Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world has limited natural resources, but it doesn't have limited human welfare or enjoyment or wealth. Moreover, natural resources are not consumed, except for helium, energy, and the contents of spacecraft. The natural resources in a big plate glass window are a double handful of sand. The natural resources in a Rembrandt are the sunlight and rainfall needed to grow a sheaf of flax and a handful of powdered colo…
The natural ressources to maintain the cost of living in a rich country like mine (denmark) is so high, that it is impossible to imagine all the people in the world maintaining a similar living standard. Im talking not only the glass in my windows, but my energyconsumption, my use of fridges, phones, tvs and so on, all of which costs not only the ressources it costs to manufacture them, but also the entire system bui…
The people of India and China can absolutely maintain a lifestyle with your energy consumption and use of manufactured luxury goods without causing ecological damage.
80% of electricity produced in Denmark is renewables, mostly wind. Historically, renewable energy other than hydroelectric and low-efficiency wind had a poor EROEI, so it wasn't really a viable alternative to fossil fuels, more like an extremely compact battery that had to be "charged" with fossil fuels and then required sunlight or wind to "discharge". That hasn't been true for 20 years, though, and EROEI keeps getting better as PERC gets adopted, PV cells get thinner, tracking gets cheaper, windmill rotors get bigger, etc.
But only a small minority of the energy used in Denmark is electric, about 15%, which is lower than in many other countries. About 10% of the rest is waste heat, and the other three quarters is currently fossil fuels. Replacing those fossil fuels will require not only increasing renewable energy production by a factor of 6 but also converting a substantial fraction of that energy into easily transportable fuels such as ammonia, biodiesel, propane, or aluminum, in order to power things which cannot practically run off the power grid like ships, airplanes, and long-distance trucks. That fuel does not need to be produced locally in Denmark; it can be produced, for example, in China, Australia, or Tunisia, and exported to Denmark.
Increasing renewable energy production by a factor of 6 may sound daunting, but worldwide solar and wind energy production doubles about every 3 years, so that transition will probably take about 5-10 years. The cost of PV and wind energy is now far below the cost of fossil-fuel energy in most of the world, although in Denmark in particular PV is not economically competitive with fossil fuels yet. The available solar resource is about four orders of magnitude larger than world marketed energy consumption, and I think the wind resource is about one or two orders of magnitude larger.
Cheap labor is not critical to manufacturing goods; if it were you'd be importing your fridges, phones, and TVs from Bangladesh and Malaysia, not China and South Korea. (Open up a recent cellphone or TV sometime and look at the country names printed on the chips.) Modern manufacturing is highly automated, and the non-automated part is highly skilled. As you're surely aware, Nokia made their phones in Finland until only a couple of decades ago. Moreover, cheap labor does not create ecological damage, only human failure to thrive.
You could imagine an economy in which the labor productivity of goods like fridges, phones, and TVs was so low that the people who made them would be unable to afford them. This is the case, for example, with skyscrapers: it takes hundreds or thousands of person-years of effort to build a skyscraper, so it would be impossible to pay each of the construction workers enough money to buy a skyscraper of their own. (An attempt to do so would raise the cost of skyscrapers by a factor of 100 or more, back out of their reach.) As should be obvious, this is very much not the case with fridges, phones, and TVs, whose labor cost is measured in person-days per instance, not person-centuries. Paying the workers Denmark wages instead of China wages would not render the production of fridges, phones, and TVs uneconomic; it would just make them more expensive. Even in Bangladesh, where many people live on US$3 per day, it is common already for people to own fridges, phones, and TVs, a situation that will only improve further when Bangladeshis are not denied the opportunities they are today. Whatever you have been told, your standard of living does not rest on exploiting the poor in faraway countries.
Shipping and transport are not a significant part of the resource usage of supplying you with fridges, phones, and TVs; shipping a TEU halfway around the world costs up to about US$7500 (though "return" rates, like from Los Angeles to Shanghai, can be as low as US$700, because the objective is just to get the container back to China, and the more usual cost is US$1000-US$2000 over the last ten years; see https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/rmt2021ch3...). A TEU weighs 24 tonnes, of which normally 21.6 tonnes is payload, giving a cost of US$0.35 per kg (and more realistically half that because of the return-cost thing). Part of that cost is the cost of fuel, which is the only resource cost of shipping. At the moment crude oil costs US$86/bbl, which means that if all of that US$0.35 went to fuel, and the fuel were unrefined crude rather than diesel and kerosene, it would buy 650 g of crude oil. That's 27 MJ/kg or 7.5 kilowatt hours per kg.
So if your fridge weighs 200 kg and uses 1000 kWh per year, running it for a year and a half is guaranteed to use more energy than it took to ship it to you from China. Because most of the cost of shipping is not actually fuel, a more realistic number is probably three months. But you will probably use that fridge for 10 years, and it is very likely that manufacturing it took more energy as well.
You can strongly bound the energy use of the whole manufacturing process in the same way. A new fridge costs about US$250 retail, which means it can't possibly require more than 2.9 barrels of oil to make it, and that only if the costs for things like labor, steel, and taxes were literally zero. 2.9 barrels of oil burned for energy is 18 MJ, 4900 kilowatt hours, though typically only 40% of that can be used for useful manufacturing things like turning motors and electrolyzing aluminum. In California with its 29% PV capacity factor, 2000 watts (peak) of solar panels produces 18 MJ every year, all high-quality electric energy, not low-grade heat. That's 10 square meters of solar panels costing under US$400. So, you can see why renewables are taking over.
This is also how you can know that your US$250 fridge doesn't require person-years of effort from a labor force in Bangladesh, even without going there. Bangladesh's per-capita GDP is US$2500 per person per year, nominal, and its Gini coefficient is a reasonable 0.39, so at most that fridge could be a couple of person-months of work, including all the components. (But in fact it was probably made in China, US$14000 per person per year, or South Korea, US$35000 per person per year, and with lower inequality.)
They might have to eat less beef, pork, tuna, herring, and mackerel, and burn less biofuels than you do, though. Those may be renewable but environmentally they are catastrophic.