Allowing private corporate interests to guide the health of the planet to ruin for individual profit, and controlling world governments to do so at the behest of the people would be a very fascist thing to do, regardless of what the definition of fascism you personally think is.

For example, the government makes a top down decision to heavily invest in cheap or entirely free public transport, invest heavily in cycling infrastructure, ensures urban planning means that (where possible) you're never more than a short bicycle ride away from a supermarket (so called 5 minute cities), does its best to ensure it's affordable to live near your work, bans cars from city centres (with obvious exceptions), increases taxation on fuel, and increases taxation on new vehicles.

Perfectly feasible, because it's been done in plenty of countries and cities. Vastly better for the environment and much more efficient too, because the population isn't wasting so much time and money driving from point A to B. People are invariably much happier, because they get more exercise, waste less of their lives in traffic, aren't wasting money on car ownership, and suffer less from the effects of air and noise pollution. Unsurprisingly, once instituted this kind of thing invariably enjoys majority democratic support.

The polar opposite of the US, where the car industry had and still has a disproportionate influence on politics, and very unpopular there in large part because of propaganda, which has given Americans the illusion of choice; they have been invariably been robbed of the choice to live near their work or spend less time in traffic, but instead get to choose which overpriced car they are forced to buy due to corporate influenced government rule. I'm tired, but you get the idea.

It's also important to realise, that a lot of these kinds of policies, aren't actually unpopular when they're done well. People like walking, cycling, breathing fresh air, loads of trees, nature, etc. It's a bit of a joke that Americans return home from their holiday in Europe, feeling healthier and having lost weight. Not being stuck in your car all day is good for you.

The current system is authoritarian.

An extremely narrow cohort of society controls the corporations that determine our fate. It plunders the earth for profit, regardless of the consequences.

A sustainable system is one in which those who make a decision are the same as those affected.

Such is the complete opposite of authoritarianism. The planet will be saved when no one any longer benefits from its ongoing destruction.

You do sound like a liberal infiltrator. It in the off chance you aren’t and actually want to understand these things, unfortunately you generally have to do the hard work of actually reading books about them. On this topic specifically I would highly recommend Climate Change as a Class War by Matt Huber. There was a good Ted Talk that summarized the ideas behind this I saw years ago but I can’t find it.

Also baby steps to ecofascism? I cannot begin to imagine what this means. The ecosystem and how we deal with it has been highjacked by weapons manufacturers and energy companies and we are all told that you’d have to give up money and comforts and all kinds of austerity has been forced down our throats which is just simply not true. I cant remember if it was 70 percent or so of climate change variables were from military ventures alone, I know it was over 50 though. And a significant portion of the rest of it is just from non-military airplane fuel. I don’t know about you but MOST people could cut those things out of their lives almost entirely and not notice. Almost every climate change agitator can be fixed WHILE INCREASING THE QUALITY OF LIFE FOR WORKING CLASS PEOPLE. But under a capitalist society that is not the goal. The goal is infinite growth through profit maximization and concentration of capital. That goal is literally antithetical to environmental protection AND improvement in proletariat quality of life. They literally cannot coexist on their own.

The reason forests are still being cut down and CO2 is still being emitted isn’t because industrial civilization requires it, but because capitalism requires it.

Weird to pin a general economic issue on capitalism when it's more of a general issue with economic growth as history corroborates. Production functions—the dependence on factors of production including natural resources to produce output—work the same regardless of economic system: more is needed to produce more.

Central planning economies can be as or more destructive than the more capitalist ones: type of economy seems to have little bearing there. The USSR aggressively industrialized & would consistently pursue economic growth (to raise standards of living). It comes up in the Soviet constitution of 1977:

• labor, free from exploitation, as the source of growth
• continuous improvement of their living standards (art. 39)
• steady growth of the productive forces (art. 40).

Despite their command economy, their pollution was disproportionately worse than the US's

Total emissions in the USSR in 1988 were about 79% of the US total. Considering that the Soviet GNP was only some 54% of that of the USA, this means that the Soviet Union generated 1.5 times more pollution than the USA per unit of GNP.

Their planners considered pollution control

unnecessary hindrance to economic development and industrialization

and

By the 1990s, 40% of Russia's territory began demonstrating symptoms of significant ecological stress, largely due to a diverse number of environmental issues, including deforestation, energy irresponsibility, pollution, and nuclear waste.

And this generously glosses over the extent of water contamination, hazardous dumping of toxic & nuclear waste into oceans, etc.

The dependence on natural resources, capacity for environmental destruction, and demand for economic growth are not particular to any type of economy: they're general. Wherever an economy recklessly grows without environmental protections, the environment is ruined.

