How did they calculate that? I don't believe it.
this post was submitted on 24 Jul 2025
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https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/124460/1/Hinckel_how-much-growth-is-required--published.pdf
Hickel serves on the Climate and Macroeconomics Roundtable of the US National Academy of Sciences. He is legit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jason_Hickel
Ah hes a degrowther, makes sense. I read through his paper and I really don't think its realistic or thought provoking. It lacks humanity and applies a utilitarian solution. Its the same as saying we have x humans producing co2 lets reduce the number of humans but instead of humans its goods he deems to be unnecessary.
His entire premise is based on what he thinks a person needs to live a good life. But lifes just not that simple and people all around the world NEED different things this type of strict partitioning fails when applied to the entire world. Part of what makes our current system work is that its dynamic, people create goods they want and those who also want those goods buy them.
No, his argument is that the average human needs this standard. also, it is a model, it is by definition simplified.
Besides, what is the alternative? First world countries living like they own the place, third world countries starving, and we're all getting killed in the climate war of 2040?
Oh, I know!
wE sHoULd KiLl HalF oF ThEm
I was going to say "No one is saying that", but there are many going down that road.
The preferable approach is degrowth. A lower birthrate leading to a smaller population with no deaths required, just vastly fewer births and lower consumption until human civilization can not only fit with our planetary boundaries, but restore a lot of wildlife and wildlands, then stabilize at a population and consumption that is healthy and comfortable.
This is already happening, but i don’t think it’s fast enough: with the exceeded life expectancy, we are first seeing an increase and aging of population. Only after the wave of now 50-60 year olds will be dead will we see a stable degrowth. Is that soon enough? Sure it’s preferable to extermination?
I'm not keen on a society were seniors are the majority of the population, it would be a disaster.
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Anyone have a good pdf source on this research?
Yeah but DLS would be a significant downgrade for many people, who already fight the suggestion to only eat meat six days a week tooth and nail.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6013539/
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10537420/
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/suppl/10.1021/acs.est.3c03957/suppl_file/es3c03957_si_001.pdf
Things that count as DLS:
- 10 m² of personal living space + 20 m² for every 4 ppl as bathroom / kitchen
- 2100 kcal/day
- 1400 kWh/year, but this already includes public services (education/healthcare)
- 1 washing machine per 20 ppl
- 2.4 kg clothing / year
- wear tops for three days and bottoms for 15 days without washing
- 1 laptop per 4 people with a yearly power consumption of 62 kWh. (bizzarely they talk about an 800 MHz computer and seem to confuse HDD and RAM). If your gaming computer used 400 W you could use it for 150 hr/year.
I'm gonna need a lot more than 10 square meters of space if everyone is changing their shirts twice a week. Yuck.
On top of that, sharing 1 washing machine for 20 fucking people?
In what world do the people writing this live? Have they never lived in an apartment building with shared laundry? The machines are never kept clean because people are fucking animals.
What a stupidly naive study lmao.
They live in a world where 700 million people are currently starving. Do you think you care about the washing machines if your children have nothing to eat?
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The other question is: where are we living? It takes a lot more resources to live in Canada than it does to live in a warm climate to the south. Does that mean we all have to abandon Canada and crowd ourselves into the hot equatorial regions?
Otherwise those numbers seem like a huge downgrade for even working class Canadians. It goes to show you that Canada is a truly rich country and all but the least fortunate here have far more resources than someone living in the poorest countries in the world.
Yeah, that list sounds like literal prison. That's a hard sell for a good chunk of people.
Prison in a hot climate with no AC. No thanks!
They talk about it in the PDF. Basically its a weighted average. Some people live in colder climates and need more heating/clothes, others need less. It then averages out to those numbers.
So it’s not really giving everyone in the world an exactly equal share of resources. Not to mention there’s a natural component to inequality that’s independent of resources: location. A 10 m^2 per person shack is a lot more bearable on a beach in Southern California than it is in a desert or an insect-infested swamp.
Its not about giving people resources, merely estimating what it would take for everyone to meet DLS requirements if they live where they currently live.
I'd argue that's a downgrade for most people. I personally exceed all of those bullet points and the idea of coming close to most of them sounds like Hell to me. If it meant 8.5 billion people met those standards, I could make the sacrifice, but it would be awful.
Can you imagine if everyone you met was wearing a 3 days dirty shirt? Do other not sweat? And 2100 kcal per day is not safe or sustainable for almost anyone that exercises regularly.
And 2100 kcal per day is not safe or sustainable for almost anyone that exercises regularly.
I’m a woman with a relatively large frame (~65kg/180cm) who used to do 14 hours of hard cardio a week. At that time, my recommendation was 2250, the first time in my life it had exceeded 2k. For smaller women, the recommendation is sometimes much lower. My stepsister is about 45kg and 155cm tall and her calculated daily calorie burn is like 1300. My ex boyfriend’s mom was told not to go over 1200, which I thought was the lower limit for humans generally- things are different when you’re a short, post-menopausal woman.
All that is to say, it’s probably an average of 2100 calories, spread between people who need on average 1400-1800 calories and those who need 2000-2400
That's fair. My take was shallow and I was thinking more from personal experience. I'm ~200lbs and burn over 100 kcal every mile I run, and am a distance athlete. If I jog 6 miles or bike 20+, I have to replace that for proper recovery.
I shouldn't say most people, but a large amount of people need more than 2100 kcal if they are active.
