Sure, but on what scale before capitalism (16th century)? Yes, some cultures have disappeared due to over-using their resources, but none threatened to take away humanity and millions of other species along with it. Or did you mean before the collapse of USSR and so-called socialist countries (which are arguably State-capitalist and very similar in terms of industry).
> energy is needed for all political systems to improve the population life
Yes, but what energy and on what scale? Clever engineering enables crazy optimizations. When you see people building wooden houses that can be heated with simple candles, it's quite a feat of engineering. Or passive heating from the sun or underground heat. Same goes for the heating system: using a thermal mass with a little wood to burn is orders of magnitude more efficient than electric heating or a commercial woodstove.
When i say low-tech i explicitly don't mean primitivist. I mean our understanding of sciences has progressed enough that we now know that our industrial way of life is not efficient and we can do much with less resources.
> Am I wrong can we stop burning coal and extracting oiuld and gas and survive as a civilized species?
Then again, depends on what scale. Personal cars for people in remote areas is not the main source of pollution. And i'm personally glad we've got some stuff like hospitals which may be a major source of pollution but i personally think are worth the trade-off.
But there are bigger sources of pollutions we could do without. How do you explain there's more smartphones on this planet than human beings yet we keep making more? Why do we keep building more cars and make it impossible to repair the old ones? All environmental studies point out that over the lifecycle of an object, production has the most environmental impact; disposal/recycling is also something we don't know how to do (apart from shoving it down the surface to pollute everything else).
These polluting schemes were invented by the industry to keep profits going after WWI when there was massive overproduction of goodsI'm. They do not benefit humanity or the public, or the exploited workers, or the polluted communities. They benefit only shareholders and politicians who get to shake hands with them.
I'm not saying i alone have the best answers to our problems (far from it). But if we want to build a breathable future for our children, there's certainly quite a few radical changes we could envision that would not damage the way of life of common people but would certainly trade shareholder's profits for humanity's survival.
