Capitalism makes resources infinite - sustainability

There are good reasons to think that with careful planning, this planet should be able to house seven billion or more people stably and comfortably.11 With sustainable agricultural practices and innovative use of irrigation methods, it should be possible for many relatively uninhabited and agriculturally unproductive parts of the world to support more people and food production. An endless population growth on a finite planet is not possible without a collapse; however, growth until the point of collapse is by no means inevitable. Stabilization of population size is strongly correlated with several factors we are making steady global progress on: including education (especially of women), and rights and a greater level of control for women over their own lives. While there are conflicting studies,12 many experts hold that decreasing child mortality, while leading to population increase in the near-term, leads to a drop in population growth in the longer term. In other words, as we move toward a better world, we will bring about a more stable world, provided intermediate stages in this process do not trigger a collapse or lasting global harm.13, 14 Current advances in science and technology, while not sufficient in themselves, will play a key role in making a more resilient and sustainable future possible. Rapid progress is happening in carbon-zero energy sources such as solar photovoltaics and other renewables.15 Energy storage remains a problem, but progress is occurring on battery efficiency. Advances in irrigation techniques and desalination technologies may allow us to provide water to areas where this has not previously been possible, allowing both food production and other processes that depend on reliable access to clean water. Advances in materials technology will have wide-ranging benefits, from lighter, more energy-efficient vehicles, to more efficient buildings and energy grids, to more powerful scientific tools and novel technological innovations. Advances in our understanding of the genetics of plants are leading to crops with greater yields, greater resilience to temperature shifts, droughts and other extreme weather, and greater resistance to pests—resulting in a reduction of the need for polluting pesticides. We are likely to see many further innovations in food production; for example, exciting advances in lab-grown meat may result in the production of meat with a fraction of the environmental footprint of livestock farming. Many of the processes that have resulted in our current unsustainable trajectories can be traced back to the Industrial Revolution, and our widespread adoption of fossil fuels. However, the Industrial Revolution and fossil fuels must also be recognized as having unlocked a level of prosperity, and a rate and scale of scientific and technological progress that would simply not have been possible without them. While a continued reliance on fossil fuels would be catastrophic for our environment, it is unclear whether many of the “clean technology” breakthroughs that will allow us to break our dependence on fossil fuels would have been possible without the scientific breakthroughs that were enabled directly, or indirectly, by this rich, abundant, and easily available fuel source. The goal is clear: having benefitted so tremendously from this “dirty” stage of technology, we now need to take advantage of the opportunity it gives us to move onto cleaner and more powerful next-generation energy and manufacturing technologies. The challenge will be to do so before thresholds of irreversible global consequence have been passed.