One Earth is not Enough

Today marks overshoot day, the earliest time it has occurred since humans first started unsustainable consumption in 1969.

Overshooting our resources certainly implies a need to reduce consumption. Yet that appears to be politically untenable. Stan Cox needs to point out that there's no free lunch.

[T]he national or world power structure [has not] acknowledged that deep reductions in human resource use and economic activity, but with sufficiency for all, are necessary. Instead, the most popular proposed “solutions” would double down on human ingenuity and market forces, the two factors that have been central to creating our predicament in the first place.

Cox rejects notions such as 100 percent renewable energy at current levels of consumption, or urban "farming", or gasoline from air. Research continues on carbon extraction from the atmosphere, but it merely seems like a textbook example of increasing complexity.

Modern capitalism is not designed to solve the problems we face.

Ecomodern megacities, LED-powered Caesar salads, robotic servants, gasoline that lets you turn carbon dioxide into carbon dioxide, the blockchain, renewable-energy fantasies, and countless other innovative schemes illustrate how market forces are always far better at producing energy-hungry technologies than they are at finding ways to reduce consumption.

Update (August 13):  Maria Stoian isn't willing to place a bet.