Writing in this week’s Pearls and Irritations, Peter Sainsbury points out that the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections regarding climate change assume continual economic growth as fundamental to their projection. Their modelling offsets this with unprecedented technical change, such as green hydrogen and green steel and new, negative emissions technologies. Europe’s Fit for 55 zero-emissions plan, also predicates economic growth, decoupled from environmental harm. Sébastien Wälti of the Swiss National Bank and other degrowth researchers point out that the vast sums of money spent on emissions reduction technologies over the last two decades have had very little impact on emissions. Reducing consumption and population rather than inventing new technologies.
Sources:
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/whp/ev/2013/00000022/00000001/art00006
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-38807-6_15