If capitalism keeps 10 billion people employed 9–5 through mass overproduction, our planet will be toast
Joel Millward-Hopkins, postdoctoral researcher in sustainability, examines how advanced technologies, sufficient consumption, and flattening global inequalities could together improve the standard of living for all within a livable climate.
The Earth is home to 7.8 billion human beings
About 70%, or 5.5 billion people, are under the age of 45, while global life expectancy is closing upon 75 years. People who are 45 years old or younger are expected to live until 2050 and beyond. What this means is that the 2050 global population would likely be well over 5 billion, even if not a single human baby was born in the next 30 years.
What this calculation shows is now that humans are living so long, population change is very slow (that is, in the absence of nuclear war or a pandemic far deadlier than covid-19). This is partly why our global population is forecast to be nearly 10 billion in 2050, and over 8 billion in the lowest forecasts, even though population growth has been slowing for over 50 years. If as some claim that overpopulation was the primary cause of looming ecological catastrophes, our fate would appear to be sealed.
Fortunately, it’s not. Population is one of many drivers of environmental impacts — alongside affluence, technology, and inequality — as expert advocates of population reductions make extremely clear. This doesn’t mean that initiatives to reduce population aren’t important, especially as these can (and must) be focused upon empowering women through education, access to contraception and family planning. A reduced population can be seen as a side effect of providing women across the Global South with a level of control over their reproduction that those in the Global North take for granted. And such initiatives will be needed for the population to peak this century.
However, the role that reductions in population can play in reducing impacts over the coming few decades is limited and these decades are crucial for climate change mitigation. It’s promising that in new research, we find that with 60% less energy than today, decent living standards could be provided to 10 billion people in 2050. That’s 75% less energy than is forecast for 2050 on our current trajectory and an amount that could almost certainly be met by clean sources.
Achieving such a world requires radical action on all fronts
It requires a mass rollout of the best technologies available — the most advanced buildings, vehicles, household appliances and lighting systems, along with efficient industrial facilities to produce and recycle all the required materials. And it requires drastic reductions in consumption. There’s no room for second homes, second cars, or 20-minute power showers in the second bathroom, nor biannual upgrading of electronic gadgets, new shoes for every season or plates piled high with red meat seven nights a week.
Crucially, it requires the excessive consumption of the affluent to be reduced to modest levels, leaving space for the living conditions of the ~3.5 billion living on less than $5.50 a day to be raised. In the most energy hungry countries of the Global North like the USA and Australia, average energy use per person is 100 times larger than in poorer regions of Africa. Consequently, in the former countries, reductions in energy use of over 90% could be made while still providing decent living standards for all. By contrast, providing the same living standards in poorer areas of the Global South may require energy use to increase 10-fold.
Providing universal decent living with minimal energy use requires a flattening of global and national inequalities. In our study, we allow for inequalities in energy consumption only where need dictates. Especially cold or hot climates need more energy for heating and cooling; sparsely populated regions need more transport to meet social needs.
What do we mean by decent living?
The notion we use is far from contemporary consumer culture but it’s also a long way from anything resembling poverty. There’s adequately sized housing that maintains a comfortable temperature all-year round, with clean running water and enough heat to meet hygiene needs. Washing machines, fridge-freezers, laptops and smartphones in every home. Enough hospitals and schools for universal access, and three times more public transport per person than is currently provided in the world’s wealthier Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
When people claim environmentalists are calling for us to return to living in caves, this is clearly not what they have in mind, or else they’re imagining rather luxurious caves! The major reductions in consumption that are necessary don’t present barriers to anyone achieving a high quality of life. Solving the ecological crises doesn’t have to be the attack on modern living that many fear.
Although that’s not entirely true. It is an attack on an economic system that requires permanent growth in output to maintain employment levels; that incentivizes shifting factories to places where global economic forces make ecological damage inevitable and wages barely adequate for subsistence; that requires the majority of people to work the majority of their lives in jobs they secretly believe are pointless.
Ecological breakdown is only one of the 21st century’s challenges
Fears are abound that artificial intelligence and automation will bring mass unemployment, spiraling inequalities, and even biological castes of superhumans. We may see the entirety of Uber replaced by self-driving vehicles; robotic factories able to produce an abundance of synthetic meat; even large fractions of healthcare and legal work outsourced to algorithms fed by torrents of globally sourced data. All this alongside a rapidly aging population, requiring increasing amounts of care.
A world of universal decent living standards using minimal energy requires drastic reductions in global inequalities. But these developments promise to push us precisely the other way.
Can business as usual cope? In an increasingly automated future, no work means no wages — who’ll then buy all the stuff that’s produced? Alternatively, if capitalism manages to keep a world of 10 billion people employed 9–5 through mass overproduction, the planet will be toast. The only people living decently may be those blessed with the finances and foresight to have secured themselves a doomsday bunker on the flourishing ‘apocalypse real estate’ market.
If aliens were looking down upon us now…
they would surely be baffled that technologies able to replace much of our labour are being met with fear, rather than celebration. But these fears are merely symptoms of our economic system. Anyone familiar with The Culture at the heart of Iain M. Banks’ science fiction will be aware of the idea that capitalism is ill-suited to a world of intelligent machines and automated production. In short, beyond a certain level of technological development, very little human labour is socially necessary. Wages and money thus cease to make sense. This requires us to totally rethink systems of ownership and distribution.
And why not? The technologies underpinning automation are an outcome of hundreds of years of human experimentation and ingenuity (and blind luck). Why should the benefits be captured by a minority of super-rich owners?
To confront 21st century challenges, things like Universal Basic Services will be needed ‒ public provisioning of housing, healthcare, education, mobility and other services required to meet the basic needs of all citizens. Another important step forward could be a Green New Deal focused on equality and decarbonization, not growth. Universal Basic Services could support people in a world with less work, allowing people the time to undertake all the unpaid care work required to support children, the elderly, and all those in between. There’s a reluctance to such proposals from some, but anyone that thinks removing the economic incentive for people to work will lead to a society of slackers needs to look-up Wikipedia and take a browse.
We’re a long way from the limitless luxuries available to the spacefaring citizens of Ian M. Banks’ novels (and who knows if we’ll ever get close). But providing decent living standards to all is technologically possible, and the politics this requires may meet other challenges presented by 21st century technologies and our aging population. It may be a step towards a utopian future where luxury can be provided to all. When the alternative is ecological catastrophe and social breakdown, aspiring to such a world seems not only desirable, but essential.
