Guilt-tripping, environmental style

Ronald Bailey dons his ecological sackcloth to take the various "self-tests" available online:

Are you an ecological bigfoot? Various environmental groups now offer websites where you can supposedly find out. The site provided by the folks at Redefining Progress informs me that if everyone on the planet lived my lifestyle, we would need the resources of 6.5 Earths to supply everyone. I took the test again, this time selecting all the ecological choices, including living a 500-square-foot apartment filled with second-hand furniture in a large apartment building heated with biomass, using electricity generated by solar panels, equipped with low flow toilets and showers, buying all my food at farmers markets, planting my own garden fertilized by compost from my food scraps, eating a vegan diet, recycling all my paper, plastic, aluminum, glass and electronics, owning no car, never flying and traveling no more than 2,000 miles by bus or rail each year. If everyone lived like that we would only need 0.93 earths to accommodate everyone.

[. . .]

It is true that many of us in the rich countries could cut back a bit on our use of energy and other resources without too much pain. But 1.6 billion people around the world still lack access to electricity and 1.1 billion live on less than $1 per day. These poor people desperately need access to cheap sources of energy to improve their lives.

Assuming that these ecological footprint calculations have some merit, the upshot is that if one does not want to "redefine progress" as a return to 19th-century poverty (and surely no one does), then accelerated technological innovation aimed at finding low-carbon sources of cheap energy is crucial. How to achieve that goal is what the real environmental debate should be on this 38th Earth Day.