I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not. If you are being serious, then mind taking a moment to consider your impact on the Earth? It's kind of in a bad way right now.

I'm not being sarcastic at all. Whatever damage humanity is doing to Earth now in pursuit of material comfort will be quickly healed once we transition to more sustainable sources of energy. The Earth will be fine, it's very resilient.

Living well and living sustainably are both important, we don't have to sacrifice one for the other.

Well I disagree on all the above points, and there is a lot of evidence the Earth is having a really tough time dealing with our massive destruction of habitat, production of CO2, toxins, pollution--especially pesticides--overfishing, overpopulation, and overconsumption of every type of food. Ecosystems are in freefall, insects are disappearing, ecosystems are unraveling, the ice caps and Greenland and nearly all global glaciers are melting, the ocean is full of trash, and parts of the planet are likely to be uninhabitable in a century or two. This is not normal. Thousands of years of human history and it's come down to less than a century of industrialized fuckery to create a situation where a very ugly collapse increasingly looks inevitable.

And then you talk about living sustainable. Well buckle up, your lifestyle, and mine--I dunno for sure, since you mention Netflix and traveling I assume you are a relatively normal middle-class or upper-middle class westerner--are going bye bye. It simply does not scale to 7.5 billion people, so we are all are either going to have check out early without having kids or find a way to maintain our lifestyles using less energy, less food, less travel, and overall fewer goods, and then explain to our kids how they are going to have make do with even less than that.

The fantasy of a tech utopia run by machines on sustainable energy and the environment being all rosy like in the movies is just not going to happen. Unless we invent the Matrix--in which case, we'll all probably gladly enter it.

>the Earth is having a really tough time

Pointless statement because you are anthropomorphizing the planet. The only way the plan ceases to exist is if we manage to blow it up. Otherwise it's fine. Be more precise in your words.

>the ocean is full of trash

Again, it's not full. Don't be hyperbolic when convincing someone of an argument.

>It simply does not scale to 7.5 billion people

There is no evidence of this. The lifestyle of a vegan westerner who does not travel frequently scales extremely well.

You're seriously going to attempt to advance the claim there is no evidence to support the assertion that global consumption doesn't sustainably scale to 7.5 billion people in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary (you might want to look into Global Warming and the anthropocene mass extinction as a start) and then have the cheek to claim veganism is some kind of magic bullet? I'm guessing you aren't conversant with what percentage of total global consumption of fossil fuels is used by the agricultural industry, either as fertilizer or as part of the sow->harvest->packaging->delivery pipeline. You also really won't enjoy a clear-eyed examination of the impact of the agricultural industry's use of pesticide and herbicides.

It's almost as if you didn't read my post. We will be able to sustain our population pretty easily because we can adapt, farm further north, use more energy, etc. If anti-science people would stop blocking nuclear energy then we would have a clear path to low emissions energy for the entire planet.

If by 'sustainably' you mean some hand-wavy 'no impact to anything on the planet' then no, we cannot. We will certainly need to farm a lot and that takes land which will displace something.

Also, the ecosystem of the planet itself is not sustainable because of the competitive and evolutionary nature of life. Even without humans, animals and plants continually go extinct and have mass extinction events and yet life continues.

Your assertions are faith-based unless you have a plan for what we eat when (for example) pollinators go extinct? You cannot simply handwave away a collapsing ecosystem.

The earth never had to face a menace so great as the homo sapiens though. Will it be resilient enough? What's good enough? that we and our debilitated livestock survive this technological "transition"? Is living in such a world even worth it for your kids?

> then mind taking a moment to consider your impact on the Earth?

The Earth isn't a being with a utility function, you can't have a beneficial or harmful impact on it, only on people who attach positive or negative value to certain conditions on the Earth.