Well of course the "we should have just gone hell bent toward destruction and we would have had the $$$ to fix the house damage" is about what our Larry Summers like economist high priests have been chanting to us for decades. The problem of course is that they have insufficient knowledge (Leopold said we don't really know what makes the clock tick) about ecology, carrying capacity, random future events and of course economist don't even know much about their own "dismal science" ... well illustrated by their crashing the world economies in 1929 and 2008. Although many economists acknowledge periodic "adjustments" result for reckless business behaviors but wave it off as something the rich and powerful are necessarily "insured" against so the damages on the wider society are a trivial concern. Going back to the thought experiment allegory what if there was an earthquake and the house crumbled a year before destruction of it by machinery vibration had created enough $$$ to pay for its rebuilding. We are similarly asked to believe that we can do all manner of environmental destruction and degradation now because the human imagination is infinite and can humanity is challenged enough (when enough men, women and children have died or been shoved into poverty) that humanity will adapt techno fix its way out of a biosphere collapse (another sage declaration of Larry Summers). Problem is that inventions are rather random and unpredictable as are environmental tipping points to collapse. What if a source of infinite none polluting energy is a few years away from production when everyone on earth dies of starvation, pandemic, in nuclear wars, due to ocean rise catastrophes. Another techno claim fantasy to justify reckless biosphere damaging perpetual growth in the size of the human enterprise was made by the younger President Bush who said off hand that if the earth becomes uninhabitable we can just move to another planet. Same problem with this techno fix as many others that seek to deny the law of thermos dynamics and finite carrying capacity on a finite spheroidal planet. First it may be impossible to go faster than the speed of light (forever in human history) and so ever reach habitable planets around other stars. So the prudent logical course of action is to use the precautionary principal and not destroy planet earth thinking that the desperation generated by doing so would automatically motivate us to fix the damage or enable us to escape. Our problem as a species is, however, that we are ruled by elites with God complexes for whom everything is possible in the present and so do not believe that they might not be able to escape some generalize future catastrophe of their making by simply using most of the rest of us inferior beings as cannon fodder as they do now to escape local and region disasters of their making.
All true. I'll have only a little to add to this for people who haven't been reading all the environmental activist articles and books you and I have been discussing elsewhere. Thanks for taking the time to write this, Win.