It’s high-income countries that are the problem here, where growth has become completely unhinged from any concept of need, and has long been vastly in excess of what is required for human flourishing.

As societies become more egalitarian, people feel less pressure to pursue ever-higher incomes and more glamorous status goods. This liberates people from the treadmill of perpetual consumerism.

If the rich have more money than they can spend, which is virtually always the case, then they invest their excess in expansionary industries that are quite often ecologically destructive.

Any policy that reduces the incomes of the very rich will have a positive ecological benefit. And because the excess incomes of the rich win them nothing when it comes to welfare, this can be accomplished without any cost to social outcomes.

[For the past forty years], guided by the dogmas of neoliberalism, governments have privatised public services, slashed social spending, cut wages and labour protections, handed tax cuts to the richest and sent inequality soaring. In an age of climate breakdown, we need to be doing exactly the opposite.

Growthism is little more than ideology – an ideology that benefits a few at the expense of our collective future. We’re all pushed to step on the accelerator of growth, with deadly consequences for our living planet, all so that a rich elite can get even richer. From the perspective of human life, this is clearly an injustice. And indeed we have been aware of this problem for some time. But from the perspective of ecology, it is even worse – it is a kind of madness.

Those who insist that aggregate growth is necessary to improve people’s lives force us into a horrible double-bind. We are made to choose between human welfare or ecological stability – an impossible choice that nobody wants to face. But when we understand how inequality works, suddenly the choice becomes much easier: between living in a more equitable society, on the one hand, and risking ecological catastrophe on the other.

Clean energy might help deal with emissions, but it does nothing to reverse deforestation, overfishing, soil depletion and mass extinction. A growth-obsessed economy powered by clean energy will still tip us into ecological disaster.

We will find ourselves plunging into ecological collapse well before we run into the limits to growth.