This is what I always point to when people say capitalism is unsustainable because it supposedly "requires infinite growth in a closed system."
It doesn't require that, it only requires endless incremental improvements in efficiency, which is perfectly possible, given that even just the tiniest incremental improvement on a massive problem can result in huge productivity gains. A great example is farming. We produce more crop output than ever before all while using less land, labor, and energy.
Right, the outputs are higher than ever with the least conventionally measured inputs. Which was great for a while, but we're well into the tail portion of the curve where the advances are all accompanied with ever greater shifts of cost to the unmeasured externalities. Modern farming is a hyper-efficient process of converting fossil fuels -> fertilizer -> corn & soy -> food and its many imitations, along with massive environmental costs (CO2, runoff, freshwater usage and groundwater depletion, ...)
> In 2020, a meta-analysis of 180 scientific studies notes that there is "No evidence of the kind of decoupling needed for ecological sustainability" and that "in the absence of robust evidence, the goal of decoupling rests partly on faith". [1]
Economic growth without ecological collapse is currently capitalist fantasy and wish-casting.
No one sensible is arguing that efficiencies can't be found. They're pointing you at the very real crisis that we have no idea how to decouple economic growth from environmental resource consumption such that environmental disaster is averted.
It doesn't require that, it only requires endless incremental improvements in efficiency, which is perfectly possible, given that even just the tiniest incremental improvement on a massive problem can result in huge productivity gains. A great example is farming. We produce more crop output than ever before all while using less land, labor, and energy.