Critical of the Green New Deal? What’s Your Suggestion?

Green New Deal legislation

Here’s an academic paper on the Green New Deal as a mechanism to mitigate climate change and other forms of environmental disaster.

It’s highly critical of the GND, based, as it is, largely around renewable energy and the electrification of everything that formerly required fossil fuels.  Its authors point to the eco-costs of mining the materials that go into these technologies, as well as the issue of waste disposal when things like solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries reach the end of their lives.  Further, they point out that renewable energy technology can’t keep up with the growth of the population and the exploding demand for energy.

All well and good. There are some errors in these people’s thinking, but there is also some truth here, to be sure.

But what’s the solution? From the article:

Obviously, a managed descent will require a paradigmatic shift in societyʼs socially constructed values, beliefs, and assumptions. At a minimum, we must replace our unrelenting  anthropocentricism and strictly instrumental approach to Nature with a more holistic, eco-centric perspective. People must come to acknowledge both their utter dependence on the integrity of the ecosphere and the intrinsic worth of other species and natural ecosystems. This means overcoming capitalismʼs addiction to material growth and adopting systems
compatible with one-Earth living, (which) implies any material standard of living that, if extended to everyone on Earth, would be sustainable —i.e., the human population would be living within the global carrying capacity. 

I laughed when I came to this.  The GND won’t work, but a “paradigmatic shift in societyʼs socially constructed values, beliefs, and assumptions” seems more plausible?