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this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2024
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Futurology
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They're not making the point that "all civilizations will end because of this". The more interesting and credible point they're making is that 1,000 years of energy consumption growth rates at our speed must inevitably, even using 100% renewables, cook the planet. They're not saying "we can't beat climate change under any circumstances", they're saying (if I have understood them) that the way to do it is at least some amount of degrowth, which is quite reasonable.
It also seems to me that the circumstances implied don't seem the most likely? Like, we're working on space exploration and development right now, it's still early stages, but given another thousand years it would be strange for it to not go anywhere. It's not even like we'd need to stop building new energy using things in a few hundred years (which, given the current trends in population growth, we might I suppose), we literally just have to spread the things out rather than just piling more and more onto a single planet.
The literal scenario should be less emphasized than the subtler point that degrowth is a far more direct way to address climate change than any specific green (or greenwashed) technological advance, since consumption itself (merely using that amount of energy, regardless of its sources) is enough to destroy our habitat.
The issue there is the cause and timescale. Waste heat from energy use isn't what is causing our current climate change, it's the effect of greenhouse gas emissions on the energy absorbed from sunlight. They're related in that the greenhouse gas emissions are generally waste products too, but they're different physical problems that seem equivalent because they have same ultimate consequence, so they shouldn't be taken as having identical solutions. Not that degrowth wouldn't be a way to solve our current issues too, but it's not the only way to, and the point where it becomes such because we reach the physical limits of the planet is a long way off. In the meantime, it has a lot of downsides to consider vs the various other ways to deal with the current problem.