[jamesbvaughan]

Could you explain more what you mean about our growth based economic model not being sustainable? This is a topic that I'm fairly new to and the only substantial thing I've read about it is Tyler Cowen's "Stubborn Attachments" which presented what I found to be a very compelling argument that long term economic growth is very good and is in fact the only sustainable way forward.

I've been hoping to read some counter arguments to that idea to round out my exposure to the topic.

[tgirod]

Well, first there is the common sense part - infinite growth with limited resources is likely to bump on a wall at some point. Someone (especially here) will probably argue that the resources are not really limited because technology and spaaaace, but that's precisely the kind of hubris I was reacting to in the first place.

I think the first extensive study on the subject is [the limits to growth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth).

A compelling thing I've seen (sorry can't find the exact source, I think it was from [the shift project](https://theshiftproject.org)) is the very strong correlation - almost linear relation - between GDP, energy consumption and co2 emission. So far we haven't been able to decorrelate those three.