Your examples of possible solutions fit the pattern of past technologies that increased efficiency. They lowered consumption per use but increased the number of uses, increasing total energy consumption and therefore pollution in the long term. I wrote about it in Inc When Innovation and Technology Fail Us and spoke about it on my podcast.
If you make a polluting system more efficient, it pollutes more efficiently.
Joshua, you continue to repeat this statement as if it was a universal law that increases in efficiency result in increases in resource consumption. There are certainly some situations where that is that case. However, as we discussed only two weeks ago on this same forum, there are also cases where increased efficiency decreases resource consumption. Specifically, we discussed how increases in fuel efficiency in the USA lead to decreased total national gasoline consumption, even when facing the headwinds of a growing population and gasoline prices which declined 31% in real terms, both of which would normally result in significant increases in total national gasoline consumption.
I wrote above that it has different effects in the long term and in the links that it depends on the demand curve -- that is, how many other uses there are at lower prices. For 300+ million people, 10 years doesn't feel like long-term, especially with significant social change in the meantime. Also, I'm not sure how much the demand for gas increases at lower prices or if we've saturated it.
How many years would you consider to be "long term"? While I'm not accusing you of this, the way you're now modifying your assertion could easily be used to make it completely non-falsifiable because any contradictory data which showed a case where an in resource use efficiency did not produce an increase in total consumption of that particular resource can be challenged as "well yes, but if we wait longer it might change."
It's also possible lower use is resulting from social change. Increasing portions of drivers recognize that they will feel the effects of global warming in their lifetimes while people who won't are dying off. They're seeing the pollution in their lives, corals dying, extinctions, etc.
Ah, but this doesn't get you off the hook. You are asserting that an increase in efficiency must cause an increase in consumption. So it's not enough to argue that the increase in efficiency isn't responsible for the decrease in consumption, you would need to argue that the decrease in consumption would have been even larger if we hadn't developed more fuel efficient cars.
That just doesn't pass the smell test to me. I'm happy to be convinced I'm wrong if you have convincing data to back it up, but at the moment it would certainly appear that there is at least once exception to your rule that increases in efficiency always produce increases in consumption, and where there is one exception, there are certainly likely to be other cases where increases in efficiency decrease demand (for example total demand for electricity).
Now to be clear, I'm not arguing that increases in efficiency cannot sometimes have unintended consequences. And if you wanted to argue that we should consider and model carefully the effects of specific advances in technology or efficiency with an awareness that the overall impacts can sometimes be counterintuitive, I'd be all for that.
But you are using your absolute rule to dismiss technological solutions generally as never effective as reducing resource use. And our history simply doesn't support that assertion.
I can say that the trend over centuries is clear: machines are more efficient than ever, we use them for more purposes as they become more efficient, and we pollute more than ever.
The problem with this argument is that is can work for anything that has been changing over time.
All I can say is that over centuries the trend is clear: the odds of dying in birth are down, fewer and fewer women are dying when delivering their first or second child, and we pollute more than ever.
All I can say is that over centuries the trend is clear: the number of distinct plant species the average person eats over the course of a year has decreased, today more than half of all our calories come, directly or indirectly from only three major grain crops, and we pollute more than ever.
All I can say is that over centuries the trend is clear: the total number of books written has continued to increase, today more people are literature than at any point in the past, and we pollute more than ever.
When people choose to pollute less, it's easy and often improves their lives. They're glad they did and wish they had earlier. I'm trying to promote that effect.
Having a laudable end goal does not make it acceptable to promote that end goal through the use of misleading or incomplete or incorrect assertions about the way the world works. Both on an ethical level and because it tends to backfire when you don't just damage your own credibility but that of all of us arguing on the same side.