The devil is you and me and billions of other people who drive cars, use fossil fuel generated electricity and heating fuel, eat any form of animal protein and think we have the right to have as many children as we want. There's a future where Charlton Heston is punching sand and screaming "you bastards!" in the ruins of New York...and we're the bastards.
Really, it's okay. As Matt McConaughey observes in True Detective, you need the bad people to keep the other bad people from our door. The truly good people, the ones who eat only plants and live in small huts whose heating system is to wrap yourself in a sheepskin, and ride bicycles, and never have more than one child...are probably going to be useless in moving the needle on how ordinary people use resources. We need people who are stained with ecological transgression, and are feeling a twinge of guilt about it.
LOL
Every day tens of thousands of people around the world get to turn on electricity for the first time.
The worldwide literacy rate is at 90 per cent and also growing. The poverty has fallen to less than 10 percent. (it was over 90 less than two centuries ago). As countries become richer they use less aluminum, nickel, copper, steel, stone, cement, sand, wood, paper, fertilizer, water, crop acreage and fossil fuel every year. Consumption of 66 out of 72 resources tracked by the U.S. Geological Survey is now declining.
Deaths from disasters continue to decline not because there are fewer disaster but because we are better at dealing with them.
Life expectancies are up, childhood diseases are way down which has led to smaller families.
Tell me what we are supposed to feel guilty about?
Mankind creates faster than they can squander, and repairs more than they can destroy.