Now it is greatly revived with movie theaters, restaurants, art galleries, etc.. The upper floors of old office buildings, which had long gone empty or used for storage, are being converted to housing. Downtown living is not a bad lifestyle and has a relatively small environmental footprint.

My wife and I live in a high density suburb with a backyard big enough for three large dogs. We're about two miles from downtown, a mile from the grocery store and two miles, in the opposite direction, to the nearest Target. Our children walked to school but now they are grown and living in big cities. I think our neighborhood would be greatly improved if it was more like pre-automobile cities, with a few little grocery stores, hair salons, and pubs scattered about within easy walking distance. Our children and some of our nieces and nephews live in places like that.

[Progressive dog]

7. I disagree and certainly would not choose to

set environmental policies based on a few anecdotes from one particular section of one nation.
Most of the world's population has a standard of living far below that of the USA and other developed nations. That standard of living depends upon energy use to improve efficiency and replace labor.
I live six or seven miles from the nearest grocery store and even when I was younger, I would not have thought of walking that far and carrying home groceries. It's about three miles to the nearest public transportation, which is a commuter rail station that provides a connection with NYC. My children were bused to school, as they must be when there are no sidewalks and distances can be ten or more miles to school. That's my anecdote. I do not wish to live downtown.
Poughkeepsie, the largest city in my county, has zero grocery stores. They all moved to the surrounding towns years ago.

[hunter]

8. So, how do we fix that?

Affordable fossil fuel free energy would be a good start.

From there ordinary government regulations can encourage the building and rebuilding of cities that have a much smaller per-capita environmental footprints than automobile dependent low density suburbs.

We already know such lifestyles are desirable. Some people pay crazy prices for them. And people now living in extreme poverty, with no safe water, no flush toilets, no modern sanitation systems, and no electricity, would happily trade up to an urban lifestyle with safe comfortable housing and good work.

Here in the U.S.A. many people with very limited incomes are forced to maintain cars because they live in places where no car equals no work and they can't see any way out. That's unacceptable. It's a great fallacy that owning a car is some kind of freedom. It's not.

[Progressive dog]

10. Obviously, if we don't have enough fossil fuel free energy

production to satisfy demand there is no point in subsidizing it. Eventually energy from fossil fuel will cost more than renewable energy, but before it can be available all our investments in fossil fuel recovery and use will have to be replaced. Airplanes, buses, trucks, most railroad s, ships, etc. will become obsolete.
As far as ownong a car being a freedom, it is more than that, it is a necessity for many of us.

[PETRUS]

9. I've been meaning to respond to this.

In some ways, I think you are absolutely right. Nations and high-net-worth elites are constantly jockeying for position. The "winners" are generally the governments (or individuals) who can deploy the most energy and material - this applies to both economic and military competition. Why would any of the players voluntarily back off? The kind of coordination required does lead one to think of a "single world government."

In another sense, I think you're missing the obvious. Authoritarianism is what got us here. Any formal economy is coercive. (That goes without saying, but if you have any doubts about that being the case in the US, just look as how wildly off actual policy is with respect to polling - raise the minimum wage and increase taxes on the rich have had supermajority support for years, and even "is protecting the environment more important than growing the economy" registered above water when I checked recently.) There are plenty of people in the US (and many more elsewhere) that use very little energy and materials due to income/wealth constraints. There are already prohibitions or stipulations about what can be manufactured - or what goods and services can be sold - and under what conditions. Our government wouldn't have to be any more "authoritarian" that it already is, it would just have to enforce different rules. Or the world could go wildly anti-authoritarian, which would remove most of the "incentives" to produce a massive surplus...

[Progressive dog]

11. The USA has a constitution that restricts

what government is allowed to do. We have had minimum wages for years, at one time we did tax the wealthy at a much higher rate. The problem is not our system of government, it is who we elect to run that government. Our government is not and has never been authoritarian.
As far as people in other nations that are poorer, they are all striving to raise their standard of living. They don't choose to be poor.