To summarise, this approach promotes mind over matter.

But this approach is also flawed because it requires and assumes a state of peace. For this model to work, peace is necessary, yet it is by and large absent.

If you want to subdue materialism, the first thing to resist and subdue is one's own genes which dictate to us their material desires. So long as we listen to them and continue to procreate, we are being conscripted by our genes to fight their never-ending wars among themselves - and no peaceful solutions are possible while we live in a war-zone!

I seem to recall just a few years ago that the CSIRO (Turner et al) looked at the 1972 Limits to Growth study and found that many indicators were coming true. LtG seems to support the idea of a long term no-growth economy perhaps with a smaller world population. That's not sexy enough for the new bosses of CSIRO so we're back to indefinite growth with all the green trimmings.

They say if you are not part of the solution then you're part of the problem. By pushing myths like CCS, unrebounded efficiency gains and super carbon absorbing trees we are actually locking ourselves into fossil fuel dependence. Don't fret about driving your big SUV to the airport because it's all going to be carbon free and sustainable in future. Nobody wants to hear the future will be hard and involve what is effectively rationing.

More globalist garbage to sell an agenda.
I read an article a few years back where the CSIRO actually said CO2 was greening the planet.
Someone must've said "Hey get with the program or we'll cut your funding"
http://www.csiro.au/en/News/News-releases/2013/Deserts-greening-from-rising-CO2

And always comes with compulsory bonus guilt-trip 'everyone needs to move into coffin sized homes'.
Ugh... tempts me to reconnect with my spiteful aloof teenage years and the lack of respect for authority and go burn some old tyres...

As I stated in a post a couple of days ago:

"...we have a way bigger energy and economic problem barreling down on us!

Here is the short reason: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2017-01-31/end-of-the-oilocene-the-demise-of-the-global-oil-industry-and-of-the-global-economic-system-as-we-know-it/

And here is the scientific version of the evidence: http://www.thehillsgroup.org/petrohgv2.pdf

Oil is everything, without it we are buggered, forget the coal problem and focus on this more important predicament if you dare."

The article in question here relies way too much on untested assumptions and is therefore invalid.

If you take the time to read the two links I have shown above, the second being the more technical version, you will realise we are stuffed and no amount of wishful thing, i.e. Algae farming, biofuel, fracking, thorium etc are going to solve this most pressing of predicaments.

Never mind permaculture, green utopia blah blah, we don't have the time or the money, it is way too late, period

Geoff

I subscribe to the last paragraph : Implications for the growth economy".
I'm not a sicko Green, but trust me, without sustainable oceans there will be no life!

Chinese (as the peak Asian Nation, but not alone among other Asian ocean rapists), wholesale plunder of the oceans fish stocks, and everything else that moves in it, must stop quickly if this is to be achieved..

For survival sake, Australia should tuck in behind the U.S. and declare war on China, not be sucking along to it, with blind economic lust!

That is my own view of a lower sustainable growth rate...

The blind leading the blind.