The debate over "climate change" ignores, whatever your feelings one way or the other, a major bone of contention. It's not about the location of pollution or the virtue of human endeavor. It really comes down to a question of priorities. From ancient times to the present day, people have polluted, and the biggest polluters are those who are poor either in information or in resources, because those people don't usually live long enough to care. In truth most of us won't live long enough to see the world end from pollution, if pollution actually persists, but pollution is a concern of the first world. The rest of the world is full of people just trying to make it through the day without dying.
Everyone pollutes everywhere. Just today, the lid on my cup blew off and I didn't go running to fetch it because I was encumbered. In 2020, my friend and I found piles of plastic waste across the road from a cocao plantation in the jungle in Belize. You might not know that Jeru and Salem were separate cities that are merged because they built atop a large garbage pile between the two hills and conjoined the cities. Some people don't mean to pollute. Some people do. In 2017 I confronted three men (who turned out to be Federal Marshalls) for littering on Mt Charleston right in front of me. Those are the ones I detest, but most people have no idea what the consequences are, and many more don't know. My neighbors are pretty affluent and probably have no idea that, if they dont' clean up after their late night parties, the food they leave out back attracts rodents. And the trash blows over the fence into my yard. nobody taught them until me, and the man is 36 years old.
In antiquity nobody worried about it. There was always more land. If you polluted an area, or depleted it of resources, you moved away. The natives of North America knew this and would actually rotate their settlements to allow the land to recover. However, you can find videos about the large pottery trash pile in the middle of Rome where everyone just threw their broken pots and bowls. It was simply someone else's problem, and ancient governments were too brief usually to tackle things long term. Most people in antiqity were concerned with subsistence agriculture, and so there was no time for education, innovation, or preservation of anything but the lives of their families. It's not a dig. It's simply a fact of their lives.
In modernity the people who pollute the most are those who have the least to lose from pollution because they are concerned with basic survival. Most people on the planet to this day are poor and barely eke out a living each day enough to afford food for tomorrow. Even in the time of Dickens, it's clear that most Londoners were hand to mouth, which is why so many were in debt to Ebenezer Scrooge. Without banks or pensions, most people worked until they died, of disease or age or warfare. It was simply not a time in which most had the luxury, even if they knew or cared, to take care of "the planet". It was also, particularly in Christian nations, exceptionally arrogant to presume that you could do a better job at that than God, even as men scarred the land looking for treasure or power. What kept the human population in check was food. Now that we have enough, we have time for inventing and vacationing and relaxation and to sit in the jungle with plastic bottles that we leave behind because we're too lazy. It's not the way they say. If the climate is changing because of man, it's not because man is evil. It's because most men don't care because they don't have time. Someone has to manufacture and ship that crap you buy from Temu, and they don't earn much to do it.
Concern about "manmade climate change" is a luxury afforded to the affluent nations of the earth. If you consider the pollution output of most industrialized nations, the ones that are reducing their output are in no way keeping pace with those whose output is increasing. This is due to "men" but not for the reasons they proscribe. It is done because most of the nations who are the biggest polluters have burgeoning populations of mostly poor people whose concern is not "saving the planet" but "not dying today". Although the website mentioned in this video has been taken down, it is interesting to note that these nations have always been this way. It might not be politics. It might simply be poverty.
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