There is lots to feel optimistic about. We already have much of the knowledge that would allow us to reduce carbon emissions drastically within a few decades and improve the quality of our lives. Climate change, resource and ecosystem service depletion all demand that we switch to a highly efficient economy by mid-century. Unfortunately, we especially lack the political will to implement the switch away from fossil fuels and more generally account for externalities in the cost of doing business in order to stem wasteful practices. If we only consider how much more efficient our transportation sector would already be today if we had followed the trend toward fuel-efficiency after the 73 oil crisis, and had funded emerging technologies 15 years ago when we already knew we had a climate problem, it empowers us to think that we can successfully address these questions in the coming decades. Sustainability was not even a slight consideration for the power brokers that made these decisions and it probably wasn't for a lack of awareness of these issues (the Club of Rome is almost 40 years old).

The dominant narrative according to which reducing waste is the equivalent of returning to the stone age is the cause of the public reticence toward global warming remediation. It's rather impossible for most to imagine that we can improve our lives by switching to renewables when nothing is done to provide the infrastructure that would allow envisionning change and nothing is said to inform the public of the economic benefits of new technologies. Discussing environmental catastrophes may not have a quantifyable effect on the public will to address global warming, but it is the only way we have to communicate that business as usual is the surest way to return to the stone age. Still, I completely agree that we need to impose a discourse that is positive toward our capacity of adaptation; after all, it shouldn't be very difficult since this framing is already part of the dominant dicourse w.r.t. human inventiveness.