Consumption cannot scale to infinity. There's little harm in periodically taking account of the externalities of the things we value.
The truth is, humanity can continue to be more productive and efficient for millions more years. We can do more with less like we've been doing for centuries.
For example, the US economy is bigger than ever, yet we emit less carbon than we did 10 years ago, both total and on a per capita basis.
Is it? The proposition was that folks should have a growth mindset about consumption. Yet we're already reaching the limits of long term sustainably. I'm not advocating to stop trying to do better. Rather that we shouldn't assume we can indefinitely.
> The truth is, humanity can continue to be more productive and efficient for millions more years. We can do more with less like we've been doing for centuries.
Have we really been doing more with less for so long? Or have we just learned to extract more and more nonrenewable resources more quickly than ever before?
For example if your lifetime worth of waste had to remain in your own yard then how would it compare to those from past generations?
It’s not truth. It’s a form of techno-libertarianism bordering on religion. I can’t find a single working scientist in any relevant field who believes this claim. Most scientists believe we are on our way out, along with the biosphere we’ve destroyed.
Jevons Paradox also comes into play.
What I mean is, e.g., when the cost of energy drops people's energy bills in general do not go down, the have warmer homes. That has been known for a while. But is it still true if everybody can keep their houses at 21 degrees permanently? At thatr point does a reduction in energy costs reduce their bills or do they find something else to spend the energy on?
As a % of the population, I don't know how many have those traits - 10%? 1%? - but with a population also numbered in billions, "enough to totally screw the planet" is a reasonable guess.
Besides, considering that we are living on a finite world, we don’t need to merely decouple economy from materials, because any use at all will at some point exhaust available resources. Sure, we can say “fuck everything, I’m going to keep going on as usual because in 100 years I’ll be dead and they’ll have that one wonderful technological panacea that will change everything (be it Mars colonisation, asteroid mining, or anything else)”. I don’t know how to call that attitude except for “techno-libertarian dogmatism”.
Also, let's wave the magic wand and make all cars non-polluting during operation (not even dust from the brake rotors).
Where do the natural materials which are used to make the car come from?
What about the materials which make the road network that the cars drive on?
What about the natural environments which get turned into suburbs because mobility is "easy"?
How much of the surface of the earth is co-opted for human-dominated and human-determined?
That is very easy to say and hard to know how.
I do not think that our economic system depends on economic growth in reality. (It would be sick to depend on economic growth in PPP terms for economic justice) The entrenched power structure's path of least resistance for maintaining their position is economic growth. That is a different thing.
We definitely should explore that (and are).