Fifteen years ago I heard that we had ten years to turn the world around or it would be too late. When can I stop caring about the Environment?

It's worthless to read into doomsday predictions. People have been predicting it for eons and it's safe to say they've all been wrong. A quick google revealed http://www.abhota.info/end5.htm that lists a bunch of them. Interesting read, albeit last updated in 2005.

I know this is not politically correct. Yeah. It's also kind of stupid. It's not like there's some magic line where, if we stop short of it, everything will be just fine, but if we cross that line we are all DOOMED TO DIE FOREVER OMG SO LETS PARTY. Things will just get gradually worse, a little bit at a time. You can make it a little bit more worse than it would otherwise have been, or you can make it a little bit less worse. You can choose to feel guilty about whichever choice you make, or not, but you can't pretend the choice doesn't matter.

Environmentalists, to me, are like a religion: your only salvation is to listen to them. So I understand why you're complaining. But you're being a baby about it; look at it pragmatically, instead. Doing things that are environmentally sound are, typically, about being more efficient. For example: It takes less energy to recycle an aluminum can than it does to make it from scratch. So why not recycle them, instead of letting them sit in a landfill. Less energy consumed by aluminum companies means more for everyone else, which will reduce prices. Driving a fuel efficient car uses less gas, which reduces demand, which will lead to a reduction in the cost of gas. And your fuel efficient car gets you where you're going just as well as your gas guzzler. Recycling paper means that paper producers don't need to plant as many trees to replace those that they cut down, which will make your paper less expensive in the long run. If you throw out less styrofoam and other non-recyclables, your city will need to send out fewer garbage trucks, which will save it money; this will result in saving you property taxes. You see, the choices you make can be to your benefit too. In all these cases, if people follow advice that happens to be good for the environment, everyone will save money. Start small, and you'll see that it has no negative effect on your life. And maybe you'll save the world.

Could I back up a second here and ask for a bit of clarification? As someone who recycles, uses water and electricity sparingly, etc., I can't think of the last time I said to myself, while tossing an empty beer bottle in the recycling tub: "Stupid environmentalists! I would so much rather put this in the trash can 10 feet away. This is so dumb." The fact that recycling is affecting you so strongly seems to suggest that you're either doing something wrong, or you're just overly sensitive to it for some other reason which isn't clear. While environmentally sound actions do exist on a scale from Nothing to Extremist, most people will easily be able to integrate environmentally sound actions into their everyday life without much effort.

Or... you know, what Simon Barclay said.

It is worth pointing out that "fucked" is ill-defined. Nobody can really say how much warming we're going to get and how it's going to affect our ecosystems; how big the species die-off will be; whether we'll all starve because of it, or whether we'll simply adjust to a new normal in which things are shittier. The world ends all the time. It ended for the Romans and the Aztecs and the Lakota. It continues to end across the planet. How do people cope when their world is shattered? For a lot of the cultures that were conquered, they saw it coming and they fought to the death and they died. Those that are left struggle to find meaning and lead wasted lives. As for us, we have no enemy to fight except ourselves. Hence, we all have this painful internal struggle. If you're no longer willing to fight, you can just stop. Live it up and go out in a blaze of glory. I can't fault you for it; if you really believe the fight is pointless (which it might be, again no-one can really say), then you should stop fighting. I think, though, that given the absence of a conqueror, and the amount of resources we're pouring into the problem, a fast die-off is unlikely. We're more likely faced with a decline and an adjustment, for a few generations at least. In such cases, going out in a blaze of glory is anti-social, since it makes the adjustment more painful. You will become the enemy. Will that really be a relief?

I personally think that global warming tipping points have been passed, yes, and it is now a runaway system, but you seem to think that this would allow you to dump heavy metals into your water table with a clear conscience. These issues are just not related, other than falling under the label of "environmental". If you've lost your hand, that doesn't mean you're not going to notice cutting off your foot. No matter how bad things get - or how good - there will always be improvements that can be made, standards that can be raised. What you seek is to escape is the march of technology and the rise of civilization. Yes, it's a treadmill, and it's tiresome sometimes, but it's also the engine that brings a better future than what might have been. To be human is to strive for a better tomorrow, regardless of failures of the past or the challenges of the future. We make our world.

