If there's ever a collective lawsuit for the excess carbon footprints produced, there will be hell to pay, and the people getting rich off of pushing externalities to their communities today will be the same ones serving life sentences tomorrow.
I don't exempt myself from blame for the destruction of the natural world, but neither should you. I believe there is a sliding gradient of blame to be applied to all people, but really, except for a few notable exceptions (oil, finance execs in particular) it's a difficult and somewhat futile model to apply. Am I to blame for taking a vacation overseas every three years? Is a businessman more or less to blame for flying cross-country every week for meetings?
Unfortunately for those of my generation who are "woke" to the catastrophe of climate change, much of our lives have necessarily become a precarious balancing act between trying to live justly and trying to live happily. I sadly question my ability to bring children into the world with my SO in the face of a problem that is tantamount to Armageddon. But our own personal attitudes and wants shrink in the face of the enormity of the quandary that is climate change.
What I personally have come to believe is that change for the better flows from two things: willingness to forgo one's ego, and collective political action towards curbing our wasteful modern lifestyle.
I have seen it before and I always wonder when it comes up: If you take a flight with Emirates, is it considered pollution by Emirates or by you? What about the CO2 used to build the plane? Should you divide those emissions among everyone that flew in the plane, or should that CO2 be added to the company?
I would love to dive the Great Barrier Reef while it's still great, but can't justify it on the grounds you lay out. But I wish people could get the sense of what is being lost. Seeing it in person, in situ, is very different from watching it on a screen.