[lioeters]

We could flip the original sentence as: "Blind faith in industrial progress..carried by the tide of public policy..is causing and will continue to cause a ton of damage in the century to come, and the damage will never be repaid."

[hennsen]

Yes it will be paid back. By generations to come. While the corporations who invented/introduced/pushed the stuff and got governments to support them by adjusting laws to allow doing it keep flourishing...

[lioeters]

That's the sad truth, that coming generations will be paying for our short-sighted pursuit of profit and "progress".

This reminds me of the Long Now Foundation [0]. At least there is hope, that there are people aware of the need for long-term sustainable thinking, and are actively promoting it.

"Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed - some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where 'long-term' is measured at least in centuries." Stewart Brand

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Now_Foundation