> It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.
Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find.
Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all of which are heated and cooled 24/7. How much energy do they use? What is that energy use in terms of average European households?"
I used European because Americans are notable energy pigs and can cut a lot without losing much. Europeans are closer to the reasonable baseline.
The total it comes up with for our gas-guzzling fat cat is 96-97 GWh per year. That's including three homes and a continuously operating jet aircraft. This is a totally ridiculous footprint, of course.
Claude Fable says the average European household uses about 15,000 kWh/year in electricity, heating, etc. That means our fat cat corresponds to about 6,400 average European households.
The population of Europe is around 750 million people.
There's about 3000 billionaires worldwide, and if they all lived as absurdly as my caricature they'd use 288 TWh per year.
That corresponds to around 19.2 million European households, or about 2.5% of the energy use of a middle class Europe.
The vast bulk of energy and resource use supports the middle class, and raising people out of poverty.
Inequality probably reduces energy use. If we improved equality it would mean more people with a basic middle class standard of living. A society in which almost everyone has a European middle class standard of living would consume far more energy than one in which a few fat cats live it up and everyone else is poor.
Personally I agree with the left at least a bit on this. I think we have too much inequality. If we reduce inequality, that will increase energy consumption, so we'd better build solar panels and batteries and reactors at the same time.
Trivially false, and I think this is the root of it. I'm lazy so I asked Claude Fable, but what it gave me is in the same ballpark as a blog post on this I saw a while back that I now can't find.
Question: "Lets say a billionaire spends 100% of their time on boards a medium sized private jet. They also own three 10,000 square foot homes, all of which are heated and cooled 24/7. How much energy do they use? What is that energy use in terms of average European households?"
I used European because Americans are notable energy pigs and can cut a lot without losing much. Europeans are closer to the reasonable baseline.
The total it comes up with for our gas-guzzling fat cat is 96-97 GWh per year. That's including three homes and a continuously operating jet aircraft. This is a totally ridiculous footprint, of course.
Claude Fable says the average European household uses about 15,000 kWh/year in electricity, heating, etc. That means our fat cat corresponds to about 6,400 average European households.
The population of Europe is around 750 million people.
There's about 3000 billionaires worldwide, and if they all lived as absurdly as my caricature they'd use 288 TWh per year.
That corresponds to around 19.2 million European households, or about 2.5% of the energy use of a middle class Europe.
The vast bulk of energy and resource use supports the middle class, and raising people out of poverty.
Inequality probably reduces energy use. If we improved equality it would mean more people with a basic middle class standard of living. A society in which almost everyone has a European middle class standard of living would consume far more energy than one in which a few fat cats live it up and everyone else is poor.
Personally I agree with the left at least a bit on this. I think we have too much inequality. If we reduce inequality, that will increase energy consumption, so we'd better build solar panels and batteries and reactors at the same time.