Do the degrowthers really think it’s a winning proposition that they want to take away refrigeration, sanitation and air conditioning? Do they truly believe that will sway anyone, win anyone over, make anyone remotely normal a true believer?
What’s the play there exactly? Oh, right, they just enjoy taking away things. Has nothing to do with saving the planet or humanity; it’s just permissible cruelty.
What you seem to be describing sounds to me more like straight-up doomerism (or worse, primitivism) than mere degrowth. I know, degree, not kind. But still. I’m sure there are people who are neither degrowthers nor denialists. There might even be some who aren’t counting chickens that haven’t yet hatched, such as nuclear fusion or asteroid mining. But I don’t know who they are. Some suggested reading might help. Might help my mental health, if nothing else.
There are degrowthers who want to de-intensify (for lack of a better word) capitalism. And I think that could work — after all, the French have a high standard of living and work approximately 500 fewer hours than Americans per year (and also have better/more available health care, etc.).
Certainly if we corrected many distributional issues, we could get by with much less growth and in certain places or countries, perhaps no growth. But what are the chances of that?
The best non-loony exploration of degrowth I’ve read is Peter A. Victor’s Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster. Though as the title implies, it’s not so much about degrowth as it is about having a no-growth society in most of the already-developed countries. I doubt that would work, even, but at least it wouldn’t lead to massive poverty and death as most of the proposals of even the more-reasonable degrowthers would. (I tried to read some of the other degrowth books but most were too outlandish in their asseverations to tolerate.)
That said, degrowth and doomerism seems an understandable response to the climate issues we face but degrowth even in its milder forms doesn’t seem like much of an answer as to the extent it would help, it would cause other problems right away such as huge mass migrations even beyond climate change, likely famines, and would not change distributional issues or inequality at all. Those would probably in fact get worse.
People say we can’t tech our way out of climate change. Not only do I think we can, but that we’ll have to. And that won’t happen with degrowth, though climate change still very much will.