constant growth != infinite growth
constant growth just means converging growth
if the population is shrinking all we need to do is increase gdp per capita.
In theory. In practice GDP growth is strongly correlated with things like energy use and waste/pollution generation. There will come a point when either that correlation has to be broken or growth has to halt.
They just pushed pollution elsewhere, by outsourcing manufacturing.
The same goods (and better goods) take less energy and pollution to produce than in 2000, and a lot of physical goods have been effectively replaced with features in digital devices; and the main part of GDP growth for developed countries does not involve any growth in consumption of goods but rather the consumption of services - the shift from an industrial economy to a service economy has quite fundamental impact on the nature of growth.
That's a good trend if true.
> The amount of greenhouse gases linked to goods and services consumed by UK households, including emissions from the foreign manufacture of imported products, rose by 3% between 2012 and 2013, the most recent data shows. But the figures are almost a fifth (19%) below the peak seen in 2007, when UK consumers were responsible for nearly 1.3bn tonnes of greenhouse gases.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/02/uks-carb...
But thanks to the rebound effect we make/sell/trash more of them
Like with airplanes, it doesn't matter that Rolls-Royce make their engines 5% more efficient every 10 years if in the meantime you have 4 times as many plane flying.
https://eeb.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Decoupling-Debunk...
Only because we delocalised all the industries to Asia, globally co2 = gdp, before and after 2010
https://jancovici.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/GDP-CO2-wor...
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gabe-Scelta-2/publicati...
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes#Achilles_an...