Counter/Supportive/Tangential argument: We can improve people's lives by REDUCING resource consumption!
Example: Commuting to work from one city to another city requires travel between cities twice daily, consuming resources and taking time away from the commuters' lives. Rezoning and building businesses mixed in with housing would reduce both energy (gas) usage AND improve the workers' lives by giving them more time back in their day. Remote work would eliminate the gas use and commute time altogether where it's possible.
There are plenty more opportunities to improve people's lives by changing the systems we live in to reduce consumption.

A planned economy which could now be set in place without the bureaucracy usually associated with it by using a small fraction of the computing power currently being used to develop profit driven AIs (so that billionaires can better sell us shit we don't need and control every aspect of our lives, while f*cking up the planet to the point of our extinction).
A new form of communism/socialism.

for example:

And your first born. Don't have any kids yet? Oh, we've outlawed birth control to help make sure you'll produce our new labor and fight our wars over oil

Of course, this has been repeatedly researched with much the same result. Simply, we don't push our elected representatives nearly hard enough! Check out UBI https://www.ubiworks.ca/ or do a search on 'UBI' and read on! Then write to your elected representatives - all of them!

Hi Samuel!
Yes, commuting is an unnecessary burden. But here in Edmonton Amazon has moved in, built a huge warehouse kilometers/ miles south of the city and the low income people who work there have to drive - there is no bus. Amazon pays the workers poorly, and pays nothing for the cars, which die in the effort to get to/from work, so the worker has no car & no job: basically, Amazon is stealing peoples' cars.

🎯New Bus Route!