Chapter 5: Limits to Growth: Natural or Moral?
"For if growth turns out to be sustainable after all, as it well might, then those whose opposition to it was based solely on its unsustainability will have nothing left to say. (...) Extremists have always relied on the exploitation of fear to achieve their ends. Our own aspiration is to persuade by joy, to present a vision of the good life as one to be pursued not from guilt or fear of retribution but in happiness and hope. (...) We agree that, for the affluent world, growth is no longer a sensible goal of long-term policy. But we regard this as an ethical truth, not as a conclusion from scientific fact. The problems of global warming, serious as they are, do not on their own require us to abandon growth. (...) The argument from global warming to growth reduction typically takes a utilitarian form. (...) To sum up: the environmentalist case for growth reduction cannot be explained as a pragmatic response to known facts. It betrays a passion, a will to believe, to which the facts are incidental."
