Amazing what propaganda and convenience does to people.
Environmental "degrowth" measures (that in reality are just growth measures that take externalities into account) are evil, while the companies and the economic system literally destroying the natural environment and the prerequisites for human civilization on the planet are fine.
What you refer to as "degrowth" is not necessarily what the parent is.
Like most political terms it has been used in a variety of ways by different people.
Some of the classic "degrowth" proponent ideas would reduce the viable Earth human population to around a billion and this would be seen as a good thing. I know three such people personally.
The best way I have to understand why it has been so hard to shift to renewables is: so-called "growth proponents" are the actual "degrowth proponents" who are completely okay (and would prefer) billions of people dying.
I advise you sit down and do the modelling, the data on electricity storage costs (consider kw, kwh, cycles reaction times and annual maintenance please) and wind and solar production variation is available.
IIRC worst case projections of HALYs lost due to climate change is under 10BY
> IIRC worst case projections of HALYs lost due to climate change is under 10BY
Those models are wrong, it's as simple as that.
They are probably wrong in ways that would be completely transparent to anyone actually looking into how they are constructed.
I can't say specifically what is wrong about the model you are referring to, but let me give an example that illustrates one common issue:
Agriculture, forestry and fishing accounted for ~5% of the world economy last year.
Loosing 5% of the economy is not good, but it is not that bad. But in reality, of course, loosing that particular 5% would lead to the total collapse of all civilisation.
Those kinds of dynamical effects are extremely difficult to model, and literary anyone doing that kind of modelling is a crackpot, no more or less. (But crackpots sometimes win prices, so that's good for them I guess...)
My point is: be extremely sceptical of "models" that tries to "value" ecological damage based on current prices. The present biological web on earth is the only place we know in the universe where we know humans can live and thrive. Let's not ruin it for a few percentage points of imaginary economic growth.
Storage is not the unsolved problem. While I cannot say that I have personally done the calculations in detail, I can say that I have engaged with people who have done the calculations, and spent a lot of their life doing those calculations.
Also, I have no clue what "HALY" stands for, and searching for this term didn't lead to anything concrete either. I'm assuming BY stands for 10 billion years.
You can be pro-sustainability and pro-growth. Examples are (product-neutral) carbon tax and solar&nuclear power.
You can also be anti-growth and disguised as pro-sustainability. Examples are being anti-consumerism, anti-energy-abundance (including being pro-solar without solving for intermittency), and meat tax (i.e. singling out a single product that you don't like).
"More efficient devices" also falls in the second category, as (1) it's pursuing energy-scarcity, not energy-abundance, and (2) it's usually implemented as "uses less energy by being worse" (e.g. dishwasher that runs longer, cars with lesser range) not "uses less energy by being more efficient" (prime example are actually petrol cars, which have massively increased in efficiency in last few decades).
We need to be pro-growth but it is difficult to balance that with sustainability. For example:
In practice, carbon taxes are easy to game and are counter-productive. The companies prioritize profits (growth) to the exclusion of sustainability; the governments are bureaucratic and slow, so they're always years behind the businesses playing the game.
> "uses less energy by being more efficient" (prime example are actually petrol cars, which have massively increased in efficiency in last few decades).
Jevon's Paradox is that as resource usage becomes more efficient (cheaper), there is a _greater_ overall use of the resource. This isn't bad per se, but it does mean that greater efficiency will not lead to reduced usage.
Nuclear power is one of our best current options, even though it's often derided for cost. But in lots of ways, we can't stop developing nations from burning fossil fuels, so energy developed nations produce from other sources can be use to capture those emissions.
Environmental "degrowth" measures (that in reality are just growth measures that take externalities into account) are evil, while the companies and the economic system literally destroying the natural environment and the prerequisites for human civilization on the planet are fine.