I doubt the additional billion people in poverty are much comforted by the percentages.

Probably not. But I would think that the additional three billion people who get to live lives that are not impovershed very much are.

The rise in energy and industrial production, the increasing real numbers of people in poverty, is coming at the expense of the environment.

As others have mentioned, it's just not sustainable.

They've mentioned it, but haven't supported it. As I noted upthread, the U.S. has increased its population by more than 50% (and increased income by far more than that) over the last fifty years....and the environment is generally in better shape than it was in the 1970's. Certainly not in each and every specific spot, of course - after all, we have taken some parts of the environment and completely developed them, and other areas are newly polluted. But we have also witnessed the dramatic cleanup of many other places - you can swim safely in the Hudson or the Chesapeake Bay again, and the Cuyahoga isn't on fire nearly as often.

Population growth and economic development doesn't have to be an environmental catastrophe. In fact, economic development may be more sustainable than poverty - rich western developed economies tend to be (overall) more protective in terms of environmental regulations than poor, developing, or largely subsistence agricultural countries. Indeed, economic development appears to carry with it the seeds of its own sustainability, not destruction - as people become wealthier and less ag-dependent, they end up caring more about environmental protections and having fewer children.

Seems pretty sustainable to me. Doomsayers like Malthus and Ehrlich have been claiming we're on the verge of imminent collapse for....well, pretty much always you can find someone saying that the end is nigh. Yet overall, the natural environment of the U.S. is in better shape than it was fifty years ago. Seems like we're headed in the right direction - with fits and starts, but still generally improving over time while still growing quickly.

Albaby