The stark fact is that economic growth as we know it today will come to an end at some point on a finite planet like ours. For those who want an extremely meticulous and data driven analysis of the same I recommend reading Vaclav Smils work. I’m just sharing what I learned.
There are many websites that calculate your “earth footprint”. Ie how many earths are needed if everyone lived the same as you. My earth footprint was 4 earths ! All 8 billion of us cannot live like Americans or even Europeans. And then there is climate change. There’s no known cheap energy substitutes on the horizon. Tesla’s are for now completely coal powered. The amount hydro carbons consumed is still increasing every year. For things like making steel, fertilizer or cement we cannot even begin to design good scalable solar powered methods. Solar plants have a very low load factor. It often only generates 30 % of its installed capacity. So you need to over build by 3x of what you need. Assuming we also need solar power for cars we are talking about building 10x the capacity of all existing energy infrastructure and not to talk about storage.
The existing energy grid is crumbling in many places and we are talking about trillions of dollars in spending to build new high voltage DC transmission to make solar scalable.
The world population will be 10-12 billion by 2100. Its hard to imagine how everyone will have a first world lifestyle without completely trashing the planet.