Unfortunately, the future of our biosphere doesn’t just depend on our engineering effectiveness to stop our carbon dioxide output and our destruction of the ecosystem. It also depends on preferences.
The fact is, different people assign different levels of importance to protecting our world. For some people, the technological advancements we have made are worth the environmental destruction whether they explicitly say so or not. Even if such people are disturbed by climate change and want it to stop, implicitly, they still give a lot of weight to the so-called life improvements given to us by technology.
For example, the increase in life expectancy and the curing of many diseases is seen as a strong good for humanity by many. And the vast majority of people see a thriving economy as something we should try and hold onto even as we combat the climate change problem and other problems of ecosystem destruction. And of course, there are people who don’t care at all about the destruction we are causing because they’re going to die of old age long before any serious problems could threaten them.
And even if some people think that all of these technological so-called improvements are not worth it, the inertia of modern human society and the system act as if human beings should still be placed above nature. In other words, the preference of the machine is to advance at all costs.
Largely, this is due to the prisoner’s dilemma operating on a grand scale: even if I believe that modern medicine is a bad thing for humanity, I still might use it to save myself due to my survival instinct.
For these reasons, it is extremely unlikely that the destruction of wild ecosystems can be stopped via politics or the general movements of modern industrial civilization. At some point, we might slow down climate change, but it will only be at a compromise of quite a lot more destruction on top of the existing damage we’ve done. In other words, modern human civilization is not salvageable.
The only two things we are good at doing, as a species in modern times, is advance the machine of destruction and convince those who disagree that something is being done.