But people wouldn't be cutting down the rainforest if they weren't rewarded for it. If we patch each problem as it comes along, we're spending a lot of political will on the problem.
The human race, consisting of 6+ billion people, can do more then one thing at a time.
The idea of "we need to end economic growth" implies an extremely broad ranging, aggressive, authoritarian imposition on people's freedoms - requiring so much logistics, infrastructure and coordination as to be practically impossible.
Or you know, we could just fund the EPA and BLM, and employ auditors for sustainable sourcing requirements for overseas importers...
If economic growth is something so natural that it needs to be actively suppressed for it not to happen, why do we need aggressive, harmful growth drivers like planned obsolescence or the ever-growing pervasiveness of ads that this thread was originally about?
That's the whole point! We don't! We have to actively fight planned obsolescence and other useless ways of inefficient growth. But due to the short term optimization of states, society, people, and businesses, it's what happens nowadays.
It's a meta-optimization problem. Like the problem of figuring out how to spend our "remaining" carbon budget best to minimize suffering both short and long term.
