Providing Decent Living with Minimum Energy for Modern Humans
This is another article review of quotes [and comments added in brackets]. Best to just read the original. I failed to find any hint in the article that there are or could be too many people on the planet, a concept (overpopulation) that is not considered, perhaps because not politically thinkable. Too bad rapid population reduction is the only viable solution to most problems we have, i.e. all problems that are overshoot related.
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.
[The concept of “decent” is wholly a social construct of Modern Techno-Industrial (MTI) peoples whose form of civilization is not remotely viable. Descending to a “decent” and “sustainable” number of humans on the planet consuming a “decent” amount of energy and stuff is an attempt to envision what a viable form of MTI society would look like. Perhaps the question should start with what a viable number of humans on the planet might be (e.g. 7–35 million) whose consumption excluded all long-term non-renewables (e.g. fossil fuels, mined/recycled metals and minerals — in a low energy world, 100% recycling is not possible).]
1. Introduction
The annual energy use of late-Palaeolithic foragers is estimated to have been around 5 GJ [gigajoules] per person annually (Smil, 2017) — the sum of food-energy metabolised plus biomass for cooking.
By 1850, after nearly 10,000 years of agriculturally-supported expansion, average global primary energy consumption rose to over 20 GJ/cap (GEA, 2012).
Today, after 150 years of fossil-fuelled industrial development, it has reached 80 GJ/cap (IEA, 2019a).
In absolute terms, total global primary energy use has risen from around 1 PJ in the late-Palaeolithic to nearly 600,000 PJ today…. [or 600,000,000,000 GJ/8 billion humans = 75 GJ/cap. We went from zero energy slaves to 15 energy slaves per average person. The United States’ per capita energy consumption is 311 GJ/cap or the average American has 62 energy slaves working for them 24/7 to better serve us than 62 human slaves could do, especially the young and old ones. Few of Rome’s most elite had more than a 100 slaves working maybe 12 hours a day for them. If you envision a world with no human slaves, envision a would with maybe 7-35 million humans supported by the environmental productivity of their local region (e.g. local watershed area) that depends on leaving room for Nature, for the Gaian system to prosper.]
Have the massive increases in energy consumption that accompanied the agricultural and industrial revolutions brought about comparable improvements for human well-being? Evidence suggests that for much of the past 10,000 years agriculture led to a declining quality of life for most human populations, compared to their forager predecessors (Larsen, 2006). But recent centuries have seen a rapid reversal of this trend, with improvements in health indicators across the board. However, it is difficult to say whether humans today are better off than ancient foragers (Diamond, 2010), who were far more socially and politically sophisticated than is often assumed (Wengrow and Graeber, 2015). Available data — life expectancy, child mortality, rates of violence seen in some modern foraging societies — can never tell the full story (Harari, 2016). [That’s what the tealeaves of evidence are trying to tell us, but note that the food on then end of your fork likely was extensively processed and travelled 1,500 miles to get there, and that ten times more fossil fuel was used to produce it than kcals in the food, i.e. without turning fossil fuel into food, figure a hundred fold decrease in human food availability.]
Regarding the modern era, however, some things can be stated with certainty:
First, current levels of energy use underpin numerous existential threats — ecological crises (Haberl et al., 2011, Steffen et al., 2015), resource scarcity, and the geopolitical instabilities these issues can catalyse, especially in a growth-dependent global economy (Büchs and Koch, 2019). And those most severely impacted tend to be the least well off (Haberl et al., 2011).
Second, while immense improvements in energy efficiency have occurred throughout the industrial revolution, these largely served to boost productivity and enable further growth (Brockway et al., 2017, Sakai et al., 2018, Ayres and Warr, 2010). Global energy use has thus risen consistently (GEA, 2012), with the exception of financial crises — whose effects soon wear off (Geels, 2013) — and global pandemics (Le Quéré et al., 2020) — the long-term impacts of which are yet to be seen. In countries where economic activity appears to have been decoupled from energy-use, this normally turns out to be an artefact of accounting conventions (Arto et al., 2016, Haberl et al., 2020) — namely, production-based methods, which ignore offshoring of production and imported goods (Peters, 2008, Peters et al., 2011).
