Alright, I want to point-by-point rebut your comment, but I'm going to take a step back instead.

What is your goal here?

Every argument has some kind of goal, some position or point of view that it wants to express. Yours appears to be, "CO2 accumulation is no big deal as long as at least a few people survive". (Contextualizing your own statement that, "Humanity, and life in general, will survive increased CO2 levels".)

But I don't want to assume that that's your argument, because it would be a wildly irrational one to make. So let's bring your actual position out into the light.

--

edit in response to your edit:

> Largely because I firmly believe CO2 emissions will not decrease through 2040.

Maybe. But they could, except for all of the politics and arguments around this that is still preventing large-scale efforts to reduce global emissions.

> Petroleum is simply too useful as a resource.

It has been useful. Humanity likely could not have reached its current state of technological development without easy access to vast amounts of energy in the form of coal and oil.

But its usefulness is waning. Countries and organizations are more often using it to influence the economies of other countries. A lot of suffering is happening in Venezuela right now, and oil is a major contributor to that; a lot of damage was done to Gulf Coast not long ago, and even if you place no value at all on natural ecosystems, it also impacted a lot of livelihoods that depended on fishing and tourism in the area. Depending on your point of view, the most recent Iraq war killed, maimed, or displaced a lot of people for the sake of controlling oil. Tensions between Europe, US, and Russia right now can also trace their causes back to the distribution of natural gas.

And none of this is taking into account the predicted effects of a warming global climate. Many -- many! -- more people are going to suffer and die.

> I find it reassuring that biology and life on earth survived for hundreds of millions of years with CO2 levels between 1000-2000ppm. It means that increased CO2 levels will not cause the extinction of humanity.

There are a lot of different conditions that satisfy "survival", and many of them are pretty awful.

--

Since global warming / climate change is such a politically charged topic, let's try reframing it.

Let's say there is a hypothetical global disease for which nobody has a natural immunity. We'll use some variant of the Black Plague for this gedankenexperiment. Right now it is responsible for killing an estimated few hundred thousand people a year worldwide [1], and costs several hundreds of billions of dollars each year worldwide [2]. We could be committing more resources towards reducing the impacts of this disease, but right now, this is a level of suffering and expense which enough people are totally okay with.

This disease is expected to gradually worsen though, and in the not very distant future, begin killing millions and harming millions more. We may still be able to mitigate a lot of the effects of the disease in the future, but we'll still have the same costs for developing new technology to fight it, plus we'll have much higher costs for dealing with the effects of it.

The Black Plague killed 30% to 60% of Europe's population in the mid-1300s [3], and now it's coming back, just more slowly.

Would your position then be, "it's no big deal, we survived it once before"?

[1]: https://www.thedailybeast.com/climate-change-kills-400000-a-...

[2]: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/climate-change-c... -- this doesn't include worldwide numbers; I'm using a conservative extrapolation here.

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death