Abstract:

The idea that everyone should have access to a sufficient, minimum amount of essential goods and services is uncontroversial, both in academic and public discourse. It is also clear that avoiding ecological crises requires demand-side changes to consumption, not just cleaner production. The notion of a minimum ‘floor’ for consumption, together with constraints placed on total economic activity by environmental limits, implies an upper ‘ceiling’ to consumption. But the concept of overconsumption remains both controversial and poorly defined. Here we develop three definitions of overconsumption relevant to different scales — individual, social, and planetary. These can form overlapping corridors beyond which consumption can be defined as useless, unfair, and/or unsustainable, each of which justifies different political responses. We then describe how all can (and should) be integrated and discuss the implications for understanding and modelling sustainability transitions. To illustrate these possibilities, we summarise our recent work on energy use in Switzerland. First, we describe analysis of the potential limits on economic inequality that ‘decent living energy’ requirements imply, when considering maximum sustainable national energy budgets. Finally, we show how inequalities in energy use related to transport and housing are influenced by socio-economic, geographical, infrastructural, and behavioral determinants. Energy use is more unequally distributed between individuals than income, and our results call for policies that go beyond cost-effectiveness to consider age and gender and the targeting of top users.