How Climate Change Can Fuel War

In response to the following article: https://www.economist.com/international/2019/05/25/how-climate-change-can-fuel-wars

We’ve hardly started on the road to a very hot world. I have not seen projections for what happens to food production in Africa, but if they can’t get enough food there, guess where the nearest place of plenty is?

Following on from the above, more and more pointed questions will be asked of the dominant system we are living under. It’s already happening with the climate strikes and extinction rebellion but there are also studies coming out from more august quarters which are in some ways suggesting that things are even worse and the solutions need to be even more draconian. Given that, as yet, few can ‘handle the truth’ (as Nicholson put it in ‘a few good men’), pro tem other forms of words will be need and I thought that consumerism is a less incendiary word than the other c word (i dont mean cancer, though the c word is almost literally a form of economic cancer). thus, i have two questions:

• is it be more palatable to say ‘consumerism is destroying the planet’ than ‘capitalism is destroying the planet’?
  do you think it might be true that consumerism is destroying the planet?
• if the answer to 2) is no, i would like to know of sources and suggestions as to how we can have a sustainable planet with 8 – 12 billion humans, many of whom are already massive consumers and many more trying either to catch up with the most egregious consumers or else consume even more than they already do. all of advertising is dedicated to nothing but increasing our consumption and 2/3 of the developed nations’ economies are dependent on naked consumerism. it is surely reasonable to suggest that unless something is done to reduce consumerism all the other problems will get worse.

It is tempting to think that we can just switch to renewables etc, and all will be ok (nothwithstanding that this would be a titanic task since 80% of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels), but there is an interesting line of argument called jeavons’ paradox that suggests that efficient substitution leads to more consumption not less: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox