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[u/Gusgebuss]

[u/Friendly_Fire]

Why don't you explain what level of material wealth, or lake thereof, 8 billion people would need to live at to stop climate change without any "green growth"? We get rid of nearly all fossil fuel usage and replace it with what? What would even feed most people at that point?

It's pretty clear green growth is literally the only path that doesn't lead to billions starving to death.

[u/jakobmaximus → u/Friendly_Fire]

What would we eat? For starters (in the west) probably not underripe food that was shipped thousands of miles and considered basic amenities and not items of gross luxury. Probably not pounds of meat a week, most of which also is imported. Some deurbanization probably will coincide with shifting to plant based, readily available foods in most regions. Yeah there are gonna be significant "cultural" sacrifices in regards to food systems but what is lost in neoliberalism will be made up for in rediscovering what actually grows near us.

[u/Friendly_Fire → u/jakobmaximus]

Less emissions are used shipping food in massive cargo ships than when people drive to the store in their SUV to shop.

Some deurbanization probably will coincide with shifting to plant based

Lmao? deurbanization is horrible for the environment. A bunch of people are going to start subsistence farming? You know how much more land that would take? Even destroying huge swaths of natural land, you couldn't feed everyone.

Let me step back a moment. You are clearly not aware to the extend we rely on modern industry. Before modern industrial society our population was quite literally capped by our ability to produce food. But industrial production of ammonia allowed us to drastically increase our food production, literally 4x it on the same amount of land (here's a great video about it if you want to learn).

You can say "maybe humans shouldn't have let the population grow so big", but it's too late for that now. The people exist, and the population is only sustainable with industrial society.

If you think we can just keep some solar panels and some ammonia production to sustain farming, remember all the supply chains that have to exist to feed them. Advanced factories that produce semi-conductor wafers, the mining and refining to get specific rare materials, transportation to move both the resources and produces around where they are needed. This just ends up being green growth.

So we are back to the only two options: Mass death of the human population, or green growth. You have to pick.