> If you're really this defeatist about the whole thing, you aren't contributing anything to the conversation.
The truth? Are you concerned with truth, or just wishful thinking?
Let's say you have a terminal illness, for example, ALS. Would you lie to everyone, including yourself, and say you're fine, that everything is going to be ok? Or would you admit the truth, and try to come to grips with it?
Of course we would love to have a cure. Nobody welcomes a terminal illness. But the reality and gravity of the situation cannot be honestly denied.
> Environmental issues are a question of tradeoffs and cost-benefits
In the large sense, they're really not, because there's a single planet that supports human life, namely Earth, and if we wreck it, making it inhospitable, then every other tradeoff becomes irrelevant. The livability of the Earth's environment is a precondition for every other human endeavor. You can't have economic activity without ecological activity. And if you aim to convince me to be quiet about that, then the last thing you want to do is claim that we can "trade" the environment for something else. This kind of attitude only reaffirms my pessimism about whether we can, as I put it, get our shit together.
I am dismissive of concern trolling about windmills harming birds and dams harming fish when we're currently facing a period of mass animal species extinction due to human effects on the environment, such as global warming, chemical and physical pollution, deforestation, overfishing, etc.
> if you're philosophically committed to dismissive doomsaying.
I'm not philosophically committed to it, just empirically convinced of it.
I don't know how it's going to go down in the end. What I do know is that humans are essentially less hairy, more talkative apes, and as a group we can't responsibly handle the technology that the cleverest (but not necessarily wisest) among us were able to create. We're like the sorcerer's apprentice, except there's no sorcerer to show up at the last minute to save ourselves from the disaster we created.
We've known about global warming for many decades, yet we've done practically nothing about it, and now hardly anyone can deny that the consequences of it are starting to show. We're already past the point of no return. We allow amoral madmen to control world-threatening nuclear arsenals. We put anything and everything into the water, into the air, into the ground, without any apparent concern for the future. Millions of people are in near total denial of science, believing among other things that the world was literally created a few thousand years ago, and evolution did not occur. And by the way, these people dominate at least one of the two major political parties of the most powerful nation on Earth. I don't know why exactly I should be hopeful about all this. To whom am I supposed to cede the floor? The "pedo guy" guy?