I’m with you completely on this, Steve. Thank you for engaging this issue with insight and moral clarity. To simplify the issue, consider: If we assume nothing can be done to avoid total catastrophe, nothing WILL be done. Conversely, if we do what we can, when we can, and however we can, we probably won’t succeed, but we might just make things better than they would otherwise have been.

One analogy I like is the case of spontaneous remission in terminal cancer patients. It is extremely rare—roughly one in 2.5 million cases, or so I’ve read. But it has been amply documented, even if scientists have no clue as to how or why it happens. But it may be an instance of the “butterfly effect” in complexity theory: a small, random event, even at the cellular level, or in the (poorly understood) nexus between our mental/emotional life and our immune systems, that triggers a runaway feedback loop resulting in a phase shift at the macro level.

I’m guessing, of course, but it’s just possible that individual actions or new ideas at the local level could catch on in a way where similar way that could