‍Renewable energy, electric vehicles, recycling and greater efficiency sit at the centre of most government and corporate climate strategies. The aim, often called decoupling, is to let economies keep growing while their environmental impact falls.

A new World3 study tested that aim. World3 is the computer model behind the 1972 book The Limits to Growth, and the researchers extended it to include a shift to renewable energy and a circular economy. Even under extremely optimistic assumptions, including renewables that cost nothing and need no materials, every scenario still overshot environmental limits and declined. The technology delayed the decline. It didn’t prevent it.

That leaves a question technology can’t answer by itself: how much consumption is enough?

Cleaner technology can shift the pressure rather than remove it

Solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles produce no direct carbon dioxide emissions while in use. Electric vehicles are only as clean as the electricity that charges them, and none of these technologies comes without an environmental footprint.

Renewables reduce dependence on fossil fuels, but still require huge quantities of metals, minerals, land, and infrastructure. Recycling and reuse reduce material demand, but they also consume energy.

The problem is that relying less on fossil fuels doesn’t mean we consume less. Better technology cuts the emissions and energy involved in making and using each product, but if demand keeps growing, producing more and more products can cancel out that reduction.

A version of this problem was highlighted by the economist William Stanley Jevons in 1865. He observed how improvements in the efficiency of steam engines could lead to increased coal consumption. More efficient engines made the work done by coal cheaper, so steam power spread to more industries and Britain burned more coal overall. The same can happen with green technology: as cleaner products become cheaper to make and run, people can afford to buy and use more of them.

The missing question is how much is enough

Gaya Herrington, whose earlier work compared contemporary data with World3, argues that renewable energy and circular business models need to be implemented with the deliberate intention of reducing environmental footprints rather than simply supporting more growth.

She advocates the use of consumption corridors. A corridor sets a minimum level of consumption, ensuring people have enough resources to live a decent life, and a maximum, beyond which one person’s consumption begins to limit the resources and opportunities available to others.

Somewhere between the two lies a fair equilibrium.

Establishing such a corridor would inevitably raise difficult questions about redistribution. Someone must decide where the limits lie, how they are measured, and how they are enforced. Without such limits, the logic of Jevons’ paradox remains: greater efficiency can simply make consumption cheaper and encourage people to consume more.

Naturally, the idea raises fundamental political and economic questions. How much redistribution is justified? Who decides what constitutes excessive consumption? And how far should governments go in limiting growth or individual consumption to stay within environmental boundaries?

Green businesses will need to sell better outcomes, not simply more products

Currently, most conventional businesses operate under the logic of more. Selling more means more revenue and, usually, more profit. Growth depends on increasing volume.

The logic of more, however, is not always compatible with a thriving environment. The answer may not be more, but better.

A genuinely lower-footprint economy, for example, can ask different commercial questions:

Can products last longer?

Can companies earn from repair rather than replacement?

Can customers pay for access or performance instead of ownership?

Can materials be recovered and reused?

Can businesses generate revenue while reducing overall material throughput?

This isn’t a new concept. Repairers, tailors and hire shops once made a living by keeping goods in use for longer. As mass production made new goods cheaper and labour costs rose, replacing an item often became cheaper than mending it. Many businesses came to depend on selling more units, more often, a model now most visible in fast fashion and rapid replacement cycles for electronics.

A lower-footprint model simply asks whether businesses can create value without relying on people buying more physical products every year.

Your career may depend on solving the second half of the problem

If the first phase of the green transition was about developing cleaner technology, the next may be about changing how businesses make money from it.

Lower-footprint business models depend on people who can work out how a company earns money when it sells fewer products, whether by pricing a service in place of a sale, designing goods to be repaired, or bringing materials back through the supply chain for reuse.

The challenge calls for professionals who think inventively, who can look at the way their industry has always made money and imagine profitable alternatives to selling more.