It’s honestly wild the difference in caloric requirements based on age and sex/gender (I don’t know how much is due to size/hormones, so I don’t know where trans people’s requirements would be) even before factoring in activity level, so it’s entirely reasonable not to realize the difference.
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A simpler solution is to simply abolish wealth hoarding, impose sensible consumption limits (so, no cars or commercial plane travel, no meat, no 800 watt gaming rigs), and continue to encourage population decline. Boom, everyone is healthy, the air is clean, and you can keep your house.
Their idea of ‘decent’ is disgusting.
Their idea of decent is a dream for a good chunk of the world population. We're the privileged ones. People kill to live like us.
I am amazed by all the people that, when faced with having to give up some of the first-world luxury they are used to, flip completely in their head. It is the opposite of not-in-my-backyard: Don't take from my backyard, pls.
Yes, I would rather have the current distribution continue, where hundreds of millions are literally starving, where there are people who would kill to live like this, where people are walking through the desert and taking dinghies over oceans for shit like this, just so I can have my amenities.
Absolutely wild. We're so doomed.
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It’s disturbing, how many people eagerly embrace eugenics and anti-natalism as long as they can cite a left-wing cause like ecology as their reason
Antinatalism is a strawman slur against anyone that questions the viability of infinite growth.
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How are the two on the same level?
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But image if we can provide so much for 8.5 billion, it means we can provid double for 4 billion. There is no reasonable excuse to keep increasing the human population.
Those 8.5 billion are producing all of that 100%. If you had 4 billion, it would be 45%.
Production is absolutely not the bottleneck, here. We are producing too much, constantly.
Why can’t we just have fewer people too? Instead of finding ways to support 50 billion people, how about we have good birth control facilities, education, and economies not based on constant never ending growth? The reality is unending growth WILL end whether people like it or not- wouldn’t it be better to do it on our own terms rather than in a global catastrophe?
wouldn’t it be better to do it on our own terms rather than in a global catastrophe?
The catastrophy is inevitable, it's just a question of whether any humans will survive.
For example CO2 has a delayed effect of ~40years (if I remember correctly). The effects of global warming are very much obvious now, but the yearly output hasn't at any point dropped to those levels since.
Most of the world is far from replacement levels of population and the global trend is a decrease in fertility. Overall, we are at 2.4 kids per woman, the replacement level being estimated between 2.1 and 2.3 (depending how likely you think it is to die from wars). This data has been (mostly) decreasing since the 60s.
Why can’t we just have fewer people too?
Won't somebody think of the ECONOMY?
A lot of countries around the world are living a so called "underpopulation crisis" even though the population is still growing frighteningly fast. Population going down is only a problem for capitalism, and it's going to doom us all
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Does this assume instant, frictionless transportation of goods?
And bunch of other sacrifices. One of the points was also about everyone living in a city close by. The study is not applicable to real life, it's utopia scenario. One of the biggest problems isn't even resources, but co2 production.
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Transportation of goods is mostly a capitalist issue. You don't need to cover a cucumber with plastic and ship it half way across the world, while selling the local ones to richer countries. The same goes for the vast majority of "goods". Remove all of that greedy, superfluous shit, and you're left with minimal shipping needs.
It's wild that many people on Lemmy dont understand that many things, while completely and absolutely unnecessary, also bring a lot of joy to people.
Cracking a bottle of beaujolais alongside a dish made from Chinese and Korean ingredients while listening to South American vinyl on my Japanese speakers is part of the spice of life.
I get that I could live like a 12th century peasant, only consume things I grow myself and use clothing I can make by hand, but Jesus christ, that's fucking insane.
Living isnt just about living, its about knowing and enjoying other cultures and the world itself. This study sound like they'd have you live in a cave with no ac while only eating flavorless locally sourced paste.
How boring and repulsive.
I mean, I get that you don’t like how they talk on Lemmy about it, but the quote from the study even talks about how the surplus could be used for additional consumption and everything. Study is here
I think we all have different things we want in life and with such a big surplus there is room for most of us to regularly enjoy that. I do not believe that they argue that we will NEVER be able to enjoy different food. That is as you have mentioned not functional or good for people to work together and live together. Disregarding the many people with different cultures that have moved somewhere else.
I think the study more clearly argues that we can afford to take care of everyone on the world if we wanted to. That there is a viable way and that that way is not as you are implying necessarily a deprived space with tight margins. Because living is about more than slaving away like a 12th century peasant to accumulate more wealth for a king somewhere far off.
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There was 3.7 billion people when I was born. Since I'm still alive we can guess that's within a human lifetime.
Since I was born, 73% of the animals on Earth are gone. Our ecosystems are already crashed, and no one notices.
Remember COVID? When everyone stayed home and quit buying shit, laid low? Remember Venice seeing dolphins in the streets and Asians seeing mountains you couldn't see before? Remember how quiet it was?
SOCIETY can provide, EARTH cannot. Y'all gonna have to die. But hey, between global warming and tanking birth rates fucking our economies in both holes, win, win! The contraction will be of Biblical proportions. I won't live it, my kids will. Good luck kids!
I won't live it, my kids will. Good luck kids!
One of the many reasons I didn't have kids.
And what makes you think society is suddenly going to change (any moment now?) and your kids would have a better life, would just everyone keep having kids?🤔
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How detailed is this calculation? Does it take into account where these resources are produced and costs of logistics (nvm difficulty of getting every country on board with this, lets assume we did)?
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