...on which they state that a vague subset of people shouldn't exist so they can exist in comfort.
To be perfectly honest, I favor more consumption for the 1.7 billion people on this planet who lack access to improved sanitation, as well as those who lack electricity, or are short on food, etc.
I believe that human justice and human development goals require more energy, not less of it, and I know very well, having studied it at a deep level, that this kind of energy can be provided with reasonably low external costs.
Nuclear energy, because of its extremely high energy to mass ratio is essentially infinitely sustainable. Nothing else is.
I tend to be very suspicious of claims by people living in secure countries that the world would be a better place if they all just got good gas mileage, or all moved to the city. It's the kind of "environmentalism" that generally ends up with people who wish to demonstrate their "commitment" by driving to the mall at Christmas - if one is wealthy enough in an electric car - to purchase a Sierra Club Calendar and announcing thereafter that one is "environmentally aware."
Been there, done that, but I grew up.
As for statements about over population being the root of all evil, every once in a while, I'll hear from some fellow old fart from my detestable generation of consumers, how noble they were for not having children, while smugly condemning me for having two.
I have little patience for superciliousness of this type of fool. It's arrogant and frankly, more than a little solipsistic.
If it makes anyone happy, I personally believe that the world population may collapse by catastrophe, but I believe it wasn't necessary that this happen. An alternative would have been to reduce it by attrition: It is well known that those countries that have birth rates below the replacement rate are almost always places where people feel secure in their homes, have food to eat, access to health care, etc.
The problems of our planet are not going to be addressed by platitudes, or any of the bourgeois drivel, electric cars, wind turbines and solar cells on McMansions, the kind of rhetoric leaching out of the assholes who write at "Common Dreams" or, frankly, in the kind of rhetoric- in defiance of Jevon's well know paradox - bourgeois people employ that we can all use a little less and everything will be fine. If one has effectively nothing, one cannot use less.
I see the people at "Common Dreams," as indicated in my previous post, to be the moral and intellectual equivalent of anti-vaxxers.
As for the limits of growth, there was recently an editorial item on this topic in Nature: Are there limits to economic growth? It’s time to call time on a 50-year argument (Nature 603, 361 (2022)). It is very clear that there are material limits, and ironically, it is the people who call for so called "renewable energy" who are the most enthusiastic advocates for profligate use of materials: They insist that having two or three redundant systems spread over vast tracks of land is better than having one system that is reliable and can produce energy for millions of people on a few acres of land.
The editorial notes (albeit in a slightly different way than I would) that when faced with a choice of "going green" - whatever that's supposed to mean - and "growing" the GDP, the GDP wins. But it's quite possible that the choice might be between "going green" and living in poverty. When the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine - dunkelflaute - the Germans burn coal. They've been doing all winter, and their carbon intensity is disgusting.
I'm not inclined to address the serious of issue of material limits with hand waving however.
I'm an old fashioned type of liberal, the type which has nearly vanished: I believe that the poor matter, that poverty needs to be addressed, not embraced.
If you think your proposal is practical, I disagree, but good luck with that anyway, with convincing everyone to embrace poverty as a virtue. I think there are some religious sects that go there, but I'm not a participant in religion.
Have a nice day tomorrow.
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