"We must choose between champagne for a few or drinking water for all." - Thomas Sankara
(lemmy.world)
I get your point, but I think this describes a dilemma for the entire world, not just one country.
Do we have enough wealth for everyone on earth to get champagne (or the equivalent for other goods, more than once in their lifetime)? The global north can do that pretty easily, but that relies on exploitation of the rest of the world. A US standard of living and consumption profile is absolutely not sustainable for everyone in the world. There may be a European country with an average standard of living that’s close to sustainable for everyone, but it wouldn’t be one of the rich ones.
I can’t find it right now, but I saw a yearly consumption and living standards chart for what would be universally sustainable for humans, and it was pretty sparse. It involved limiting electricity to four hours a day and cooking hot food something like 10 times/week.
If anyone knows what I could look for to find that, please let me know, because I really want to look into it. I remember it also noted how big your living space per person was and either how many clothes you could have or how often you could do laundry (or both), and I’m pretty sure I encountered it on here, though it no might have been a comment. There’s this lifestyle calculator, which advocates
2.5 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent/person/year, but that doesn’t get into house size or number of possessions, just acquisition of new ones.