Ibon wrote:Dont forget one of the largest sources of slack, all that discretionary use of energy that serves no utility beyond indulgence.
Very true. Also do not underestimate the ways in which it can be continued for a tiny fraction of the footprint.
Take happy motoring for instance. If a sports car were built with the design principles and efficiency of a velomobile, you'd be looking at an analogous level of utility regarding single person transport while commuting for greatly reduced manufacturing cost and energy usage when compared to a normal economy car. One could even indulge themselves and race such a vehicle around at dangerous levels of speed well into the triple digit mph range, and still use only a tiny fraction of the energy of a small hatchback doing mundane A to B driving at the speed limit.
This principle doesn't just apply to vehicles. There's wasting of resources all around us, but the products people consume are often designed with waste, disposability, and obsolescence built into their expected mundane use cases, as opposed to efficiency, recyclability, and relative permanence. After all, the goal of those promoting endless growth is consumption, often for its own sake, and building products to reduce their resource footprint goes against that, and advertisers are a thing in order to convince people they need to consume more.
All of this resource waste built into the consumption paradigm is going to induce a whole lot more needless suffering.