They are wrong about decoupling

So this degrowther argument is just wrong. But degrowthers have a second, far better counter to McAfee’s notion that we can have our cake and eat it too: Decoupling isn’t happening fast enough. If we wait for China and India and all the countries of Africa to industrialize in a resource-intensive way like today’s developed countries did, and then to dematerialize their growth like today’s developed countries are doing now, it will be far too late and the planet will suffer ecological catastrophe.

This argument isn’t as strong as it sounds — China and India and the rest will be able to take advantage of the efficiency-inducing technologies created by the developed countries, like solar power (indeed, ). And they will be able to embrace “dematerialized” goods and services like social networks and video games (sorry, Xi Jinping) very early in their growth path. So these countries’ resource use trajectories won’t look quite like the U.S.’ or Europe’s.