You can ridicule the specifics, but the high-level idea here is spot on. Either you have to decouple economic growth from increased consumption of natural resources, or you have to find a way to have a stable society without economic growth. I see no reason to think the former is possible, so that leaves the latter. The alternative is some kind of calamity.
> you have to decouple economic growth from increased consumption of natural resources
Hasn't technology generally been heading in this direction? It seems we are constantly doing more with less. If it keeps up, and we slowdown procreation, I see no reason why it won't drive resource usage down long term.
I mean, I completely disagree with the premise that we must consume non-renewable resources to generate wealth, but assuming it is true I think we've come a long way in changing that and the future looks even better.
> Hasn't technology generally been heading in this direction? It seems we are constantly doing more with less
Actually no, we haven't and we don't. Carbon emissions are still growing.
Classic mistake: You're confusing relative and absolute reductions. We have reduced relative ecological impact a lot, but overall impact has been growing along the way.
One way technology can really decrease consumption is by turning humans to machines. If you are essentially a CPU, your energy consumption would likely be very low yet your computational power and lifespan could be much higher. This way earth could support a much higher quantity of "humans", being mostly electric, it could even leave the confinements of earth, this way freeing earth.
The only challenge left is to maintain cognitive growth drives when you're based on electricity, rather than hormones among other chemicals.
You can only increase efficiency so far. I do agree that a reduction in population would result in lower resource usage, but that's an economic slowdown, i.e. the opposite of growth.
> the high-level idea here is spot on. Either you have to decouple economic growth from increased consumption of natural resources, or you have to find a way to have a stable society without economic growth
That's just a narrow-minded false dilemma. There's a (for all practical purposes) infinite universe out there, we have plenty of resources to grow even if we stop recycling.
Aside from the practicality of expanding fast enough (Dyson sphere around the sun in about 1400 years, needing to leave the galaxy in 2400 years), how far can you feasibly bring resources back to earth from to fuel that growth here? If you can't do that at some point, you have to stop growing locally even if the species is expanding. And besides, without FTL travel we're not going to be colonizing anything, just spreading seeds of new societies and, eventually, species that happen to be our offspring.
