"The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to emotionally comprehend the exponential function." - Edward Teller

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Al Bartlett

Below is a first-order (approximate) description of a fast (potentially very fast) doubling time system for remediation of civilization's environmental damage. The fast doubling time drives exponential growth that could, at enormous profit and in under 15 years, drastically reduce civilization's ecological impact while, incidentally, sequestering large amounts of CO2. It is not intended to overcome Dr. Bartlett's accusation that sustainable growth is impossible and cornucopian thinking is "The New Flat Earth Society". It is intended merely to argue that imminent environmental catastrophes may, with appropriate refinements and corrections of the described system, be averted within the time estimated for environmental catastrophes by some of the more pessimistic projections (usually several decades rather than a mere 15 years).

An important principle to keep in mind is that as baseload electricity costs decrease, recycling beats other sources of raw materials. This means that if one is targeting zero environmental footprint, the most compelling path is through lower baseload electric cost simply because recycling is more economical than waste.