I love that story, I've read everything Pohl wrote, but even at the time Pohl knew it was ridiculous because of resource limits, he just liked writing satire. (See his autobiography, "The Way The Future Was".)

Once he got into the 1960s, his novels and series almost uniformly are set in resource-limited futures, though somewhat equitable ones. In Gateway, for example, almost everyone is poor and desperate for most of the series, and the only way they flourish is with magical alien technology...

We need to decarbonize our society by 90% in ten years to avoid catastrophe, and instead our consumption of absolutely all resources and our waste of every type including continues to grow exponentially.

Resource limits exist. To pretend otherwise is false to the fact.