We Can’t Save The Planet (e.g. climate change) Because We Refuse To Save Ourselves

Amongst other major problems that contribute far more to acidification of oceans, general pollution, energy consumption, etc., than e.g. use of internal combustion engined vehicles:

Because we have chosen to let the Russo-Iranians and Beijing East Asia continue to threaten the world with slavery and a massive amount of pollution and waste, we have to maintain a highly resource-intensive economy to support a military that can hold them in check.

Because we refuse to allow law enforcement and quality public education in the dense cities, we cause people to move to the suburbs and exurbs, where they waste a lot of their own time and a lot of the world’s petrochemicals and energy on commutes, transit, mitigating obesity, and single family homes that are far more expensive than what most people want and need.

Because we refuse to stop gross waste of resources like cryptocurrency, we waste 5% of the world’s energy on pointless computation.

Because many countries in Africa and Asia refuse to have market economies and rule of law, they fail to industrialize, creating more children than people would choose to have, which in turn consumes far more resources than are needed.

Because we refuse to mandate telework, even after telework has been proven to be a long-run more efficient way of working in many professions, we impoverish the world, waste resources on office buildings and commutes, and waste everyone’s time and force them to pile into megalopolises, wasting precious watered farmland, for no reason.

Because we refuse to deal with nuclear waste in a rational way, we not only continue dangerously to store loose material around the world, we also refuse to employ an economically efficient number of nuclear reactors that would allow us to reduce our peacetime dependence on petrochemicals.

None of which, in this text, assert that other environmental problems aren’t problems: the point is that for both overall environmental benefit and to avoid arbitrary behavior, we need to deal with these problems first.