You can debate about de-growth but you definitely need to grow substantially slower than you bring new capacity online, or else you run into Jevon's paradox, wh

You can debate about de-growth but you definitely need to grow substantially slower than you bring new capacity online, or else you run into Jevon's paradox, which points out that if you increase consumption as fast as you make efficiency gains you cancel the latter out. Examples being cars becoming larger and heavier even though engines get better, bloated software despite faster chips, better healthcare but sicker populations, and so on. Vaclav Smil is cited in the article and he noticed in one of his recent books that despite large deployment of renewables, global fossil fuel reliance has only fallen from about 92% to ~88% over the last few decades. It's because we keep adding more consumers almost as fast as we add renewables. In regards to ecological problems we're on a tight schedule to fend off the worst consequences and that won't be possible if we keep eating up all new gains. Especially because there's hard limits on how fast you can add new infrastructure globally, which itself is rarely green.