Consider me a policy maker.

I want to know what the costs[1] of ignoring are likely to be so I can be sure it's worth the pain to ban non-electric cars in 10 years, ram through nuclear power plants while gutting safety regs so we can get them built in less than a decade and try and threaten India and China into reducing CO2 emissions. What do you tell me?

[1] In $, convert other units like lives into dollars as need be and be sure to value lives from different cultures at 0.1x as thats the expressed preferences of the population based on chatitable giving figures.

You can call it defeatist, but at this point it's factually true. We've made a negative amount of progress on this matter. And that's taken 40 years. We have very little time left. We have already locked in almost 2 degrees of warming.

These are all regrettable facts. But that are facts.

40 years of raising awareness and individual action has failed.

One man's defeatist attitude is another mans realistic attitude. Does it help? No, it doesn't. But for the defeatist and the realist alike that may no longer matter. I'm 'long' on humanity, but I'm not convinced we will be able to avert the looming (and for some already very present) issues. My feelings are in part because of how we dealt with COVID-19, if a pandemic can't get us to pull the cart together then nothing can.

It's important to understand that reducing carbon emissions doesn't cool the planet. It only makes the future warmup slower.