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Well, this is core to the disagreement. The chemical details of how precisely e.g. food is produced and waste is handled are important, but energy is the ultimate constraint on growth. Plentiful energy enables all sorts of tricks like desalination for fresh water or electrolysis to produce the hydrogen required for the Haber–Bosch process. But if you run out of energy, no trick is going to save you.
To clarify: the energy resources I'm describing are finite; they're just very, very large. The 100X number comes from employing mature technology (breeder reactors, developed in the US in the 50s and currently in commercial use in China (CFR-600) and Russia (BN-800)) on proven deposits-- there's not really much room to doubt the potential there. Hell, the US could get centuries of current usage just burning its accumulated 'waste'-- our exiting light water reactors only actually extract a tiny fraction of the nuclear potential energy in the uranium, while a breeder can get much more out of their 'spent' fuel.
It's comparatively expensive energy, but it's a guaranteed backstop if cheaper sources dry up for whatever reason. There's a working process for seawater extraction, too; it's just not economical when it's still so easy to dig uranium out of the ground. With essentially no required additional R&D, that's already enough to get you to the point where running out of energy is just not going to be a concern in the near future, though the price of energy could be.
Speculative technology ranging from molten salt thorium reactors (probably not that hard, but no one bothers because the uranium process is easier and cheaper) to D-T fusion (there are moderately promising prototypes, but it's a very hard problem) to D-D fusion (science fiction at present) increase those reserves massively, but they're not necessary to e.g. completely replace ground water usage with desalination.
I'm not suggesting we do that -- it's almost certainly way harder than just exercising reasonable ground water stewardship -- but the option exists if we screw everything else up and billions are going to die.
I'll admit upfront I'm not too knowledgeable about microplastics, but on other sorts of pollution: we're not yeast. Yeast arguably has a pollution-related carrying capacity, in that in a sealed container it will eventually poison itself with the alcohol that is the byproduct of it's anerobic respiration. Fortunately, out pollutants are technological, not physiological.
Only CO2 has proven both 1. genuinely dangerous and 2. truly hard to mitigate. Heavy metals are dangerous, for sure... but exposure to lead peaked decades ago. Mercury in practice is only an issue if you eat a lot of certain species of fish -- we could stop. It turned out to just not be that hard to limit human exposure. Ozone layer depletion was a real problem... with a very easy solution of banning a couple aerosols; I understand that modern refrigerants are as good as freon ever was. A century ago people made a lot of noise about smog, the price of industrialization; much less so these days. Even China's about past that stage now, if you think the first world got out of it just by offshoring manufacturing.
But that does leave climate change as a more stubborn problem. Not because solving it is impossible -- we've always had fission to fall back on, as soon as we decide it's actually important -- but because it's expensive to fix and presents a difficult international coordination problem... and because most people agree it's not that important. Ecological collapse rendering stable agriculture impossible is wildly out of line with even the most dire warnings offered by the IPCC out to the year 2100. The full-chud 'it's all fake' prediction is much closer to the scientific consensus than that scenario.
We are doing a lot to fight climate change -- co2 emissions per capita peaked around 2000 in the developed world -- and there's a lot more we could and probably should do. (I'm a fan of nuclear energy, you might have gathered.) But that's because the problems it will create are cheaper to mitigate now than they will be in the future, not because it poses a genuine existential threat. And if it turns out that, in spite of all predictions, it really is that bad, there's always stratospheric aerosol injection. I just don't see this being a serious impediment to population growth (once the demographic factors sort themselves out).
True, but we 1. don't use it very efficiently 2. we could supplement with hydroponics (at much greater expense) if necessary. There's also largely untapped options like aquaculture and mesopelagic fishing, though I can't say I'm terribly excited for either.
Now do industrial production...
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