This kind of economic growth is actually a relatively new idea and not as old as it might seem, believe it or not but we have abundance today in almost everything, when was the last famine in the US for example? Hell, one of the most serious health issues in the US and Europe, is obesity and that has a reason. Food was never as cheap as it is now, consumption and production has always to increase in our society, or the system we have in place right now simply colapses. Innovations today are used very often to keep the growth rates going, products that are solely developed for profit and expanding markets or creating new ones, creating needs which are not obligatory. No one needs the newest iphones or fast food restaurants at every corner. Not really, when you think about it.
Limits to Growth, is a book/research by the Club of Rome which offers many details about the issues.
In the summer of 1970, an international team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began a study of the implications of continued worldwide growth. They examined the five basic factors that determine and, in their interactions, ultimately limit growth on this planet-population increase, agricultural production, nonrenewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation. The MIT team fed data on these five factors into a global computer model and then tested the behavior of the model under several sets of assumptions to determine alternative patterns for mankind’s future.
https://www.clubofrome.org/report/the-limits-to-growth/
If we really want to avoid an environmental dissaster on a global scale, then we simply have to think about post-growth societies and how we can get there. When people tell me they need cars or eating less meat doesn't change anything, than they simply havn't looked hard enough at the alternatives or they can't imagine them. We can exist without cars and meat, they are actually a luxury when you think about it. We havn't been born as car nations, we simply developed in to one and this means that we can also reverse this development, if we wanted it, as societies that is. I quote:
>>Back in the 1920s, most American city-dwellers took public transportation to work every day. Nowadays, by contrast, just 5 percent or so of workers commute via public transit, and they're disproportionately clustered in a handful of dense cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago.<<
I am not saying we have to remove them all, but we could learn a lot from cities like Amsterdam.
In Amsterdams inner city roughly 60% of the citizens use their bicycle. So it is possible and it can even increase the quality of live - studies even show that a bicycle is faster than most cars at distances less than 6km, due to traffic, parking etc. In Amsterdam, there are less deadly traffic accidents, less noice and environmental pollution, it also opens up space for housing and parks. Cars take up a lot of space that could be used differently for example. Large urban cities would have to use different policies and support more public transport while limiting or maybe outright banning the use of cars, at least in the inner city, alternatives like bicycles, buses, street cars etc. would have to be subisidized and improved. Those things are part of city planing and the general infrastructure and they are possible to achieve. We have good examples all over the world. And this could be done in many other areas, like meat consumption, where again better and more environmental friendly alternatives are subisized. Of course it sounds crazy now, but think about it in 10, 20 or 50 years. Those changes don't have to happen from one day to the other.
