From Scarcity to Sufficiency: Enough Energy for Everyone

Author: Deric Gruen

Energy affordability is not about not having enough energy, but democratically deciding how much is enough as a society.

The war in Iran led to a rapid increase in oil and gas prices. These are the direct effects, but over time, the hit to energy prices will ripple throughout the economy as fossil fuel products are in everything from fertilizers to fabrics. Costs will go up, and affordability will go down. Supply-side, substitution solutions to the affordability crisis, switching fuels, generators, and transmission systems, are critical to reducing inflationary risks and volatility. There is no affordable future for a highly centralized, fossil fuel economy. But a different discourse on what kind of energy transition we need is starting to gain traction. One that reaches for a much greater degree of agency and carries with it a greater potential to make life affordable. The approach of energy sufficiency.

Energy Sufficiency

When we leave the house, our goals are usually to get to work or school, to pick up groceries, and to visit friends and family. Yet historically our transportation systems weren’t interested in getting us to our needs, they were built to move as many cars–or in the original highway system, military vehicles–as possible through a roadway. Today, transportation planners broadly acknowledge that building more roads actually induces more vehicle travel. Supply actually helps create demand. A cycle where traffic never ends, and it isn’t easier to access what we need. In response, planners use Transportation Demand Management strategies, such as changes in land use and structures, and incentives to reduce vehicle trips and avoid building new highways. After all, highways come with severe costs to taxpayers, communities, historically Black and brown, and public health.

The Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarizes sufficiency as “avoiding the demand for materials, energy, land, water, and other natural resources while delivering a decent living standard for all within the planetary boundaries.” In the energy field, it’s the idea that we can meet everyone’s needs while reducing the energy services required–that we can develop democratic strategies to get what we need with less energy in absolute terms. That we don’t have to just build more highways of energy.

There is no solution that is hands-down more effective at resolving current energy issues than energy sufficiency. Mining for new fuel sources and increasing dependence on new energy generation, whether dirty or clean, drive costs for all users, create land-use and property conflicts, generate pollution, create vulnerability to hazards, cause public health impacts, and create geopolitical conflict. Sufficiency doesn’t change the need to decarbonize, but provides a different lever and the ability to sidestep many conflicts. Ultimately, decarbonization can happen much faster with less pressure from energy demand. Energy sufficiency is also an unsung hero for energy resilience. When we require less energy to meet our needs, we are far more likely to be able to meet them in the event of or following a disaster, whether climate-driven or geopolitical.

Energy sufficiency is about meeting our housing needs by constructing four- to six-story buildings rather than skyscrapers. While skyscrapers make the postcards, it’s the modest buildings that provide the most space at the best value. Picture Paris or Washington DC. Planners in some of the best cities learned that building at a smaller scale is better at providing affordable housing, creating nice, vibrant places, and minimizing energy use. Plus, when you’re in an emergency, it’s a lot easier to get out when you’re a few stories up rather than dozens. We must scale our energy demand for the perfectly livable mid-rise building rather than risk falling from an energy-intensive skyscraper.

Sufficiency strategies often go hand in hand with technology and production decisions. Examples of sufficiency strategies include building more modestly sized living spaces rather than McMansions; heating systems that prioritize human comfort rather than heating space; producing goods for durability, such as clothing that can be passed on and maintains quality for a decade; and aligning food systems with taste, nutrition, and access, rather than volume.

Energy Sufficiency Directly Confronts Business as Usual

Despite momentum driven by a similar conflict with Iran nearly fifty years ago, an earlier notion of sufficiency–energy conservation–faded like Jimmy Carter’s cardigans. Instead, efficiency, doing more per unit of energy, took root. Efficiency may have headed off a more dire energy situation in the short term, but the economic theory of Jevons paradox suggests that it’s actually efficiency that unlocks more demand in the long run, as exemplified by the induced demand phenomenon of highways filling to their capacity. Ultimately, the politics of conservation never aligned with the interests of those in power to see increased demand, but efficiency did.

While sufficiency appears to be an ideal solution to our energy issues, it’s not without its conflicts. Capitalism, as we know it–using capital to make things and generate profits–requires energy.

