this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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askchapo
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Basically yes, however the differences would be massive. The only relatively current estimates & modeling I've found for this come from the book Half Earth Socialism. Some highlights I recall, under both energy & land use constraints:
There are some tradeoffs that could be made (you occasionally get to eat meat but have to use 1500 W instead of 2000 W, etc.) but land use is the big fundamental constraint if you want to avoid xenociding 85% of the world's species (so you need to set aside half the earth for them). I know we all like those photos of mountains covered in solar panels in China but that's an example of land use devoted to electricity.
The big wildcard here is nuclear power. I don't want to start a nuclear power argument because those go nowhere. The Half Earth book doesn't use nuclear in its scenarios because the largest base of support for eco policies is anti-nuclear. Whether you view overcoming that resistance as more or less realistic than convincing USian treatlerites to give up borger is of course up to you.
There is also the question of how in a society free from want you get people to do jobs that really fucking suck. This is in the "fun to speculate about" wheelhouse. Obviously capitalism takes the stick approach and threatens the global south with homelessness, starvation, and even direct murder if they don't do the shitty jobs. Transforming this into a pure carrot-based approach is the domain of speculative fiction like The Dispossessed.
Just tangent to mentioning nuclear power, I came across this scene from a 1977 movie, this used to represent a sentiment about it.
couldnt you give incentives to those that do jobs that suck like access to more energy ? (just for example) I havent thought this through. just a thought.
Not per person, per capita. So for example the energy needed to transport all the food you buy to market or to manufacture all your shit is counted toward that total. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000-watt_society
Per that article Spanish people seem to use about 6000 W currently. Also if you take even a single flight per year it blows this budget up. The power generated by jet aircraft is actually astonishing.
We have had this conversation before, in fact.