Scientists lay out a sweeping roadmap for transitioning the US off fossil fuels

[Igel]

10. But continual growth carries some pretty falsifiable assumptions.

Population's going to decrease. Fewer people, same GDP, means more GDP/person.

There's decidedly a bottleneck, *that*'s the problem and where there's pessimism because people focus on what's next up and can't see beyond it.

Carbon efficiency is a big part of why the US' carbon footprint's declined. Right now, much of the world is 19th-century 'carbon efficient'.

There's that ol' anti-Malthusian deus-ex-machina effect that humans have pulled off a time or 10--facing predictions of impending doom, we turn at a sharp angle and miss the disaster. I read predictions of a billion dead from famine by 1980 when I was a kid, and it effing terrified me.

The only thing I took away from that is that short-sighted people like to terrify kids to accomplish their eco-political goals.

We can try to prevent the apocalypse which seems less and less avoidable, given current tech and abilities, or we can plan to accommodate the changes to make the apocalypse mitigatable even as we try to find non-coercive ways to prevent it entirely.

Walk and chew gum at the same time?