How we could live
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2452292924000493#
“Provisioning decent living standards (DLS) for 8.5 billion people would require only 30% of current global resource and energy use, leaving a substantial surplus for additional consumption, public luxury, scientific advancement, and other social investments. Such a future requires planning to provision public services, to deploy efficient technology, and to build sovereign industrial capacity in the global South.”
It outlines what a decent living standard would look like. “For a population of 8.5 billion, provisioning DLS would therefore require 28–40 gigatons of material per year, representing 29–42% of current global annual material use (which was 95 gigatons in 201911).”
We need this sort of research, as it chimes very much with our own prognosis, but it comes with data we can deploy.
They show that it is possible to provide everybody on the planet (and more) with a “decent-living standard” (DLS) without overburdening the world ecosystem.
They define a decent standard of living as:
“Recent empirical studies have established the minimum set of specific goods and services that are necessary for people to achieve decent-living standards (DLS), including nutritious food, modern housing, healthcare, education, electricity, clean-cooking stoves, sanitation systems, clothing, washing machines, refrigeration, heating/cooling, computers, mobile phones, internet, transit, etc.”
And provide the evidence that everybody could be provided with all of these.
They realise that this can’t be achieved within capitalism as the economic laws of capitalism enforce giving priority to accumulation out of profits rather than to meeting people’s needs. But they seem to think that what they propose can be introduced gradually by government action within the shell of the system.
What they propose — essentially production geared to meeting people’s needs — could in fact only be implemented on the basis and within the framework of the common ownership and democratic control of the world’s natural and industrial resources.
That basis must be established first; otherwise any attempt to implement it would provoke an economic crisis as it would be interfering with the normal functioning of the economic laws of capitalism.
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