[l_camacho84]

We don't need to scale up if the developed countries agree to scale down consumption. Reducing commuting (working from home when possible), have taxes on airplane travel, tax goods that come unnecessarily from far away, invest in durability. This is not scyfy solutions sorry to disappoint

[ben_w]

Sure, and the UK could have a 4-hour work week if it halved it’s manufacturing and automated all its services.

Annoyingly, people don’t follow such oversimplified economic models. (If we did, free market economics and communism would both be ‘right’).

[leadingthenet]

Well they are both "right" in the sense that they have different premises and optimise for different variables in the economy. They both work in certain circumstances and not in others. There's no such thing as a perfect economic system that magically solves all human problems, but that doesn't mean that there aren't gradations of how good one is compared to another, given a set of things you want to achieve in a society.

Capitalism has advantages and disadvantages, and the same is true for communism. If, however, the variable you want to optimise for is carbon footprint, then clearly capitalism is the wrong tool for the job.

Also, models are a perfect representation of reality, but since we can't possibly capture all the data inherent in a system as large as our planet (or Solar System, or the Universe), it's pretty much all we have to make sense of the world.