[Correspondence] Whose descent? Whose design?

An Article by Millward-Hopkins and colleagues, recently published in The Lancet Planetary Health, offers a thought-provoking analysis of declining per capita energy use and a call for structural change.1 However, the study advances a narrative of global “energy descent” that, despite acknowledging inequalities, risks becoming a technocratic and neocolonial discourse. This framing generalises energy contraction as a universal pathway and obscures the historical and structural deprivation that many countries in the Global South have faced.