That's new to me. It seems the argument hinges on this fact, "Bitcoin could therefore theoretically handle around 220 million transactions annually."

I think the assumption that there will be no innovation in this space, optimizations will never decrease the amount of computing resources required for a bitcoin transaction, and nothing can be done, is probably incorrect.

Some prospects:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_scalability_problem#Ef...

The pollution is happening right now. You must realize that appealing to a hypothetical future solution doesn't excuse us from our obligation to do things right in the present.

Can you outline how that could have worked for cars, trains, and all other automation, which were all extremely polluting and inefficient, and were slowly refined over a course of XX century?