"Degrowth" is code word for "austerity but painted green". It asks people to sacrifice their living standards, or their aspirations, out of a misguded misanthropy that posits humanity as an inherent blight on the planet. In the real world, we have seen the effects of low growth rates - stagnant wages, a persistent inability to tackle persistent social ailments and, well, a marked failure to invest in the housing, industry and infrastructure we require if we are to deal with reducing carbon emissions (or reduce freshwater usage, decrease eutrophication, decrease soil depletion etc)
Degrowth advocates persistently make the error of their granddaddy Malthus: failing to even remotely consider the effects of technology, and believing again and again that given problems are a completely unfeasible conundrum, despite the evidence of, um, the entire history of humanity since the Neolithic Revolution. Take an issue which humanity did collectively tackle: the depletion of the ozone layer. The solution of the "degrowth" obsessives would have been simple: tell people they shouldn't expect luxuries like hairspray and fridges, you selfish ingrates are destroing muh ozone! In fact what we did was properly regulate the chemical industry to ensure they couldn't use CFC's and HCFC's, and after they whined for a while, they sulkily replaced the offending chemicals with non-ozone depleting alternatives. The same with a lot of local pollutants: emissions of sulfur dioxide, soot particulates, carbon monoxide, lead compounds etc have been massively reduced in the West through a mixture of technology and regulation, even taking outshoring into comparison. We are even saying it right now with the electrical grid, with people panicking about how much we need coal plants despite the fact that essentially every coal plant on Earth has been rendered a white elephant even if all research into batteries and energy storage were to cease tomorrow. Same with industry, agriculture and transport.
I have long been dubious about Malthus on similar grounds and made links between him and more recent 20th century works on the environment advocating a similar approach.