Today, the dominant drivers of economic growth are more energy-intensive than ever, think AI or crypto. Managing energy demand in aggregate could conflict with this type of economic growth and with public spending, which depends on economic growth. Most states and nations around the world have been managing their economies to promote economic growth for at least the last fifty years. They promote aggregate production and consumption, measured by gross domestic product, to create employment and make public investments. Taken to the extreme, this pursuit of growth has led to massive deregulation, globalization, and privatization, known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is currently under threat from across the political spectrum, but few are ready to abandon the strategy of growth-driven provisioning, even as affordability under this model gets more precarious, and problems pile up faster than solutions.

To resolve the conflicts between energy impacts and economic growth, the “green growthers” or “eco-modernists” advocate that we substitute our way out of the fossil fuel pollution crisis with renewables and new technologies, from solar to small modular nuclear. From command-and-control strategies originating in the 1970s to the “sustainable development” path laid out in the 1990s, and most recently the green Keynesian / industrial policy path of the first half of the 2020s, this line of thinking aims to preserve growth while mitigating environmental harm. To address distribution issues, they hope a rising tide lifts all boats and that we can carve off small gains to reduce inequities or mitigate adverse impacts. Less dominant and in opposition to this thinking have been traditional and indigenous environmental leaders, some in the conservation movement, post-growth and alternative economists, and social justice rights and repair movements. These orientations emphasize attention to prevention and distribution, while forsaking the expectation of the ever-bigger tide coming in.

Energy Sufficiency Requires Aligning Macro and Micro Strategies

At the macroeconomic level, energy sufficiency today is associated with what’s now called postgrowth economics, which is a philosophy that challenges economic growth as the most effective strategy to ensure affordability and livelihoods, let alone a safe climate. The field has grown substantially in the past decade, appearing in global forums like the UN Sustainable Development Goals, IPCC reports, and more. The UN Secretary-General António Guterres called for moving past GDP at the UN conference Beyond GDP, alongside leading economists such as Joseph Stiglitz. There is now a UN “Roadmap for Eradicating Poverty Beyond Growth.” Parliamentary groups have formed in Europe and the UK to address the “limits to growth.” In the U.S., the conservative think tank American Compass has been pushing for “The Elite to Give Up Its GDP Fetish,” and on the left, ideas like Doughnut Economics promote agnosticism about growth. Some of these groups intentionally seek to move beyond growth, while others see it as a backup plan if growth cannot be continued.

At the micro-level, strategies to tackle energy sufficiency mix and mingle with a broader suite of energy ideas under the label of sustainable consumption or lifestyles. This wide-ranging field is interested in behavior change, but most people doing the work don’t view behaviors as individual choices. Rather, they view consumption as a societal choice whose structures constrain and dictate our energy decisions. Recent reports like 1.5 Degree Lifestyles go deep not on technologies to produce or improve energy efficiency, but on who and what energy use serves. The goal is to better understand how we can meet our needs for food, housing, transport, goods, and services, with less energy and fewer emissions, by changing system structures, cultural norms, and individual preferences. The recent vocabulary for sustainable consumption covers a wide range of concepts that anchor this domain, from the “ecosocial contract” to the “hedonic treadmill.”

Energy Sufficiency Requires Rethinking the Terms of the Affordability Debate

Sufficiency focuses on how we satisfy our needs and what is enough for a good life. Affordability considers whether households can meet essential expenses routinely and securely. To use sufficiency strategies to tackle affordability issues, we need to understand how essential needs are determined.

Spending money is how most of us think about meeting our essential needs. Limiting essential needs to prices that match our wages leads us to a particular story of affordability that needs are secured in the market, and the currency is personal income. Affordability in an era of premiumization–where more and more goods and services are tailored to luxury consumers–requires that we differentiate needs from wants and price valuation from use valuation. Today, consumer demand from the wealthiest 10% accounts for nearly half of total consumer demand in the U.S. Because energy is required for almost all consumption, energy sufficiency is disproportionately a demand for wealthier people and wealthy countries in aggregate, to reduce their energy consumption.

