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...
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
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