[Beltalowda]

> At the start of the industrial revolution no one knew about global warming.

This is true, but it's been known since at least medieval times that that air pollution was pretty unhealthy; arguably a better reason to actually do something about things than climate change.

The same can be said about the usage of lead in fuel and paint; people have known it was harmful well before leaded fuel was invented.

The elephant in the room seems to me more that we, as a society, are pretty inept at long-term and "big picture" thinking and have a strong and deep bias that progress is both good and inevitable.

[teknopaul]

Progress (noun) : gradual betterment.

By that definition progress is always good.

[sn9]

Except sometimes things are called "progress" to sell them as ideas, but then it turns out the negative costs outweigh the proposed benefits.

Or maybe there's progress in the short-term but not in the long-term.

For example, the globalization of our supply chains was probably viewed as progress by some, but that very efficiency also involved a trade-off in resiliency that resulted in how brittle we now know them to be from the events of the last two years.

[Beltalowda]

"Better" for who? And many "betterments" come with downsides and trade-offs, too.

It's rarely that simple.

[teknopaul]

My point was just about the ambiguity of the word progess.

I agree that development/forward movement is not always good (or inevitable, and a deep rooted bias)

And that "good" needs context or is a simplification.

I'nt language fun: it's both logically correct and incorrect to say that progress is always progress. ;)