How can so many people be so shallow and incapable of recognizing the unintended consequences of their pollyannaish solutions?
An unanswerable question. We apparently live in a world where people really have no historical perspective and/or understanding of the environmental, economic, and sociological consequences that the Earth is experiencing.
Without writing a treatise, which I should do someday; I'll repeat the inflection point made by
Fredrick Jackson Turner that the frontier closed in 1893. Basically, the world (Earth) became "
full". One of our problems today is a growing homeless population. In the "old" days, when the world was not "
full", the homeless could simply be kicked into the nether-lands to take care of themselves. That realpolitik option can no longer be implemented today.
For millions of years, people were in a constant battle for survival. So people had to vigorously breed, not to also mention endless migrations to find new virgin territories to settle. That essentially came to a crashing halt by 1900. Nerveless, old habits die hard, even if obsolete.
Then there is
science and
technology. Since the late 1800s science and technology have exploded. This has given people the utopian perception that any problem can be solved. Unfortunately, gullible people have been blinded that claimed "
climate change" can be solved by superb hucksters. (As one recent example of public gullibility,
think of the collapse of FTX) They refuse to accept the premise that the "
climate change" religion that they believe, results from population. Which also gets us back to the paragraph above that humans for millions of years were in a battle of survival so they refuse to accept that too many people can be a problem.
We are only a few generations away from the closing of the frontier. Society as a whole has yet to comprehend that we live in a "
new" world.