Information economy

Only with an information economy.

Economic growth, population growth, progress and wellbeing correlates strongly with the amount of cheaply available energy humans have. 

Not only is much of this being depleted but even if it were in unlimited supply, continuing use of it will threaten our existence through climate change and ecological damage.

In other words, systems geared around economic growth which consume more energy will eventually destroy themselves.

Secondly, growing economies will become richer and wipe out purely sustainable (non growing) ones, partly because we are territorial animals that will always build the best weapons that we can afford and partly because growth is a function of competition for resources that is part of the arms race of natural selection itself. However, this does not mean that energy depleting economies will survive their own waste or that partially sustainable, growing economies will be wiped out by being non-competitive.

In other words, systems geared around pursuit of economic growth are inevitable.

The only way to avoid us inevitably destroying our finite world is to either grow the size of the system (colonize other planets etc. Good luck with that!) or to increase efficiency and still grow economically (continue growth but with the same energy use).

Increasing efficiency when it comes to physical things is very difficult, because it requires conscious effort against the natural order of things which is to make waste as a by product of creation. We are all little entropy machines, governed by the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. We are biologically impelled to maximize waste.

Luckily the 2nd Law applies to information as well as steam engines, and it turns out that there is a vast amount of potential information in a small amount of a physical thing like steam. The energy per bit of digital media is potentially millions of times less than a physical media. A library can fit on a thumb sized disk. We can still make a creative mess without wasting energy.

Economic growth is sustainable if we continue to switch from an industrial economy to an information (services) based one, where consumption growth is of bits of information and physical things such as people, food and shelter are born, grown and built sustainably.