What if industry can't function without hydrocarbon fossil fuels? What if we can't harvest renewable energy sources without fossil fuels?

Let's compare a society that carefully and thoughtfully uses its most dangerous, most damaging fuels.

Currently, our modern society uses dangerous and damaging fuels so that swarms of people drive for any and every errand imaginable, in separate and independent machines. In this society, everyone can use these fuels and ignore the damage using the fuel causes. Each person expends fuel without regard for the results or whether doing so will deprive another generation of the very abilities we most value.

We counter changing our current circumstances to move towards a more clean and just society with warnings about how only our current fuels can deliver prosperity and how any alternative energy systems will still rely on fossil fuels. Yet, would a few thousand industrial machines or processes generate the same total damage that billions of people generate?