Climate change is already happening, and will continue to happen for some time because of the extra CO2 and methane we've already pumped into the atmosphere. The longer before we reduce emissions, and the less we reduce emissions by, the worse the change will be in the long run. One worry is that once we raise the global temperature sufficiently, because of changes to the albedo, large methane emissions from permafrost melting etc we will then see rapid and extensive change that is effectively going to happen no matter what we do. This is difficult to predict because change is slow, and is measurable over decades, not months. Some think we're already past such a tipping point, or very close to it. However, even assuming we are past it, everything we don't do to slow or reverse the process will eventually make it even worse. There's no point at which we can sit back and just say 'fuck it', if you care about making it worse for our descendents, anyway. There are plus points. Damage to the ozone layer has been greatly reduced by actions to ban CFCs, and it has recovered somewhat. What we do now individually, and as nations, does make a difference further down the road. Recycling is not about global warming, but about conserving increasingly rare resources. Oil IS running out. Peak production keeps getting pushed out as new reserves and techniques for extraction are developed, but we WILL start to run out of it sooner rather than later. Reducing our plastic use conserves more oil for the long run, higher fuel efficencies, renewable energy sources, all of these help extend the time we can carry on using all the wonderfully useful products we make from a limited resource. There's a lot of aluminium ore in the ground, but recycling uses a lot less energy than making new aluminium, and again that's less pollution from coal power stations, and less oil burnt in power stations. Pollution again is a good thing to reduce; cleaner air, water and food leads directly to longer lifespans and higher quality of life. Much as we might like to go back to a life where ignorance is bliss, we know the damage we're doing, even if we don't know all the ramifications just yet. But if we sit back and do nothing, it will be our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren who will curse us for not doing more when we had the chance.

I have definitely felt the same way -- angry about environmental guilt being constantly perpetuated. So what follows are some rambling thoughts I've had on the topic since I first felt that way years ago. The short summary is that your idea -- live as though you know all this disaster is almost certain to come true -- isn't that bad. One place we do differ is that I believe the projections. Even the infamous Limits to Growth projections are being basically http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf (thus far). If you watch closely, people aren't predicting the same problems over and over; the predictions and concerns change. It goes from "omg, there might be no spring salmon run" to "omg, the spring run is gone and now there might be no fall run either" (or whatever; that's a fake example). Field data is coming back worse than projected. Not always, you know, but enough that I don't think these scientists are delusional pessimists.* Does this suck? Yeah, totally. And feeling torn between living my life in a way that fits with everyone else, and thinking it causes all this bad stuff? Yeah, it sucks. And watching things go wrong and not being able to do anything about it? Yeah, it sucks. I don't know about for you, what's behind that anger and guilt, but for me, the anger was more like "stop talking about this!" (I think that's called "denial"), and there was also sadness and frustration and powerlessness. That probably sucks the worst: this angry sense of powerlessness about certain things I really wish I could stop but don't even know where to begin with it. http://books.google.com/books?id=T6F7eot8UTUC&printsec=frontcover&dq=environmental+end+of+the+world&client=firefox-a#PPA7,M1 is an amazing book about the emotional dimensions of the environmental crisis. But I also got a huge weight lifted when I began to think realistically about what I could do about the problem, and what I really just couldn't do. Yeah, you can always do more -- you can always use less energy and do more politically, sure. But you can't stop the juggernaut of modern civilization single-handedly either. In fact, I often now tell myself "assume global warming is real; assume all this stuff is going to happen in the next 40-60 years," and ask, "now how do you want to live?" Most of the time, I want to live in my professional environmentalist world, printing out documents with toner and riding in elevators trying to do something about this whole mess, even if my benefit is incremental and meanwhile I'm part of the problem. I don't want to drop out; I want to feel like a part of this social world, even if I'm one tiny part trying (with many other tiny parts) to turn around the asteroid battleship. Sometimes when I ask "how do you want to live?" I think "I'm moving to a farm somewhere that water won't be too scarce," or I think "screw all this work, if bad stuff is going to happen anyway, I'm going to go spend my days learning the guitar." And even most of my daily decision get filtered through the "assume it's happening anyway" filter. That means that almost everything ends up being deliberate decisions ("I am working even though all that color printing probably just added some sort of heavy metal to the water table" "I'm not eating fish because I'm so sad about what's happening to the oceans and can't feel like I'm contributing" "I am driving right now even though I'm adding 5 pounds of carbon to the air as we speak"), and they all feel immensely better than accepting amorphous guilt for some enormous disaster but then trying to ignore it. The short summary: go ahead and live your life as though almost all of what you fear about the environment is going to come true in your lifetime. * The http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2008-07-07-bats-main_N.htm and http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/04/amphibian/holland-text seem pretty fucked, that's for sure.