When I was a child, people in China and India were starving by the millions every year, while Americans enjoyed a pleasant lifestyle.
Then ugly American consumerism really kicked in, and we started buying huge amounts of goods from China and India, which largely lifted them out of poverty.
Progressives think consumerism is bad, because they would rather have tens of millions of people starving to death. Paul Ehrlich keeps hoping for mass starvation, and keeps being frustrated.
Back in my teens I remember that the left had complex economic theories. These actually didn’t work and were eventually abandoned, but at least they had them. Nowadays their objections seem to resolve around ‘feelings’ about social injustice.
The environmental extremists say that greedy white American consumers are putting the burder of climate change on the people of color from the developing world. Instead, we are lifting them out of poverty and starvation. No climate change to be seen. It is all a figment of their imagination.