This [1] article explains some of my frustrations, but doesn't address everything mentioned on the Overshoot website.
[1]: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/people-are-realizing-that-...
This is proposing that people are lacking faith. You believe something must work because an economic theory proposed that it does. In reality these theories often fail to predict anything substantial.
Our economic system is very primitive and requires steady growth. But in reality the productivity of a finite area of land cannot grow any further even with technological advancement and long before you hit the limits of thermodynamics. The only thing that can grow in an unlimited fashion are excuses by economists to be honest.
Sorry, perhaps I just don't have the growth mindset.
Not proposing that the end is nigh, but bullshit has to be called what it is in the interest of progress.
Ehrlich might have been way too early but still have something interesting to say.
If you haven't, I would suggest "The Limits to Growth." I'm not arguing for "de-growth," but I think your fundamental assumption that we can innovate or Silicon Valley our way out of climate change without inadvertently sacrificing economic prosperity is too late and highly naive. https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/19...
Not quite convinced about that. That, or the solutions you read aren't up to par with what science has to say about it. For starters not all presented solutions are even about degrowth?
Just one example, take land use: the last talk I heard about that be a professor from a local university, people aren't exactly advocating 'less growth, less land use' but more like 'we expect synthetic meat to be x% of food intake so there's y% less land needed for animals and if all of that would be taken up by the produce needed for the synthetic meat that is actually i% more protein produced/acre' and 'x% of nice fertile land is going to degrade within the next decades because of erosion so if we implement some relatively simple measures that can be countered' and 'instead of dividing land into massive fields for production and some small dots of nature in between, as far as preservation goes it is often actually better to not do that but create one area for nature as large as those dots and optionally but even more optimal create lines of nature to connect those bigger patches'.
Sounds economically viable to me, or at least certainly not 'extremely illiterate', and also not impossible.
I think what the site is saying is we depend on ecological systems and natural resources to sustain our current standard of living, but we are consuming them at a faster rate than they can replenish. We need to use the available resources more efficiently - doesn't necessarily translate to less or even slower growth though.
I think I agree with the author about degrowth as a goal being a political nonstarter. But I'm pretty skeptical about the notion that future growth can consist of ever increasing amounts of "dematerialized" goods and services without ceasing to be real, meaningful growth (however it might be defined).
I also think the political and physical challenges inherent in technological or "pro-growth" (I need a better word) solutions for getting out of overshoot are widely underappreciated. This [1] article runs some numbers to show that, for our global civilization to satisfy its current level of energy consumption without emitting significant amounts of greenhouse gases in 2050, we will have to bring online clean energy generation capacity equivalent to one nuclear power station every day between now and then. Given that, I'd be extremely surprised to see us get there by 2150, or maybe at all.
[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rogerpielke/2019/09/30/net-zero...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Convention_for_Clim...
Also economy is just numbers going up and down, it's not real. You just need to change some variables of what makes economic growth if you want your numbers keep going up in gdp. Earth overshoot is not as flexible, we don't make the rules.
This fixation on growing every single year hurts prospects to grow more over longer periods of time. It also causes needless environmental destruction. We would rather deplete the soil for a quick buck than maintain it and make it better every year at the cost of lower initial yields.
economics is a psuedoscience like all social sciences and astrology. They've predicted absolutely nothing of value. It's just people studying these things prior to them becoming scientific, like people did with alchemy and whatnot before chemistry.