I see. So you've rationalized to yourself that these extinctions are just the continuation of a trend which started 10,000 years ago (the megafauna?), and have nothing to do with us.
Which part of "There is no doubt that extinction rates have been elevated for about the past 10000 years, and that has been clearly due to human activity." did you not understand?
It shows that you don't get that it's the Industrial Revolution which is the culprit - not pre-industrial people who probably killed off some megafauna.
You surprise me every time. That's what keeps me coming back for more, I think! So, you accept that humans have caused global warming, and are responsible for our current "elevated" rate of extinctions. You just don't think the rates are especially higher now than 10,000 years ago. In particular, you don't blame industrialization for any noticeable (or, I should say, problematic) increase in extinction rate. Is that an accurate assessment?
As long as humans exist, the rest of the planet will always only be a managed zoo.
Agreed 100%. Unless, in some unlikely scenario, we somehow survive a great cataclysm in the margins, bereft of our technological civilization.
What should we do? [ ... things I wholeheartedly agree with ... ]
Agreed.
But you know which countries are best at all of that? Wealthy industrialized nations.
Agreed.
And the best thing we can do for the environment is to help Russian, China, South America, and Africa develop rapidly so that they are wealthy enough to protect the environment themselves.
You could be right. In fact, you're probably right. But the critical thing we need to figure out is: how do we make people wealthy without further destroying the environment? And going forward, we need to figure out how to _reduce_ our environmental footprint.
Imposing global carbon emission limits is counterproductive and doesn't accomplish anything useful right now.
Here I disagree completely. It's absolutely critical that we figure out, poste haste, how to get energy some other way than from fossil fuel. We have massive amounts of energy raining down on us. We're just too technolgically undeveloped to know how to make use of it. Why? Because companies don't have to pay anything for the damage they do to the environment.
What a carbon tax does is to say, "Look, you can put CO2 into the atmosphere. But when you do, you take something away from everyone else who lives on the planet. Therefore, you must pay for the mess you make." It's very straightforward, sensible, fair, etc. It's outrageous that we don't do that now.
If we were to do that, the market would start finding the solutions to our problems.