> Decades of warning from the scientific community have yielded effectively 0 progress on halting our exponential march towards ecological collapse.

This kind of doomsday fatalism is both factually incorrect and unhelpful. Between 2005 and 2015, a single decade, the US doubled its use of renewable energy [1]. co2 emissions from energy peaked in 2006 and have gently decreased since then [2]. Compared to significant upward slope before then, and the continued growth of the economy and population, that's a significant improvement. From 2000 to 2008, the number of people bicycling to work increased by 60% [3]. (It's still small in absolute terms, but this is a change that requires significant effort and lifestyle changes at the individual level.) In 2008, 30% of Americans felt dealing with climate change should be a top Presidential and Congressional priority. By 2018, that number was 44%, despite continued well-funded climate denial campaigns.

The world is a giant ship with 8+ billion each with their own oar in the water. A vessel like that turns very slowly and with a danger on the horizon as complex and difficult to understand as climate change, we should not expect everyone to wake up overnight and be all-in on fixing the problem. But almost every trend shows that people are waking up, changing their habits, and shifting their priorities in the right direction. The ship is turning.

Is it turning fast enough to avoid hitting the iceberg? No. But is it plowing full steam ahead? Not that either.

> But when the likely end goal remains total collapse of civilization and possible extinction of our species, does it really matter?

This is simply not true and you are very unlikely to find any reputable scientific source saying that. It is and will be a catastrophe. People have died and more will die. It has and will cause more political uprisings.

But humanity as a species will almost certainly survive and as the reality of the problem becomes more and more apparent, we will put more and more resources into dealing with it. It's going to be bad, yes. But we (as a species and civilization) survived the Last Glacial Period, the Neolithic decline, the Plague of Justinian, the Black Death, multiple cholera pandemics, the fall of the Roman Empire, and the Spanish flu pandemic.

We survived all of those with only a fraction of the technology, knowledge, and resources that we have today. Climate change is an entirely solvable problem with the capacity we have right now and we can and will solve as the necessity of doing so becomes more apparent and accepted.

Only a hundred years ago, nearly 5% of the entire human population was wiped out by Spanish flu and today flu innoculation is a minor inconvenience for most and the pandemic is a footnote in history. We've kept humans alive in the hottest deserts, the coldest tundra, across oceans, and on the fucking moon. We are like cockroaches but smarter and better organized.

[1]: https://www.energy.gov/eere/articles/4-charts-show-renewable...

[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide...

[3]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2014/cb14-86....

[4]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/19/how-america...