Some of it is also because externalities like pollution aren't priced in, but often the seemingly-bad thing is actually better by most metrics.
Reducing plastic packaging may be one such example: Sure, it reduces plastic waste, but it creates more wasted product, and packaging from stuff consumed in households is exceedingly unlikely to end up in the ocean in a western city that burns their trash in a waste-to-energy plant.
In the broadest possible sense, no, we can't keep doing "this": either we limit fertility somehow or we got the Malthusian limit eventually. That's just the consequence of the exponential function. And right now, whether population will stabilize on its own before we hit carrying capacity is an open question.
But if you hold population constant? Yes, we can keep doing this indefinitely, or at least until the sun boils the oceans in 500 million years or so. Why wouldn't we? There's every reason to believe that we can supply oranges in January to everyone.
Show me the math that says we can't. I'm not persuaded by rhetoric about rust bucket cargo ships. It's exactly this sort of sentimentality that makes it difficult to actually make progress on addressing actual climate problems.
It's not really an open question - it would take reversal of long lasting trends in large parts of the world to do more than at most delay the reversal.
We’re way off topic here but what the heck… in my entire life, I’ve not seen one single ‘population model’ play out accurately. We’ve seen dozens of popular ones that have failed to come true in the past century alone - what makes today’s different?
China is currently set to face a reversal somewhere from the middle of this decade to 1-2 decades away depending on who you believe. India is set to follow. Many smaller countries are also reversing around now, but those two for obvious reasons have a huge impact.
The last holdouts with high fertility are a handful of sub-Saharan states, with Niger by far the worst (Somalia second - the two are the only countries in the world left with fertility rates above 6), but even Niger is seeing fertility rates plummet as it's economic growth have sped up.
The estimates varies massively based on various scenarios. E.g. on a current trajectory, China will see its population halve by 2100. It's likely you'll see the Chinese government do a lot to prevent the decline from being that steep because it will be an economic nightmare to manage, and so we can't assume the trajectories will remain unchanged.
But nobody is actively trying to get much above-replacement fertility rates, so any political interference is likely to moderate delay the peak not prevent it.
Furthermore, fertility drops as education increases and poverty decreases. This trend is consistent in every population where we can correlate economic development. E.g. here's the fertility rate for Niger [1], one of the poorest countries in the world. Even that has taken a sharp downturn as economic growth has started decoupling from uranium export (which previously dominated Niger's GDP, but provided very little benefit to the population).
Niger, incidentally, has the highest fertility rate in the world, and is one of only 10 remaining countries with fertility rate above 5.
As such such "high fertility subpopulations" are really high poverty, low education populations - currently countries categorised as "Least Developed Countries" by the UN have a fertility rate of 4. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world that remains above 4, but that too is dropping fast as most of the countries in the region are seeing solid economic growth.
As poverty drops and education increases, fertility rates are dropping across the board, just not at the same rate. But even sub-Saharan African is headed for reversal.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Not roll back. But do smarter.
It's not just global warming. We're shipping billions of tons of stuff from one side of the planet to another in sulphur-blowing rustbuckets. Creating continents of floating plastic in the oceans. Causing toxic lakes from harvesting rare earth minerals.
We can't keep doing this. Maybe we can keep it up so before your lifetime is over, but sooner or later it's going to be a problem that can't be avoided just like climate change is now.
There's many quick wins here. Buying locally produced foods instead of stuff flown in from half a world away. Not flying across europe for a 1 hour business meeting. Reducing plastic packaging.
And there's good news too. We're continuing the excellent path of energy reduction in electric appliances. They had to keep adding "+"es and now rework the entire energy labels in Europe because "A++++" efficiency became too long.
I think COVID already brought us halfway there. We're no longer used to business meetings, the fragility of our supply chains has opened up many eyes, and most office workers now work from home at least part time and do just fine. For the environment this has all been pretty great :)