Yeah, the title is a bit click-bait'ish, but there is some interesting discussion in the actual article. This person makes some good points, but I'm not sure I agree with everything he says. For example, he's calling for a world with severe restrictions on travel.
I concur with your assessment. Severe travel restrictions will hurt everyone but the rich and you can be sure he only means tourist travel, a huge contributor to pollution is cargo being shipped and flown around the world. What we need are cleaner methods of transport, not less transportation and movement.
Everybody has worshipped at the altar of efficiency for so long that they don’t understand that if you don’t have extra capacity you have no ability to deal with unexpected events.
Well said. This seems to be the critical point to me, although it's not a brand new idea. Since JIT became very popular, there have been multiple occasions in various industries where we've seen the negative effects of not having any surplus capacity.