Economic growth is required for sustainability

There are 2 methods to grow the economy: (1) increase resource consumption or (2) produce more benefits per unit of resource consumption (i.e., increase productivity)

A lot of people think producing oil & gas grows the economy exclusively by method (1). It's easy to see how they come to this belief: we take barrels out of the ground, sell them on the market and count the sale price towards GDP. The more barrels we take our of the ground, the more we grow GDP.

However, if we consider what the world would be like without oil & gas production, it's clear that producing oil & gas grows the economy primarily by method (2). If the world stopped producing oil & gas in the world, the vast majority of the world would clear cut forest to heat our homes, cook our food and grow food without the help of fertilizer which is what we did for thousands of years. So oil and gas production grows the economy by producing 1000s of times more energy per unit of land than we would without it.

If oil and gas workers didn't go to work everyday, there's no way we would be able to set aside vast tracts of land for recreation because we'd have to clear cut and farm it to avoid famine. So contrary to popular belief, oil & gas production is not detrimental but essential to environmental conservation.

Obviously, oil & gas production is not harmless but it's far better than the alternative and it also provides society with the wealth it need to feed the minds that will invent and discover even better energy sources. Maybe we could have stable nuclear fusion powering our society in 50 years if we had 500 million more healthy and educated humans contributing the economy instead of starving to death.

So economic growth is NOT about increasing consumption for the sake of consumption. Economic growth is about producing the means for us to feed people, raise families, conserve nature, explore space, create art, build cathedrals, solve math problems, cure disease and essentially reach potential as individuals and a society. GDP stands for gross domestic "product".