Is this really that complicated? We can have more people living lives with limited freedoms and limited lifestyle quality, or more people with greater freedoms

Is this really that complicated? We can have more people living lives with limited freedoms and limited lifestyle quality, or more people with greater freedoms but greater health/climate/whatever impacts, or we can have fewer people. Fossil fuels aren’t the primary problem or even the sole problem. It’s that we have enough people living rich lives to create problems of scale whether from fossil fuels or mining or whatever.