The degrowth movement is very fringe indeed. But its ideas are not, some have even been assimilated by the green-washing apparatus such as "reduce, reuse, recycle". I agree with your definition because it includes pollution, which is deciding factor for reducing production overall.
> Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption
The question is good but not the framing. How is pollution avoidable? Energy consumption is not the problem but it's the means by which the auxiliary problems arise, and therefore a correct proxy to measure them. One of the problems is production of throwaway goods of dubious quality (leading to enormous pollution), a problem which technically could not exist before we had an abundance of quasi-free energy.
It's like in software development when people consider CPU/RAM is unlimited and don't provide any optimization. That may be fine in hypothetical settings, but in the real world resources are finite. (the analogy stops because using too much CPU/RAM does not "pollute" the rest of the machine and create memory corruption or whatever)
> Can you name specific issues caused directly by energy consumption
The question is good but not the framing. How is pollution avoidable? Energy consumption is not the problem but it's the means by which the auxiliary problems arise, and therefore a correct proxy to measure them. One of the problems is production of throwaway goods of dubious quality (leading to enormous pollution), a problem which technically could not exist before we had an abundance of quasi-free energy.
It's like in software development when people consider CPU/RAM is unlimited and don't provide any optimization. That may be fine in hypothetical settings, but in the real world resources are finite. (the analogy stops because using too much CPU/RAM does not "pollute" the rest of the machine and create memory corruption or whatever)