"I don't care it the climate's fucked, I want to live away from civilization and drive 100 miles a day everywhere"
Of course we shouldn't hyper-optimize everything, but sooner people realize our environment depends on not everyone getting exactly what they want whenever they want the better. Living in a (walkable) city is just one such concession towards the environment we ought to make, even if we don't "want" to.
Just whack an externality tax on fossil fuels and things like cutting down wilderness, job done.
Also, you have the mindset of a typical anti-social coastal elite who thinks “oh no big deal we can just raise the cost of living for all the poor rural types by sticking on a tax because I want to go LARP as a Victorian manor lord. And people don’t bend to my every whim immediately or live exactly like me so I want to be in total control of the 50 miles around me.”
All I'm saying is that the efficiency arguments are silly unless you are comparing like for like. If we're suggesting that people simply do less because it's more efficient, well, no-one is going to do that without an incentive.
Everyone having 50 sqmi obviously isn't realistic (there actually is not enough space on the globe), but equally, if the idea is that everyone _has_ to live in a metropolitan apartment because each person has to use (1/7billion) of the resources, you're going to see an uprising, that just won't fly with people.
The best outcome is probably to convince as many people as possible to live in a shoebox so that the rest of us can still have a decent life. It seems to be working!
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...
https://news.berkeley.edu/2014/01/06/suburban-sprawl-cancels...