chickentendrils [any, comrade/them]

We don’t really know what level of consumer goods and their availability is sustainable because we’ve never attempted to make it sustainable. Denser living will help immensely though, and building things to last and be repairable should go a long way. I suspect humanity can easily do it, just not when those making the decisions are incentivized to protect their own destructive monopolies.

how do we repair the immense damage that’s already been done?

As far as carbon capture goes, I think we’re going to end up planting a ton of trees, maybe some kind of ocean CO2 scrubbing algae or something as well, then cutting them down, and sealing the decaying wood underground. Basically the reverse process that we’ve been doing at breakneck speed for a century… And probably stratospheric atmospheric injection to slow cooling, which hopefully won’t affect anything else as drastically as the greenhouse effect.

I don’t think it really matters. For a vegan, following “the cow’s already been killed for meat” can lead to some absurd outcomes. For a dietary non-ethical vegans it makes perfect sense. For an ethical vegan, it would not.