I think a lot of people who lived their lives in a quivering state of imminent ecological collapse-panic have moved those emotions from that box into this one, and feel energized because the dread now seems even more imminent, and they have Science! on their side, and their enemies are all the right enemies, and this time they can make a difference. And it requires nothing.
I’m not much of an aphorist, unfortunately, but I do have one saying that I thought up myself: “Beware the intersection of convenience and virtue.” Righteousness that asks little or nothing of you is cheap and dangerous like bathtub gin. And, as Theodore Dalrymple notes,“There is more pleasure in being right about forthcoming disaster than in being right about incremental improvement.” How quickly we seem to have forgotten all we learned back when “motivated reasoning” and “confirmation bias” were trendy topics.