[downandout]

I won't argue the relative merits of the marginal value of a human life vs. mass extinction of species

We aren't going anywhere anytime soon, and when we do, it likely won't be from the effects of preventable climate change. We may in fact have another ice age sometime in the next several million years - but no amount of money, protests, cutting back on emissions, carbon taxes, or other measures will stop it. Dinosaurs had an ice age, and as far as we know they didn't have cars.

[orbifold]

This is precisely not about the survival of the human species, we are doing fine and humans are the most likely to be able to adapt to rapidly changing climate and collapse of biodiversity. The issue is that the biodiversity will recover only slowly (in the order of 10 million years) and probably won't completely because we have left very few natural habitats anyways.

Humans have completely bypassed all the usual regulatory mechanisms that balance the populations of all the other species and caused mass extinction simply by reproducing well beyond what a natural ecosystem could sustain. Even the ice age set in way slower than how fast we are currently changing the temperature on earth.

As much as I understand that most people have an anthropocentric outlook, especially the >30% religious fundamentalists in the US, I feel like we should value overall biodiversity over pure human survival. Most of the programs the Gates foundation are probably helpful in the long run for this as well. Lower infant mortality, better access to birth control and reducing poverty will hopefully result in slowed down population growth.