Documents Millward-Hopkins, Joel 4 results

"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."

"Inequality has become a defining feature of our time and concerns are growing that artificial intelligence, human-enhancement and global ecological breakdown could cause levels to spiral upwards. Although public disapproval of current inequalities is widespread, studies also show that people don't desire equality, but prefer ‘fair', still significant inequalities. Here, I argue these preferences are rooted in ideals of meritocracy and intuitive notions of free will; values that'll become increasingly tenuous in a future of human enhancement, where they could legitimise mass inequalities. Maintaining an illusion of free will is often argued to be needed to disincentivise immoral behaviour, but it also creates a vicious feedback: It provides social legitimacy to substantial inequalities, which exacerbate precisely those immoral behaviours that the illusion is intended to mitigate. However, meritocratic values, and their foundational notion of individual agency, are neither natural nor inevitable – they're mediated by social practices. To see what egalitarian practices may look like, I review the rich anthropology literature on egalitarian societies. This highlights an irony, in that the meritocratic ideals proposed by contemporary politicians as a remedy to entrenched inequalities are the same values seen as the origin of inequality in existing egalitarian societies around the world."

"There is some evidence to support the common intuition that, as the direct impacts of warming intensify – particularly in the affluent Global North – a politics ambitious enough to confront the climate emergency may finally find support. However, it seems at least equally likely that the opposite trend will prevail. This proposition can be understood by considering various indirect impacts of warming, including the widening of socioeconomic inequalities (within and between countries), increases in migration (intra- and inter-nationally) and heightened risk of conflict (from violence and war through to hate speech and crime). Compiling these impacts reveals a considerable and highly inconvenient overlap with key drivers of the authoritarian populism that has proliferated in the 21st century. It highlights the risk of a socio-ecological feedback loop where the consequences of warming create a political environment entirely at odds with that required to reduce emissions. Such a future is, of course, far from inevitable. Nonetheless, the risks highlight the urgent need to find public support for combined solutions to climate change and inequality, which go well beyond the status-quo. This is necessary not only for reasons of economic and climate justice, but in order to mitigate political barriers to carbon mitigation itself."

"Background
For decades, climate researchers have highlighted the unprecedented emissions reductions necessary if we are to meet global mitigation ambitions. To achieve these reductions, the climate change mitigation scenarios that dominate the literature assume large-scale deployment of negative-emissions technologies, but such technologies are unproven and present considerable trade-offs for biodiversity and food systems. In response, energy researchers have postulated low energy demand scenarios as alternatives and others have developed models for estimating the minimum energy requirements for the provision of decent material living standards considered essential for human wellbeing. However, a key question that our study aims to explore is how a climate-safe, low energy demand future, and universal decent living could be achieved simultaneously, given the magnitude of current global inequalities in energy consumption and technological access.
Methods
In this modelling study, we combined data that described current global and regional inequalities in energy consumption with scenarios for low energy demand in 2050, and compared the resulting distributions with estimates of decent living energy, drawing all of this data from published academic literature. Using a threshold analysis, we estimated how much of the 2050 global population would fall below the minimum energy required to support human wellbeing if a low energy demand pathway was followed but inequalities in energy consumption remained as wide as they currently are. We then estimated the reductions in energy inequality and increases in technological equity that were required to ensure that no one falls below decent living energy in a climate-safe future. Finally, we speculated about the implications for global income inequalities.
Findings
We found that unprecedented reductions in income and energy inequalities are likely to be necessary to simultaneously secure a climate-safe future and decent living standards for all. If global energy use is reduced enough to ensure climate safety, but the extent of energy inequality remains as it is today, more than 4 billion people will not have access to decent living energy. To avoid this occurrence, after remaining essentially flat for 150 years, the Gini coefficient for income inequality globally might have to fall by a factor of two (ie, to a lower extent than for some of the most egalitarian European countries) and at a rate of reduction more than double that observed in the so-called golden age of capitalism. In the Global South (South America, Central America, south Asia, southeast Asia, east Asia, the Middle East, and Africa) even greater reductions in inequality would be required, unless the average living standards in the Global North (North America, Europe, Australasia, central Asia, and Japan) and in the Global South fully converged, which would require even more substantial reductions in consumption in the Global North than low energy demand scenarios assume.
Interpretation
Resolving the contradiction between the current global economic system (with its inherent inequalities) and the need for planetary and human health necessitates transformational change. Reflecting on the limitations of our analysis, we discuss four ways that these global challenges could be met without the need for such drastic reductions in inequality.
Funding
The Centre for Research into Energy Demand Solutions and the Leverhulme Trust."