The only way we're going to truly minimize human impact is by forcing developing nations like China and India to dramatically change the way they are growing their economies, which frankly, doesn't seem very fair. They have as much right as the rest of the 1st world to develop their country and nobody is going to be able to tell them otherwise. The only real way out of this mess is a mass exodus away from fossil fuels over to nuclear power or the discovery of some sort of new abundant power source like fusion (solar and wind aren't going to cut it).
>The only way we're going to truly minimize human impact is by forcing developing nations like China and India to dramatically change the way they are growing their economies
Firstly, the US and EU combined output more CO2 than China and India combined, so we can make a substantial contribution to reducing CO2 emissions.
Why? One would probably tend to keep the impact tolerable enough for themself, but you're not going to find enough people except green fanatics to be motivated to minimize it.
Because the impact is difficult to appreciate at a personal level over the short (years to decades) timeframe. As a result, individual humans struggle to realise it in their daily interactions. Nevertheless, the damage accumulates and causes significant negative results for future generations.
Your logic assumes a feedback loop that shows the person the results of their actions. Like the Crypto article yesterday [1] touched on, if you lack that feedback loop you won't know the negative consequences of your actions.
We owe it to our offspring that we leave them with an environment that's not beyond recovery from the actions we take by the time they're in a position to affect change. Anything else is purely selfish.
To put it in the Hacker News analogy, if I corrupt one bit of your system's RAM, you'll rarely notice the effects and will probably use your PC for its functional life without realising your RAM even has a fault. If I corrupt a significant percentage of it, you'll be crying murder when you get hourly system crashes.