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Of course we need to conserve -- we are throwing away everything in a virtual instant. Planned obsolescence is the worst thing that we humans have come up with -- I think this was Alfred P. Sloan at GM who got us going down this path; for cars anyway.
A growth economy is a fantasy turned into a nightmare. Even with a fixed population, an economy based on growth was never possible. I said as much several times so far on this thread alone. Oil is finite. Coal is finite. Gas is finite. Uranium is finite. We have to keep living on the same water and the same minerals.
There is a concept called a Steady State Economy. Look it up. It means that we have to consume less than the maximum that the earth can sustain. It means that we have to stop turning oil into plastic, and we have to stop using hormones and antibiotics on our animals, and we have to farm the way that we have for the 10,000 years before chemical fertilizers and pesticides were invented -- and that is to work within the cycle of life. We will improve the soil, instead of mining it. We will have cleaner water and cleaner air and we cannot have any long lasting effects on any other life form -- since we all are the results of all the life that came before us, and all life in the future will have to live within the world we are making.
Of course we share this earth with all other life. Which do you think has a longer lasting impact: an array of buoys bobbing on the waves or a smokestack? What about 1,000 wind turbines compared to mountaintop removal? And if carbon dioxide was virtually locked on a plateau of ~270ppm for 650,000 years and all life had evolved to fit in that framework -- and then in ~150 years we have caused the level of carbon dioxide to shoot up to over 390ppm and we are already seeing a myriad affects from this -- that it was okay for us to just burn through oil as quickly as we could? Even just from the standpoint of what will our progeny do without oil; let alone the climate chaos we have unleashed -- we simply have to change our ways, as quickly as possible.
By definition, renewable energy is sustainable. We'll have to fine tune it as we go. And yes, we certainly have to figure out how to make large items last a lifetime, and be fully repairable, and then they must disappear back into the earth; to be reused as life's building blocks.
We are the plastic people. No plastic should be thrown out. It is entering the food chain, along with all the hormones, etc. Did you know that estrogen is the same for all vertebrates? We've got male small mouth bass laying eggs, folks.
There is no planet 'B'.
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