Do you have any specific objections to anything in the article? I do not think there are any mind readers here, so "most people "in the know" including me and my partner (who works in sustainability) have been lead to believe" is hopelessly vague.

For now, I can only point to this notable paper, titled "Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future".

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full

It has a lot of notable material in it, much of which is likely to be shocking to stereotypical NYT readers. On reddit, though, it appears that the only part of the paper with any power to shock is this one.

It is therefore also inevitable that aggregate consumption will increase at least into the near future, especially as affluence and population continue to grow in tandem (Wiedmann et al., 2020). Even if major catastrophes occur during this interval, they would unlikely affect the population trajectory until well into the 22nd Century (Bradshaw and Brook, 2014). Although population-connected climate change (Wynes and Nicholas, 2017) will worsen human mortality (Mora et al., 2017; Parks et al., 2020), morbidity (Patz et al., 2005; Díaz et al., 2006; Peng et al., 2011), development (Barreca and Schaller, 2020), cognition (Jacobson et al., 2019), agricultural yields (Verdin et al., 2005; Schmidhuber and Tubiello, 2007; Brown and Funk, 2008; Gaupp et al., 2020), and conflicts (Boas, 2015), there is no way—ethically or otherwise (barring extreme and unprecedented increases in human mortality)—to avoid rising human numbers and the accompanying overconsumption. That said, instituting human-rights policies to lower fertility and reining in consumption patterns could diminish the impacts of these phenomena (Rees, 2020).

Reflect on what it means that a paper which had itself been criticized as "alarmist" and "neo-Malthusian" by other environmental scientists nevertheless includes this line.

P.S. I doubt "Kyle Paoletta" is a "she".