People criticize environmentalists as doomsayers while celebrating futurists. This episode shares key examples where the doomsayers were the ones saying acting sustainably would ruin us. On the contrary, in these cases and many others, doomsayers said changing our polluting behavior would undermine our way of life. Yet acting on sustainability improved our situation in these cases.

I also share, by contrast, cases where people projected new technologies would only improve our situations, and they may have in limited areas, but they deteriorated them in others.

We can learn skepticism of those saying stopping polluting will deprive us of income, well-being, or liberty.

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