Capitalism is based on the cancerous logic of perpetual expansion, devastating the living world. In the face of ecological breakdown, we need to restore the ...
So yes the real target is to stay within planetary boundaries and to shut down problematic industries as quickly as possible, to increase the quality of life over the long term. The key with GDP is that degrowth argues that GDP is a flawed metric for quality of life. For example when you work less, you reduce GDP, but have more free time, which might improve your life even more then the extra work income. The problem is that 32 out of 116 countries have actually managed to decouple GDP growth from emissions and those are nearly all developed countries, which have way to high emissions already and the fall in emissions is pretty low. The argument is that we can provide a good quality of life for everybody on the planet, while staying within planetary boundaries, by cutting wastefull practises and using resources in a more targeted way. For example by using bicycles instead of cars, which are more expensive to produce and also use a lot more oil.
This is a good summary of the concept:
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2024-03-07/degrowth-as-a-concept-and-a-practice-introduction/
So yes the real target is to stay within planetary boundaries and to shut down problematic industries as quickly as possible, to increase the quality of life over the long term. The key with GDP is that degrowth argues that GDP is a flawed metric for quality of life. For example when you work less, you reduce GDP, but have more free time, which might improve your life even more then the extra work income. The problem is that 32 out of 116 countries have actually managed to decouple GDP growth from emissions and those are nearly all developed countries, which have way to high emissions already and the fall in emissions is pretty low. The argument is that we can provide a good quality of life for everybody on the planet, while staying within planetary boundaries, by cutting wastefull practises and using resources in a more targeted way. For example by using bicycles instead of cars, which are more expensive to produce and also use a lot more oil.