Finally, the drastic increases in societies’ energy use seen in recent decades have, beyond a certain point, had no benefit for the well-being of their populations — social returns on energy consumption per capita become increasingly marginal (Arto et al., 2016, Steinberger and Roberts, 2010, Steinberger et al., 2012, Martínez and Ebenhack, 2008). Some countries thus achieve high social outcomes with far lower energy consumption than others, but none currently manage to achieve high social outcomes while staying within planetary boundaries (O’Neill et al., 2018).
Estimating the energy requirements of well-being is therefore an important but challenging task. Fortunately, recent advances have been made in both theory (Rao and Baer, 2012, Day et al., 2016, Brand-Correa and Steinberger, 2017) and estimation (Rao et al., 2019, Arto et al., 2016). It has been argued that a finite and universal set of satiable human needs underpin life satisfaction (O’Neill et al., 2018), while the ways they can be satisfied are culturally, historically and technologically varied (Gough, 2015, Brand-Correa et al., 2018). Further, while efficiency improvements have undoubtedly contributed to the decreasing levels of energy associated with human development (Steinberger and Roberts, 2010), other cultural and technological (long- and short-term) trends work counter to this. For example, diffuse contemporary social networks and a globalised economy necessitate high levels of mobility and complex communications technologies to meet basic needs of social and political participation, while infrastructure biased toward private vehicles ensures much of this mobility is car-dependent. A global population in the billions necessitates substantial agricultural activity — the foraging methods of our ancestors were much less energy intense, but could support <1% of the current world population (Burger and Fristoe, 2018) [0.05% is less than 1%]. Moreover, inequality, and especially affluence, are now widely recognised as core drivers of environmental damage (Wiedmann et al., 2020).
Here, we aim to contribute to these debates by estimating minimum final energy requirements for decent living standards to be provided to the entire global population in 2050. We build an energy-model upon the existing framework of Rao and Min (2018a), which proposes a list of basic material needs that underpin human well-being, and consider final (as opposed to primary) energy in order to move a step closer to the energy requirements of social life. These material needs are in many ways specific to our time, but can be taken as a reasonable basis for the coming decades. We find that, with a combination of the most efficient technologies available and radical demand-side transformations that reduce excess consumption to sufficiency-levels, the final energy requirements for providing decent living standards to the global population in 2050 could be over 60% lower than consumption today. In countries that are today’s highest per-capita consumers, cuts of ~95% appear possible while still providing decent living standards to all.
[Contributing to debates among modern Anthropocene techno-industrial servants of the global monetary culture/form of civilization by estimating minimum final energy requirements for decent living standards to be provided to the entire global population in 2050 is a distraction few Anthropocene enthusiasts will be distracted by. The few will add a few more dissonant words the the sustainability debate. A likely outcome is that 13.4 billion humans will die a premature death this century.]
[And how much energy is needed to live a decent eudaimonic life none of our hominin ancestors were able to live on a mere 5 GJ? No surprise here, folks, as experts differ:]
[And so we expansionist form of modern humans need (about 15-25 GJ/cap or) 3–5 times more energy than our ancestors did to persist over six million years. But we expansionist form of human will want evermore, for our 50k year old expansionist r-culture (far older than the Bible) tells us so. If we could all agree to live like the poorest of poor Americans (15-25 GJ/cap vs 311 GJ/cap today), the total human consumption the planetary life-support system would decline by a third to a quarter, but continue to increase until maybe 2050 if population growth climaxes by then so we can remain far into overshoot for how long?]
[That Earth can sustainably support 3–4 billion humans (46% of experts think >4 billion humans can be sustainably supported) at current levels of consumption, then if 9 billion consume only one-third as much, then 9 billion can be supported, and so we don’t have to think about reducing human population, which only racists who want to kill black babies want to talk about.]
[Oh, and assumed is that current agricultural productivity can continued with regenerative agriculture/permaculture/vertical farming techniques added to maintain if not increase yields to make agriculture sustainable. This is a far more eudaimonic solution than a rapid birth-off to less than 7 million with perhaps a gradual increase as the millennia pass while the Gaian system recovers from the Anthropocene mass extinction event.]
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — — —
For involuntary change, join MHEM. The belief that you are a free agent, with free will to choose your future (or get modern humans to choose their future), is error floating on a sea of ignorance in a thick fog of illusion.
[Note: MHEM includes members who celebrate Modern human life and favor the extinction of all life that humans do not value. A minority faction views the condition of being a Modern human the way AA members view the condition of being an alcoholic — i.e. non-viable. The author is obviously one of the “Or-nots” who seek to “just say no” to the Anthropocene.]