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The Ecological
Limits of Work:
on carbon emissions, carbon budgets
and working time
By Philipp Frey
Autonomy The Ecological Limits of Work: April 2019
Contents
1 History of an Idea
5 Other Considerations
6 Bibliography
1 History of an Idea
1
Anthropogenic climate change is of course just one of the ecological challenges facing humanity today
(others include soil degradation, for example). The focus on GHG emissions as an indicator for ecological
sustainability could accordingly be challenged. However, due to climate change being considered the key
issue of ecological sustainability by policy makers, GHG emissions are more reliably tracked than other
indices of ecological sustainability and at the same time one can hope that if a radical reduction of hours
would contribute to a decrease in carbon emissions, it would also contribute to reducing other forms of
stress on the ecological system.
Autonomy The Ecological Limits of Work: April 2019 3
2
The data puts a nation’s total GHG emissions in relation with its GDP. However, it does exclude
emissions from land use, land-use change and forestry (LULUCF). These have been largely negative for
the United Kingdom, Sweden and Germany however, with Germany and the UK roughly being on the
same level and Sweden registering three times as much negative emissions form LULUCF. The intensity
per unit of GDP (expressed in USD at 2010 prices and PPPs) is calculated on gross direct emissions
(excluding LULUCF). Due to the limitation of the data provided by the OECD, the effects of unpaid work
had to be excluded in this paper for pragmatic reasons.
Autonomy The Ecological Limits of Work: April 2019 4
The OECD data details the total GHG emissions per unit of
GDP (kg CO2 eq per dollar GDP), or Carbon Intensity of an
economy (CI).3 Combining this data, we can learn how much
GDP per capita would be sustainable, provided a per Carbon
Budget of 1610 kg eq CO2 per year derived from research
literature and the levels of Carbon Intensity provided by the
OECD.
(whereby index i denotes the country and year the data refers
to) for various countries.
OECD (2016)
UK (2016)
Sweden (2016)
Germany (2016)
3
I would like to thank Nela Šalamon for her help in formalizing my initial ‘back-of-the-envelope’
approach.
4
Hours worked per capita per year on average across the whole national population.
Autonomy The Ecological Limits of Work: April 2019 5
5
The lower Carbon Intensity of the Swedish economy can partly be explained by its composition which
is not as centred on manufacturing as the German economy, but more importantly it points to an early
adoption of progressive sustainability policies such as carbon taxation and a relatively high share of
renewable energies, supported by government investment.
Autonomy The Ecological Limits of Work: April 2019 6
OECD( 2016)
UK (2016)
Sweden (2016)
Germany (2016)
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 45
Average full-time waged weekly hours
Target full-time waged working week Actual full-time waged working week
5 Other Considerations
6 Bibliography
Keynes, J.M. (1963). Essays in Persuasion, New York: W.W. Norton & Co., pp.
358-373.
Knight, K.; Rosa, E.A.; Schor, J.B. (2012). ‘Reducing Growth to Achieve
Environmental Sustainability: The Role of Work Hours’; Political Economy
Research Institute Working Paper Series, Number 304, University of
Massachusetts: Amherst, MA, USA.
Nässén, J.; Larsson, J.; (2015). ‘Would shorter working time reduce
greenhouse gas emissions? An analysis of time use and consumption
in Swedish households’, Environment and Planning C: Government and
Policy, vol. 33, pp. 726–745.
O’Neill, D.W.; Fanning, A.L.; Lamb, W.F.; Steinberger, J.K. (2018) ‘A good life
for all within planetary boundaries’, Nature Sustainability, 1, pp. 88–95.
Stronge, W.; Harper, A. (2019). ‘The Shorter Working Week: a radical and
pragmatic proposal’. Hampshire: Autonomy. (online at: http://autonomy.
work/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/Shorter-working-week-docV6.pdf)
7 Data Sets
Data Set 1:
https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=AIR_GHG
Dataset: Level of GDP per capita and productivity / GDP per hour
worked
Dataset: Average usual weekly hours worked on the main job / All
persons, dependent full-time employment