Part 6 of Decarbonising the Built Environment: a Global Overview, by Tom Ackers
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From the perspectives of real human needs and capacities, and present forms of technology, it is perfectly possible for all the world’s peoples and societies to follow a low energy and low emissions economic path from now onwards.
The obstacles to that come from the forces of capitalist growth, and the powerful interests invested in a more destructive future.
The obvious rational route to decarbonisation and a more liveable environment is “contraction and convergence”, a concept pioneered by the Global Commons Institute.
It means that the world’s high consumers of materials and energy need to contract their material and energy footprints dramatically; in turn, that creates consumption space for the world’s poor to consume more per capita use-values than they do now – to converge upwards on the per capita living standards of the global north.
All of that needs to happen across all sectors of the economy. It also needs to happen within a shrinking material consumption budget globally – and in the context of steep rises in forecast population.
There is plainly a tension between the extent of “permissible” material consumption, and the enormous needs for social development internationally. At least half the world’s population lives in material poverty.
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