The well-known Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs is one tool for better defining our potential energy needs. It includes things like safety, love, and belonging, which don’t commonly appear with a price tag or are not defined by affordability. People with lower incomes generally aren’t given room to express these needs in the current political discourse. Going further, fundamental human needs may include not just “having things” but also “being,” “doing,” and “interacting” as MaxNeef’s non-hierarchical approach proposes, in contrast to Maslow’s pyramid.

However, most of us define essential needs relative to the society we live in rather than an absolute or abstract definition. To be clear, there are thresholds we all don’t want to cross–like hunger, lack of permanent housing, or heating and cooling–in every society. However, we also experience and engage in the politics of affordability as a relative phenomenon, compared with our friends, family, neighbors, or co-workers. And we perhaps experience affordability the most when it changeswhen prices or our income go up or down. It’s those changes and our relative positions we are most acutely aware of and likely to become part of our political perspective and actions. This is how inequality intersects with affordability, often with devastating implications that aren’t just economic, but also affect our health and democracy.

Applying the idea of sufficiency to affordability also invites changing how we identify as producers or consumers. While most of our material needs are met through personal income or public/nonprofit provisioning, some are also met through self-provisioning, for example, growing our own food. The labor we do, particularly women, and the labor of our family and friends, is the most common form of self-provisioning. In recent times, energy beyond our own family and friends’ labor was never thought of as a good we could self-provision, but today, the supply chain of energy generation is changing. While we may never manufacture solar panels ourselves, we can install our own balcony solar panels and manage our own energy behavior, such as opening a window or spending time on the cool side of our homes instead of turning on the AC. Critical to sufficiency is our ability to satisfy essential needs with resource efficiency and resilience to commodification. This strategy for affordability may prioritize production of things that are hard to exclude people from, whose quantity is less likely to be scarce, like the power of the sun and wind, public transit, or even fishing for a meal on a public pier.

Modern attempts to articulate affordability in this broader social context of human needs and sufficiency include efforts such as Canada’s “Measuring What Matters” framework and New Zealand Treasury’s He Ara Waiora, which emphasizes Māori approaches to a holistic and intergenerational conception of wellbeing with water as the source of life. These echo earlier approaches, including Bolivia and Ecuador’s constitutional codification of Buen Vivir, emphasizing living well, and the African concept of Ubuntu, which ties the well-being of the individual to the wellbeing of the many, and appear in many indigenous frameworks.

Sufficiency is a Helpful Response to Challenges to the Liberal Democratic Order

Global politics over the past decade have been gripped by the rise of illiberalism–the rejection of individual rights, rule of law, and equality–in order to prioritize a singular vision of society; most often a singular culture. In the U.S., white Christian Nationalism has been the most aggressive. The movement arose to power, in part, as a reaction to liberalism and globalization, and their negative impacts on people’s sense of identity, work, and quality of life, combined dangerously with longstanding xenophobic and racist narratives wielded by political opportunists.

While illiberalism is a harmful response to deficits of liberalism, there are real issues that must be faced, including the inability of the liberal-democratic order to solve our most pressing problems today. Over time, liberalism has evolved to prioritize negative freedom–individual freedom from any limits. The western legal framework creates laws as limits–to tell us what we cannot do, and encourages us to push right up to those limits as an exercise of freedom. For sufficiency ideas to move forward, there must be a shift toward an idea of positive freedoms where self-realization becomes collective through democracy and shared provisioning. While moving in the opposite direction of illiberalism, which actively dismantles barriers to increased production and consumption, sufficiencyalso challenges the current liberal order of individualism, but with a different vision for a collective society of pluralism and inclusion.

Policy is most often used to codify economic and cultural changes rather than lead them. We can run all the campaigns we want, but if there’s not fertile ground for good ideas, they’ll go nowhere. Ultimately, sufficiency needs a fertile economic, political, and cultural context to thrive. The countries that have had the strongest approach to sufficiency are those where the liberal policymaking apparatus is supported by a strong cultural backing, typically rooted in indigenous tradition, like New Zealand, Bolivia, and Ecuador mentioned earlier. Moving forward, we must design our energy solutions in alignment with these broader forces of societal change to achieve effective and lasting change.

This essay is an excerpt of our anthology, "Affording Our Energy Future: Perspectives to Power Change." To read the full body of work, visit our website.