Why is it inevitability? Couldn't we just use our tech advancements to move to cleaner energy, move heavy industry to the moon, and clean up the planet?
Degrowth will need to happen at some point. I believe people "with a growth mindset" are just hoping that by submitting to growth it won't happen in their lifetime.
They installed the entire grid capacity of the US in 4 years and they are accelerating. THere is a path to infinite free energy, but youd rather worry about doing your laundry at night.
Why do you find it more reasonable to build factories on the moon, rather than accept to live more austerely?
In fact, I've only ever met people who wanted more things and a higher quality of life. While many green/degrowth political policies are based around convincing people to consume less, I've met consumers and found that's not what they want. It's why most environmental policies fail, consumers want more things at a lower cost, and are willing to import goods from overseas if the environmental regulations at home prevent them from being created there.
For the future, it means degrowth policies will fail. The only solution to climate change is to develop and grow our way out of it. It will be easier to live on the moon than it will be to convince consumers to accept less than they have now.
How exactly? This is sci fi... how much more technology do you need? it's obviously not going in the right direction so far, we're just piling up reneweable sources on top of fossil ones. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-primary-energy-by-...
What's your plan? "Hey claude scrub the entire atmosphere to remove co2 from the past 200 years, make no mistake and use no energy"? "Hey codex send all our industries with razor thin margin to the moon, make no mistake and keep them as profitable as on earth"?
Look at atmospheric co2 scrubbers, the hot new thing, we can just keep polluting and clean it up am I right? Well, let's run the numbers:
We need 1 to 3 MWh of energy to remove 1t of co2
We produced 38.1 billion tonnes of it in 2025
Global electricity production in 2025: 30 TWh
We'd need to dedicate ~100% to 300% of our electricity production to simply offset our co2 production, even if we get it 10x better, and we won't because co2 is very stable and very dilute in the atmosphere (and also because it literally is below the minimum thermodynamic work to separate CO2 from air in ideal lab conditions), it's still completely retarded.
Every single technical solution to climate change completely falls apart when you run the numbers, the only argument left is "in the future we'll invent a magical tech that will save us so we have to accelerate"... might as well pray Jesus for help at that point