A note the Decoupling claim and key references.

It is commonly assumed that technical advance will enable economic growth to continue indefinitely without growth in resource use or ecological impact.  The fundamental assumption underlying these beliefs is that economic growth can be “decoupled” from resource and ecological demands and impacts That is, the claim is that rate of production and consumption can continue to increase while the resources needed to do this can be reduced to sustainable levels, along with the environmental damage it causes. This comforting faith is widely held, including by major global institutions. However this “tech-fix faith” has now been contradicted by a large amount of evidence.
 

Some key references are by Hickel and Kallis (2019), referring to over 300 studies, Parrique et al. (2019), and Haberle et al. (2020) referring to  over 850 studies.

There are areas in which production is being achieved and/or could be while impacts are reduced; transition to renewable energy is an important instance.  But what matters is whether the overall output of an economy can be reduced as its GDP rises, which is “absolute” decoupling. The above reviews conclude emphatically that despite constant effort to increase efficiency and cut costs absolute decoupling of resource use and environmental impact from GDP growth is not occurring, and that greater recycling effort and transition to “service and information economies” are not at all likely to achieve it. Despite constant effort to improve productivity and efficiency, in general growth of GDP is accompanied by growth in resource use.

The reviews emphasise that there are not good reasons to expect absolute decoupling in future; in fact the trends are getting worse.  Diminishing resource sources, falling mineral grades, rising energy costs, rising environmental costs etc are requiring more effort and resources to maintain output levels. Lenzen et al. (2022) and Zheng et al. (2018) have found that the rate of mineral consumption is increasing at twice the rate at world GDP is increasing.

The demolition of the decoupling faith has been central in the rise of the Degrowth movement. It has emerged from the basic “limits to growth” argument put by Meadows et al. fifty years ago yet largely ignored until recently. There is now a large literature and many agencies and conferences working on the fact that levels of resource use and environmental impact and thus production and consumption are now far beyond sustainable levels, and thus that the only viable solution has to be significant reduction in these levels and in GDP. Capitalism cannot do this.
This constitutes a very substantial case against the “tech-fix” and “Green Growth” believers and the “Ecomodernists”.

Haberle, H., et al., (2020), “A systematic review of the evidence on decoupling of GDP, resource use and GHG emissions, part II: synthesizing the insights”, Environmental Research Letters,15. 

Hickel J. and G. Kallis, (2019), “Is Green Growth Possible?”, New Political Economy, April. DOI: 10.1080/13563467.2019.1598964

Parrique, T., J. Bath, F. Briens, J. Spanenberg, (2019), Decoupling Debunked. Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability. A study edited by the European Environment Bureau, EEB, July, Brussels, Belgium. https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/

Lenzen, M., et al., (2022) Implementing the material footprint to measure progress towards Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 12. Nature Sustainability, 5, 157-166. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-021-00811-6

Zheng, X., Wang, R., Wood, R., Wang, C. and Hertwich, E. G., (2018) High sensitivity of metal footprint to national GDP in part explained by capital formation. Nat. Geosci. 11, 269–273 (2018