If you think of degrowth as a kind of “social technology” — i.e. a “technology” that aims to reduce energy and material throughput by radically changing cultures of consumption — it can be seen as a “speculative scheme on a mass scale” just as much or more than NETs. https://twitter.com/jasonhickel/status/1294293822013181955

Current degrowth experiments are just as niche as negative emissions experiments so to bet climate change mitigation on degrowth is just as speculative as to bet it on negative emissions technologies.

There’s some recent literature that I haven’t read but IMO degrowth scholars have spent too much ink pontificating on the need for degrowth rather than on showing how those experiments can be multiplied / scaled so as to become credible (and desirable) solutions to climate change

From that perspective, they can come across, by analogy, as a proponent of a technological solution who rather than showing how the technology can be scaled — in this case how to actually transform cultures of consumption on a mass scale — just writes rationales and critiques.

All of the above is just another way of saying that degrowth has no sufficiently developed, plausible theory of change.