Quite so. People have become so used to affluence that using less or owning less feels like losing, feels like getting poorer. However, degrowth is going to occur anyway thanks to climate change. Difficult to keep eating beef when all the cows have died in a famine. Difficult to buy the next iPhone when all those Chinese workers are dead from Covid++ . Difficult to fill up the gas tank when the oil runs out.

The choice we have to make is to either impose a structured fair and equitable degrowth, through self sacrifice or legislation, or have it forced upon us by climate disasters and the inevitable wars that follow.

There are floods in California now that show that nature does not discriminate where it will strike. You won't be able to sit back and pretend that it is only happening to other people in other countries. When all those Californians who have lost everything in the floods try to carry on, they will be forced to degrow their living standards. It will be the same for all of us in the long run.

Either we choose to move to a more sustainable future, fully prepared to use less of our resources, or we will be forced to live in a dystopian dust bowl of post civilisation collapse.