How do you propose to use much less energy without starving everyone? Where does the energy come from if not fossil fuels without conscripting people to be peasants? Does it matter if mass death is caused famine or "degrowth"?
That's the whole point: degrowth is about re-organizing society such that we don't starve. There are big efforts of planning for that in many places. Look at the "shift project" in France. It seems to me that the US are very, very, very far behind on that matter. The US seems to still be stuck on the Silicon Valley mindset ("they will save us with new technology"). But that's not representative of the rest of the world.
> Where does the energy come from if not fossil fuels without conscripting people to be peasants? Does it matter if mass death is caused famine or "degrowth"?
The idea of degrowth is that in order to avoid famines, we have to drastically reduce other stuff and reorganize society. Planes are not even a question there: planes will go away, because everyone agrees that we'd rather eat that fly. There are many decisions that are harder to make, though.
Those who don't believe in degrowth and instead think that "there will be a miracle technology that will save us" are just naive. Degrowth advocates are the ones who are actually trying to play with the cards they were dealt.
A good example or problem with degrowth is proclamation that things like planes won’t be possible. Aviation is 2% of emissions. There are lots of little things that they add up. Like concrete being 3%, but nobody says that have to give up concrete. The big ones are things like heating and cooling and transportation that are hard to give up.
The other problem is that we mostly know how to solve aviation. Hydrogen or liquid fuels should work, both produced from green energy. New technology but no miracles. We know how to do green electricity.
I agree with you that we need to change the world a lot. But it won’t work if impose suffering on people. Or do things that don’t work or don’t help.
Aviation came with oil, it will disappear with oil. It's not a problem of emissions per se, it's a problem of energy. Fossil fuels are not unlimited and we don't know how to completely replace them.
> The big ones are things like heating and cooling
We need to work hard on building isolation, obviously. And people need to live in smaller habitations.
> and transportation
We need more trains
> Hydrogen or liquid fuels should work, both produced from green energy.
Same thing: if you look at the numbers, we won't have enough green energy to produce enough hydrogen for aviation, even if technically we can make planes fly with hydrogen. We will have to choose where we use our hydrogen: for planes, or for steel and agriculture?
> But it won’t work if impose suffering on people.
Yep, we need to teach people and hope they accept to do what's needed to survive.
> Or do things that don’t work or don’t help.
Totally agreed here. Hoping for anything short of degrowth doesn't help. We need everything PLUS degrowth. And still, it will be hard because climate is already pretty messed up (with inertia) and biodiversity is looking bad.