In my experience, people aren’t taking the idea seriously enough. People are happy to geek out about electric cars and solar panels, but degrowth, despite the broad political consensus on the overwhelming evidence for its necessity, is still regarded as fringe.

Agreeing on goals is often a larger obstacle than finding solutions. How many leftists who were responsible for building sewers were sanitation engineers? Do you think they had a fleshed-out building codebook and peer-reviewed waste management proposal before they acquired political power? Or was that the easy part, compared to building a political coalition powerful enough to tax rich people who were fine with running sewage down the middle of the streets of working-class neighborhoods?