People and countries have done an enormous amount of damage in their attempts to bring about the best possible world. Communism is an obvious example. But so is British imperialism, which was not grubby self-interest all the way down, but at least in part a sincere attempt on the part of people who felt they were superior to other people to magnanimously improve the lot of their inferiors.

Even if Bill McKibben were to become dictator, future generations would suffer because of the carbon we had already emitted.

Climate change is not going to be prevented. It's not even going to be mitigated to the degree a rational person would want. As a result we're going to have to live with climate change and try to reduce the extent and rate of change as much as possible. This is not an inspiring or sexy project.

Philosophers are smart, analytical, and skeptical. For these reasons they are relatively unbiased.

Apocalypses don't happen very often. They tend to be separated by tens or even hundreds of millions of years.

Ethics is prescriptive and can change behavior, but usually only at the margins.

Philosophers tend to radically underestimate the distance between abstract principles (such as "reduce suffering") and what it might actually mean for people to act on them.