A high-quality, well-maintained car or a phone that lasts longer is more valuable than the disposable equivalent. Developing dense city centers creates wealth, reduces environmental impact, and improves quality of living all at the same time.
In an economy that really is shrinking, things tend towards stasis and people spend much more time fighting over the shrinking pie. A lot of the built environment needs to change to become sustainable, and that's only possible if the economy is vibrant, housing and transportation are plentiful, and people are motivated to improve their communities.
I don't know the solution to convincing suburban Americans to buy smaller houses and smaller cars, but I think the only way it works is if there is a positive vision of the future with both more wealth and a healthier planet.
I think we agree then about "alternative growth" or "eco-growth" where GDP and resource consumption are decoupled, where GDP continues to increase while environmental impact simultaneously falls. Most wealthy countries are already actually at that point already - CO2 emissions are falling while they still grow (adjusted for offshore emissions). It's an important point to me because the degrowth people I've encountered are kinda defeatist and I don't think will be able to grow a coalition, but decoupling the environment from growth is eminently doable.
Noah Smith is my main influence on this topic: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/people-are-realizing-that-degr... https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/degrowth-we-cant-let-it-happen...
While I agree, it's worth mentioning that this framing overlooks the significant central planning component.
The suburban lifestyle is heavily subsidized from nearly every direction (housing, autos, roads, fuel, power and water grid, shipping) which makes something that is actually a luxury lifestyle feel like a median lifestyle. If suburban living were priced at the free market rate we would see an organic shift to denser developments and more efficient resource usage.
In USA, a person's house value has become their retirement plan. A quick free-market solution is to eliminate the house mortgage interest deduction and make all of the sale price capital gains. Let the builders compete on quality, price, and maintainability rather than being subsidized by tax policy.
And yes, it's worth pointing out that in many first world countries (esp. my own), many higher density neighbourhoods actually have relatively high environmental footprints - usually because they're quite affluent ones. But also because they're often occupied by single people who don't have as many opportunities to share/pool resources with others as those in suburbia. So we need to realistic about what could be achieved simply by changes in government policy around subsidisation of various modes of urban development.
Yes An no.
Yes it is already built.
No because there is a lot that can be done to improve existing infrastructure.
Public transport can be retro fitted rail corridors, dedicated bus lanes, bike only paths, walking infrastructure
Zoning can achieve a lot too. Allowing more commercial pepperpotted amongst residential
You do have to defeat many vested interests, but unless we defeat them they will burn the world for profit, so we must defeat them
A real test for democracy
With what we have already emitted today (and we are still increasing our emissions every year), it is not clear at all that Europe will always have enough food in the next few decades. I don't know about the US, but seeing the fires in the last few years, I guess it's not far.
Growth definitely means reduced standard of living in our lifetime: we are going towards global instability, wars and famines.
Degrowth means reduced standard of living as well: just trying to keep them as high as possible. Everybody wants the same thing: the highest possible standard of living. Degrowth advocates have just accepted that it will get down in the future.