The madness of click-friendly headlines: How --- can save the planet!

I have this strange vision of a hundred planets lining up in the aisle of a church for the televangelist to push their foreheads and pronounce them "saved."

• Grazing cows can save the planet (according to Mercola recently, which provoked this blog post).
• Vegetarianism can save the planet.
• Fruits can save the planet.
• Hemp can save the planet.
• Bamboo can save the planet.
• Worm farming can save the planet.
• Bicycles can save the planet.
• Wall Street can save the planet.
• Capitalism can save the planet.
• Economic growth can save the planet.
• Telecommuting can save the planet.
• Only a challenge to corporate power can save the planet.
• Women can save the planet.
• Sensitive men can save the planet.
• Slums can save the planet.

Personally, I am not certain the planet will be saved in any case. My wife and I seek to raise our children to be robust and even happy in the face of hardship, just in case their adulthoods are less prosperous than their childhoods. 

Yet, I am not hopeless either. If the planet is saved, in the sense of successfully avoiding a demographic and environmental crisis in the next hundred years, the leading ingredients will be:

• Adaptation in rich countries to lower resource use (not lower well-being, just lower resource use).
• Continued economic growth and social transformation in poor countries (allowing much higher well-being with moderately higher resource use). 
• New technologies that grow more food and produce more energy with less land and less environmental impact (but technology is not magic and will not suffice on its own).

These three things may happen.