Debate: Present day, is it more important to focus on fixing the economy or the environment?
Side: the environment first

You do acknowledge that for the environment to fix itself would take a long time. From your argument however, I'm not sure you understand how long that would actually take, so let me put this into perspective for you.The human species, in its modern form, has only been around for a couple hundred thousand years. Civilization has existed for around 10,000 years. This means that recorded human history is less than 10,000 years old. In addition, as I'm sure you already know, the United States is 233 years old.Now let's look at the environment.Average global temperature in the last 140 yearsIn the past 1000 yearsIn the past 450,000 yearsOkay now that we have some context, let's look what this means for us.As you can see, throughout the majority of human history, and all of civilized history, humans have lived in world with an average temperature that is more, or less stable. What you can also see is that there is a trend of periodic warming and cooling that seems to be occurring about once every 100,000 years. This periodic warming and cooling is based on long-term changes in the earths orbit (known as Milankovitch factors). Our planet is not expected to experience another such periodic warming/cooling for another 20,000 to 30,000 years.What does that mean for us?Well, it means that, unless we try to solve the issue of climate change, we are going to experience a global environment that is significantly warmer than what we're used to for over 2-3 times the the length of recorded human history.Why is that a big deal?Well, increased temperature is going to have a number of adverse effects. For the sake of brevity, I will ignore rising sea levels, and massive extinction of animals and instead focus on how plant life will be effected. First, aridity will cause crop failures to dramatically increase. This means that it will become much more difficult to support our ever increasing world population. Incase you haven't figured it out, this means that tens of millions of people will likely die from starvation.There is one type of life form that the climate change is good for: bugs. In many northern ecologies, cold winter temperatures that can last from a few weeks, to several months are necessary to keep populations of bugs under control. Without this cold weather, bug populations decimate plant life. In addition, plants grown in CO2 rich environments are more prone to being destroyed by pests. This is due to the fact that the natural defenses these plants have are not produced as well in higher CO2 environments. The bugs that eat these plants live longer and produce more offspring.Now compare this to the fact that economies come and go, and the idea of an economy is only a couple thousand years old. In all likelihood, the current climate change that we are experiencing is likely to have effects that last longer then the U.S. will even exist.I would also argue that the effects of climate change will have a much more adverse effect on our economy in the longterm then the current recession ever could have. If there is less lumber from dying trees, if there is less available food from dying crops, and if literally millions and millions of people are displaced by rising sea levels, then you can be sure that the world's economy will suffer.