However, the planet is arguably the most ideologically polluted it's ever been. First world cultures have developed an aversion to individual and organization/group responsibility. Democracy is not doing great. Many institutions are bankrupt. Hardship is looming. We're in for a wild ride.
And yes, I'm aware that said commodity production produces wealth which also improves well-being. But there's a contradiction there in our economic model that is not serving us well.
EDIT: I should add to my point above that what's common with both these is one overarching world altering product that has completely transformed the world: the automobile.
Ribbons of tarmac lace the earth (it wouldn't surprise me if this is a long term environmental problem, too), even in some of the most remote sections of the planet.
Cities are built around them, privileging automobile use above a bunch of other aspects of quality of life.
Road transport is 75ish% of global CO2 emissions.
And, yeah, leaded fuel poisoned our bodies, minds, and the environment for decades.
The way it usually goes is "everyone is +5, except the village that shares the watershed with the mine"
On anything but the shortest timeline things like like wealth, health and productivity are fungible at the societal level.
If the net cumulative effect of the externalities wasn't smaller than the benefits of the progress then the progress wouldn't happen because more people would be worse off and things would grind to a halt because the gains would be more than offset.
It's still naive, or maybe obtuse. Repeating the "negative externality" buzzword doesn't give you a blank check to peddle your preferred ideology (government intervention/regulation) while crapping on the other team.
Without regulation we get lithium batteries and a couple dozen poisoned watersheds.
With regulation we get slightly more expensive batteries and fewer poisoned watersheds.
Regardless of how you or I or anyone else feels about regulation it's somewhere between farcical and deceitful to pretend that the economic activity in both of those situations doesn't help more than it hurts. If it didn't work this way progress would grind to a halt because the increased material wealth of having the batteries would be more than cancelled out by the problems that poisoned watersheds create, to run with the existing example.
Millenials are -not- the ones responsible for disastrous policies (yet). They haven't been around long enough yet. It's mainly boomers, some gen x, and a few silents.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/02/12/boomers-sil...
edit: Added "(yet)" because it's not obvious, I suppose. My point here is that the actual policymakers in congress, right now, are majority "not-millenials". So stop blaming millenials and/or gen-z when they're not the ones currently writing legislature...
Edit: That struck a chord with millenials, ha! Tell your friends that bitching does not help, voting does. Boomers seem to understand this and so they have a disproportionate amount of influence. You want it to stop? VOTE.
2018 was the first election where Gen X and younger together outvoted Boomers and older.
There is, still, a statistical bump in the boomers, hence the baby boom.
There is just more of them, and they vote. They've only just started dying in big numbers.
Plus the older voters get the more they tend to vote, for various reasons.
However, I'm tired of silents/boomers/gen-xers making comments about and blaming millenials as if it's somehow our fault the boomers and silents in congress are out of touch. A quick look at voting demographics and the demographics of congress dispels that notion (for now, as of 2022).
The blame game is unhelpful unless a holistic explanation of Why Did You Do That is also given.
It's difficult to be omniscient about the impact of everything to everything else for all future outcomes.
Smacks of Ageism, to my mind.