Economic growth no longer requires rising emissions

> it is impossible to convince societies to take massive quality-of-life reductions

What about sustainable growth focused on actual quality of life and not on perpetuating a system that produce/consume useless cheap low quality gadgets and services for the sole purpose of keeping the population at work 8 hours a day until they hit 65/67 years old (age by the time 25% of the poorest are already dead)

The fact that we (may have) decoupled growth and co2 doesn't mean all growth is progress or that all growth is desirable.

Or, you could say, we're in an era of weak decoupling where high-tail QoL can be marginally improved without negative env. externalities. That isnt "strong decoupling" where the bulk of QoL improvements around the world lie.

We're interested in GDP growth because it's highly correlated with QoL. Rich-world marginal QoL improvements aren't interesting, nor is their alleged decoupling.

The economist here says the world can get rich from services... er, No. For 80% of the population they dont need more services to improve QoL.

That said, even if economic activity was fully decoupled from emissions, Earth's environmental problems would remain overwhelming. Biodiversity loss, deforestation, aquifer depletion, desertification, etc. are just as concerning for most people here as rising global temperatures.

My inner cynic sees headlines like the above and assumes that A) the writer/publisher wants people to think everything is OK, and B) the writer/publisher wants people to narrowly focus on global warming as opposed to the greater health of the natural environment.

While obviously not easy, transitioning to lower-emissions energy sources is far,far easier than fully acknowledging the material basis of our economy and factoring in actually sufficient environmental protections to our systems of production and distribution. If we suddenly weren't allowed to replace old-growth forests with mono-culture, pollute our groundwater, fill the earth with plastic, kill off a majority of animal species, and so forth, how much would the economy shrink? More than anyone published in The Economist would ever admit, I suspect.

Why do you say degrowth = lower quality of life?

Let me give you a simple and practical example: an American living in a suburb takes her gas-guzzler 3-ton SUV to go shopping or to the park, stands in traffic in a 4-lane freeway for one hour. A Dutch living in a suburb takes her bike to go shopping or to the park, rides it through a nice street for 10 minutes. The former consumed much more resources than the latter. Who has the better quality of life?