So if we all got to divvy up the wealth of the billionaires equally, and suddenly all of us had a moderate but sustaining amount of wealth, we’d give up on cars? Electricity? Beef? Because having those things, as I like to say, your “hot showers and cold ice cream” is what is destroying this world’s habitability. It’s not just the billionaires but our demand for the shit they sell us, regardless of the economic paradigm that delivers it.

Let’s say the first world standard of living downgraded just a bit, and the third world standard of living was elevated to first world standards overnight, do you think our demands of the planets resources would diminish? I don’t think it would. It would explode, as people who have lived on very little would want to eat as well as we have all these years. As the world wants more beef, the rainforest gets the axe so ranchers can graze their cattle on its ashes. Apply this to literally every other consumer good and municipal service.

I want to see the billionaire robber barons dethroned as bad as you do, but it won’t fix the underlying problem of civilization.

I couldn’t be more critical of the maga movement and the vacant gullibility of its adherents, but I’ve seen plenty of mid wits on the left fall for and parrot shit like this and others equally idiotic. I don’t have much faith in anyone at this point. We are confused apes.

leftist can be thought of as just another flavor of authoritarian

Almost all leftists will say the end goal is communism / anarcho-communism. A system in which the workers control the means of production and anyone involved in production gets an equal say in how that production is done. Before this can be achieved the industrial capacity of a country has to be developed enough to easily provide for everyone's needs. Marx thought that once everyone's needs were met consumption would plateau and therefore so would growth. Capitalists would then compete for a fixed size pie where the only way to make money would be squeezing workers and automating jobs away, which would reduce the amount of labor needed but cause mass unemployment. This would eventually reach a tipping point where the workers would rise up, seize the means of production and redistribute resources so everyone go there needs met while working far less, and thus relieving the intraclass tension that would tear it apart once it took over.

The problem is capitalism is very good at creating new needs for people and instilling the desire for them in the working class through media and advertising. So the growth keeps going and we never reach that end state.

These needs and desires are built deep within most people living under capitalism at this point so even if a socialist revolution did happen, which is unlikely due to the above reasons, then those desires would still show in the workers choices on production, so we'd still be making f-150s, hamburgers etc.

The only way I think could result in degrowth is a massive re-education program to remove those desires, most likely through an authoritarian media control. You'd need to counteract all the advertising people have ingested, think of how much of your life you have spent watching car commercials. A person would have to watch just as many hours watching videos on how to destructive and environmentally disgusting cars are to counteract all the positive associations ads have instilled in them. Along with replacing ads with environmental psas, media would also have to be mandated to reflect environmental values, driving and eating meat would be shamed and only done by the lazy and cruel.

I'd say this is definitely authoritarian, totalitarian even, but not fascist. I struggle to think of a coherent eco-fascist ideology as fascism is all about ethno-nationalism, national supremacy and expansionism which don't work with any environmental goals. so I think Eco-fascism is just a derogatory term used by people who don't understand what fascism is and just think all evil authoritarians are fascist.

No. I oppose authoritarianism in all its flavors.

I also don’t think our species will ever willingly do “degrowth”

I think the collapse of modern civilization is an inevitability, and that there will never be any positive, organized way to guide that collapse to any worthwhile positive outcome. Will it come in my lifetime or yours? Probably not. But it will come.

The only wildcard I see that could change this would be fusion energy, actual self sustaining fusion that generates unlimited energy, or the discovery of some other exotic form of matter that can provide unlimited energy. Barring those highly unlikely developments, I think any form of eco-authoritarianism would just be a way for those in power to continue enriching themselves at the cost of everyone else, a more extreme form of what is already happening.

I don't think so. I think there are too many humans, but my approach to the problem is to educate and empower each other to make our own family planning decisions rather than pressuring or forcing people to have children who don't want them. I believe that we'll naturally maintain sustainable numbers when allowed free choice in a healthy environment.

I don't think overpopulation is our biggest concern regarding unsustainability though, only a very small portion. We need to address more serious issues first, but the good news is that overthrowing capitalism addresses pretty much every problem simultaneously.

No, you're simply a victim of misinformation and propaganda making you believe that.

There are more than enough resources to go around and we don't have to needlessly structure our society with endless sprawl and wasteful use of space. The only reason there seems to be "too many people" is our current societal structures that push people towards wanton wastefulness and excess which exacerbates the issue.

We can go back to being community driven and living in dense, walkable cities instead of everyone clamoring over each other to obtain their own little fiefdoms.