Quote Originally Posted by Johanna
There are not enough resources in the world for everybody to live like people in the richest countries do!
It depends on the amount of energy the humanity would be able to harvest, and not on the way that energy would be distributed. The politics focuses on the distribution part. So, assume our civilization achieved level I (=so it is able to harvest all the energy of the planet). Would that still imply there would be "not enough resources in the world for everybody to live like people in the richest countries do?" No, it wouldn't (if we speak of the richest and the poorest countries of today). In the global economy the poorest countries of tomorrow would live better than the richest countries of today. However, if the distribution imbalance continues, the poorest countries of tomorrow would live like the poorest countries of today, whilst the richest countries would be capitalizing on the resources of the Solar system (e.g. think how much minerals a single asteroid might have).

Another aspect is that presently lots of energy is lost due to the inevitable consequences of national economics (e.g. the armies that defend those economics).