I find this idea disagreeable on an emotional/ aesthetic level.

Sure - but this sort of reaction is historically contingent - our culture could have developed such that you would feel differently. These sorts of judgments are very fluid over time - what the Victorians found aesthetic was different that what the Romans found aesthetic is different from us. This fluidity makes it very hard to tell when the judgments should be taken seriously. Whereas we know that almost all technological advances reduced poverty.

Even as a believer in AGW, I'm pretty confident that the Industrial Revolution (which started with coal and moved to oil) was a net benefit to human happiness. Separately, it wouldn't surprise me at all if the were a near term rise in the incidence of vegetarianism in the West for food shortage reasons. (Food is a zero-sum game: There's a finite amount of energy per time that Earth receives from the Sun. Every calorie spent digesting grass to build cow bone is a calorie that can't sustain a human).