&quot;lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty&quot;<p>Objectively, humanity most closely resembles a cancer. The more you feed it, the more it grows. It tramples everything in its path.  The belief that somehow exponential economic growth is going to fix everything and everyone will lead happy middle class lives in some kind of harmony with nature is delusional. We are in the midst of the largest mass extinction event of all time.  In developed places, the natural forests and wildlife are 90-95% gone. The only places where nature still truly thrives are in undeveloped regions - the rainforests of Papua New Guinea, the amazon, the plains of africa.  As &quot;development&quot; accelerates in these places, they too will destroy nature in the name of the eternal quest for positive economic growth, attainment of first world healthcare, buying a car.