I was being sarcastic, our resources are "scarce" because they're poorly managed, that's why I mentioned farming subsides. You can't argue rampant hunger and give away food stamps while subsidizing unsustainable and inapropriate farming and burning perfectly edible food - it's nonsense. Why is the free market prevented from self-regulating what people farm and how much the food produced is sold for? If you're looking for wastefulness, that's the pinnacle right there. As for the "we won't live long enough to see it happen" argument, we also won't live long enough to see the environment "destroyed" by overpopulation so that point is moot - the fact that we won't live to see it doesn't make it less of a problem, it's just a problem of future generations. As for addressing issues of +10000 years rather than ones further down the line, why not address both? Progress still seems like a better solution to me.Is the Earth doomed? Sure, but we still have hundreds of millions of years, if not a billion years, before that happens, assuming we don't screw everything up. That's a pretty long time from now. Instead, we're focusing on problems tens or hundreds of years from now. Also, assuming we do get to a state of overpopulation, being a scarce renewable resource doesn't make it any less scarce. It might be true to say "we're fine" now, but if we don't change anything, that won't be true in the near-ish future.
Can we make things more energy efficient? Sure, but that only goes so far before we run into barriers keeping us from making things more energy efficient (e.g. the laws of physics). In reality, despite our new technologies, energy consumption has increased per person over the years, and the population of people is increasing.