The most fascinating thing about this is the "debate" between Diamandis and Paul Gilding. Gilding even said that Diamandis' hope is canceling out his fears so that nothing gets done. My fear is that ideology is making us stupid so that no problems will be solved. Instead, we are instructed by the masters of ideology to pray harder and believe harder. My opinion is that we need to think harder and address the problems instead of pointing fingers.
The author at Zero Hedge seems to agree with Gilding. Brian Wang of Next Big Future appears to side with Diamandis. I like Diamandis, and I think Gilding may not be on the level. This is a charge that will likely create a bit of resentment amongst his believers. The truth of the matter is that we've been living under the threat of diminishing resources for decades that I have personally witnessed, only to see that this has not been borne out by the facts.
I want to quote something from Zero Hedge
The second crucial problem is a failure to consider the limit outlined by Paul Gilding, which is that present growth rates of energy consumption, for example, imply an economy that just about everyone can agree is simply too large for the planet to handle. You simply cannot keep growing the size of the human-created heat engine up to the level of a star. This was articulated beautifully by physicist Tom Murphy in his recent and very wide read post Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist. When problem solvers entirely avoid the subject of limits it is both appealing, and exciting, but eventually it becomes vaguely pathological.
But it won't be necessary to grow energy consumption to the level of a star. This is a straw man. As Diamandis pointed out, the sun strikes the Earth with thousands of times the energy that we currently consume.
If the Zero Hedge guy thinks that there are limits to growth, he is right in theory. But the assumption is that growth will continue just as it is. That hasn't even happened in the United States. Why should it happen all over the world? The USA uses less energy per capita than it did when I was in school decades ago. Efficiency has increased. This undermines his argument. It is possible to grow the economy and limit the growth in energy consumption. It has been done. Not only that, but to grow energy supply, limit consumption, and spread prosperity across the globe. All of this has been done.
Update:
The following link is to a video in progress, but at the very end. I'm putting it in here to show a rather startling assertion that the productivity of scientists has dropped to only 1% of what it used to be! A lot of what he says rings true. We've allowed politics into science and this has destroyed our ability to solve our problems that way. The results could be disastrous.
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