It is increasingly clear that averting ecological breakdown will require drastic changes to contemporary human society and the global economy embedded within it. On the other hand, the basic material needs of billions of people across the planet remain unmet. Here, we develop a simple, bottom-up model to estimate a practical minimal threshold for the final energy consumption required to provide decent material livings to the entire global population. We find that global final energy consumption in 2050 could be reduced to the levels of the 1960s, despite a population three times larger. However, such a world requires a massive rollout of advanced technologies across all sectors, as well as radical demand-side changes to reduce consumption – regardless of income – to levels of sufficiency. Sufficiency is, however, far more materially generous in our model than what those opposed to strong reductions in consumption often assume.

越来越明显的是，要避免生态破坏，就需要对当代人类社会及其内在的全球经济进行重大变革。另一方面，全球数十亿人的基本物质需求仍未得到满足。在这里，我们开发了一个简单的，自下而上的模型，以估算最终的能源消耗的实际最小阈值，以为整个全球人口提供体面的物质生活。我们发现，尽管人口数量增加了三倍，但2050年的全球最终能源消耗量可以降低到1960年代的水平。但是，这样的世界要求在各个部门大规模推广先进技术，并进行根本性的需求方变革，以将消费（无论收入如何）降低到足够的水平。但是，足够