Loss of Hope
Think of some evil company threatening customers, "What you pay for Product XYZ will go up at least thirty-twelve times!" (gasp!)
...but then, someone else is very happy to sell you their own version of Product XYZ for a little less than you were paying before. Besides that, what they sell does this new cool thing...etc. In time, you and everyone else realize that Product UVW is just better, hands down. It was stupid and expensive to buy Product XYZ in the first place, it didn't have every option you wanted, etc.
This situation, like going through a life, can seem new, scary, and ultimate. Many bad people of many types exploit this by making it seem they are rescuing you from the badnesses, some of which you know about and some of which have to be for you identified. (This is angry Jesus when He has His Second Coming or Satan/Hell, both of which have been effectively used.) What we'll do here is address some of these problems and show how they really aren't that bad.
Energy
From where does 100% of the food on Earth come? Sol. It's all various forms of captured stellar energy; more specifically, the energy of this planet's sun. Everything you've ever eaten, everything however many billion people eats, all from the sun. Food, gas, electric car charging, and so forth. And that's just from what has shone down on Earth: all that energy that got shone out into space, say in just an Earth-sized imaginary tube in some non-Earth direction, say just a light not even good enough to be in some place's constellation a few mly (Million Light Years) away, was gone.
How much energy is that? Since, say, 65 million years ago when the last dinosaur died. How much energy? How many stars are there?
Think about a Dyson Sphere (thing built around that hydrogen reaction to capture all that energy, sort of like a lot of solar panels for a long time).
Next imagine that some civilization's already made a lot of those, so we don't know they're there--it's just black sky at nighttime. Nothing's there, right? We assume "Nothing's there" just based on us being able to observe light some mly away, and like some dumbass believing (UK version someone spray-painted an R on that guy's butt for some reason) a sea monster's there, it just shows how bad our tech is that we think the map ends where we can't see. I.e. we so enthrall technology that we fail at philosophy. It's the same way we thought we were really smart when we knew just how S.R. wanted us to behave and we knew where the world ended because the map showed where were the dragons at the edge of the world. We could be in one little unused bit, or we could be pretty near (only a few [Million Light Years = mly] mly away from) some massively powerful empire where they have a few hundred Dyson Spheres in Quadrant XYZ, which we didn't think we important 'cause we just thought it was empty space.
So, some country on Earth has a big GDP each year, some cabal is TUV rich, whatever. See how little, how tiny, how hilariously insignificant it is compared to the value dismissed as insignificant by some minor functionary in an interstellar bureaucracy?
Imagine some rich person on Earth gets a $999 trillion net worth. That seems big, but imagine how tiny it is compared to said minor functionary who gets paid just 17 quadrillion dollars per year (where units of currency and duration of year are different based on to what they're used; we're just saying "dollar" as a placeholder)? She can go to the drugstore whenever and buy some upgrade for her LifePak to add a few more centuries onto her kid's life, this Perpimotion by the register caught her eye, but it's $5.99 and she doesn't feel like it, she's already got 30K of them anyway (in that one closet upstairs where she never goes), so forget it she just takes some candy bar.
Earth Can't Grow Enough Food
Problem: Meat and plants take too much land to grow.
Scare: We're all going to starve!
Solution: Food towers.
Detail:
Earth is said to be nearing the limits of food production. Nonsense. The idea is, what if some big structure, maybe floating maybe affixed, had a bunch of cows on it who did all the important cow-things of chewing cud and staring at nothing for contemplative hours on end? OK, space is easy, but what're they going to eat? A lot of bone meal, that's to be sure, but that doesn't do it all. Not nearly. They need vegan-stuff.
The Second Climate
Just like The Beginning stories are recurrent in universalist deceptions of the Christian type, so are The Ending warnings. So much of what we are told is an expression of line v. circle philosophy (you can think of the circle as a Möbius Strip to be cool if you want; same principle). Think about how "progressives" support "progressive policies," striving to "move forward" on a path of progress.
This is why there are the Genesis and Rapture stories, as well as the Torah 4.0 versions of those, namely the Big Bang and the Cold Death. People act fanatically, un-scientifically about the Big Bang because, though they're claiming to be completely different than those stupid Jesusians, they are truly, deeply committed to the straight line philosophy.
What does the straight line have at either end? That's right: an end. One progresses along the line. The circle is better, in the sense that it lasts forever. Think of going straight along the line versus spinning around the circle: the end of the line is the end, whereas with the circle one just goes forever. The circle is the better philosophy, and certainly the more hopeful; the Zoroastrian and then Christian heaven has to be a promise that getting to the end of the line means you'll be magically transported to a forever-circle. The cheap hypocrisy of religion is that it advocates for the straight line yet has to make up a magical place you can't see as a reward for going down the line, which reward you'll get when you reach the end of the line (payment for the hamburger next Tuesday).
That is what the "We're running out of food!" nonsense is. Climate Change, Peak Oil, Second Coming, etc. are all insistences that there is an ending. No, though. Think of the Yugas; things will be bad for a time, mediocre for a time, good for a time, bad for a time, and on and on. That is what Decay is doing; serving a function in that process. Yes, the Sun will burn up its hydrogen, giant and nova, but then there will be other stars, they'll nova, there'll be still other stars, and on and on. The "there are too many people!" squealing is silly; a viable planet the size of Earth has plenty of space for a lot more people, and a star like Sol kicks out plenty of energy to feed them all 17 big sandwiches a day along with them each having 17 pairs of golden slippers that walk for you when you're feeling tired.
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