I honestly can't wrap my head around the views of people promoting "degrowth" as a solution. How do they reconcile their ideas with the basic reality that is ev

I honestly can't wrap my head around the views of people promoting "degrowth" as a solution. How do they reconcile their ideas with the basic reality that is evident from a single chart like that one [0] and, again, very basic facts about our world like population numbers? The simple reality is that there are a lot of people and most of them are very poor by Western standards. There are almost 8 billion people on this planet, and only 1 billion of them live in the West. There will most likely be 10 billion people, with almost all of the extra 2 billion being born in the developing world. Those 8 billion people's living conditions are abysmal compared to developed world, so they want to improve them, which means increasing their energy consumption. 8 billion people is 8 times more than 1 billion people, therefore even if it's somehow possible to "degrow" Western economies to the level of consumption of 1970s and force the developing world to stop at that level, that's still a severalfold increase in overall carbon output. If we unshackle ourselves from the reality of international politics, let's assume that instead of waiting for the developing world to catch up we somehow redistribute all wealth equally and freeze it at that level. Ignoring all beneficial effects of wealth concentration (you can't build five smaller semiconductor plants for the price of a one big one) and previous wealth expenditure (infrastructure already in place is worth a lot of carbon), the resulting average quality of life on this planet will be closer to favelas than to whatever even the most ascetic green activists would be happy to accept. And we actually need to reduce that level, not just abandon overseas holidays. Of course, we can't ignore international politics, so any measure that fails the MAP test (can you convince Modi, Assad, and Putin to implement it?) is at most a minor respite, not a solution. Something tells me that it would be hard for green activists to convince those leaders to deliberately reduce their citizens' living conditions and, for two of them, abandon their biggest export revenue streams. I don't know what's going on in people's heads when they talk about "degrowth". Most of the time I brought up [0] the discussion switched to per-capita measures and emotional arguments about guilt of past emissions, as if our atmosphere cares about Americans being especially polluting per capita when there are 20 times more people polluting somewhat less but increasing their pollutions every day. The easiest explanation I can think of is a combination of despair ("but nothing else would work"), desire for "simple" solutions ("just reduce consumption" sounds simpler and less tradeoff-y than, say, nuclear), blindness to the world outside of Western bubble ("we just need to do our part, how hard can it be not fly to vacations"), and a quasi-religious notion of carbon piety. It's disheartening and I strongly believe it's hugely disruptive to productive efforts to combat climate change. [0]: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1711C/production/_121429449_countries_v1-nc.png https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/976/cpsprodpb/1711C/production...