That sounds like it's smuggling in some assumptions that do not hold. Modern industrialization has led to human flourishing on an unprecedented scale. Pre-indus

That sounds like it's smuggling in some assumptions that do not hold. Modern industrialization has led to human flourishing on an unprecedented scale. Pre-industrial civilizations are not getting to this point without high-energy-density materials and bootstrapping to photovoltaics, wind, and nuclear seem highly unlikely. Even solar concentrators seem unlikely to help considering fossil fuels provide portable energy storage that was unmatched in utility until recently. I think there's probably a lot of rosy math in this counterfactual. Perhaps one can argue that post the nuclear age, we could have made some choices that environmentalists would oppose that would nonetheless have been better for the environment, but "from the beginning of use"? I think that I'd like to see. EDIT: It would be a fun universe to play with, though. Do we use solar concentrators to provide the power to make grain ethanol? We'd have to master food production first without Haber-Bosch though. That sounds like a real challenge.