That is wishcasting, your first two paragraphs. It is disavow , and saying I cleanse my hands of the false choices presented to me. Of course you Mookie are not making the choice so you can do that. You are not making the consequence choice for you are not in a person of power.

Likewise me, and this is me can employ my own “defense mechanism” and say this was a known problem for decades so why didn’t we invest the R&D yesterday let’s say 1990. And R&D has gave us so much. Solar is 80 to 90% cheaper in the last 10 years, and wind is 66% cheaper. We could have so much more. But once again this is defense mechanisms and it still does not address the problem only displace it. Yet I get to do this for I am not the person in power.

We could have better Solar, Wind, or Nuclear if we invested 30 years ago.

—————

If I were the person in power I can shift the logic to one of abundance. Every option sucks, but we are now generating power cleaner than we used to, and adding new capacity which we need to do anyway for billions make less than $2 a day ( a different moral claim ) pollutes less than we used too. All options suck but the options are better now than 30 years ago with current tech and not mythical R&D tech never developed.

Likewise today we are polluting so much in other sectors which is also a problem besides CO2, cobalt mining, and so on. We could address those issues, but we are convincing ourselves they are not problems or transition would not be worth it, or we do not want to transition unless we can confirm every 7 billion person jumps at the same time.

We have options today, and not just the mythical future or the mythical past.