It is both. Intelligent life is exceptionally rare due to the key steps of evolution and environmental conditions required to develop it, as explained by Brandon Carter. Intelligence is also a lethal mutation, as Ernst Mayr pointed out. Also incidentally, the average life span of a species, of the billions that have existed, is about 100,000 years, which is roughly the length of time that modern humans have existed.

Yes, sadly you are correct.

There are people doing what they can, and other people grabbing what they can.

I take that to mean a few people are trying to be sustainable (while the vast majority are not), and those in power are, for the most part, extracting what wealth they can get their hands on. Looters, you could say, but at a much more vaulted and protected place in society. Certainly there are things that can be done, but governments need to step up and level with the public.

And we have a president who has never read the bible, much less anything else, holding the book up as a prop for the evangelical vote. And they believe he is the chosen, but imperfect, vessel of God's will. Keep in mind Trump used tear gas and state police to suppress lawful protestors and clear a path to said church. The irony, hypocrisy, and fakery in all this is too much to fathom.

A commentator on my blog some time back...

"I don’t think humanity in general will adopt any kind of remediation practices until long after they are actually needed (i.e. after the population and consumption rates have begun to crash). I don’t think it is possible for a a group as large as 7 billion people to agree that such proactive measures is necessary. After the crisis has begun, yes we’ll do all kinds of things, but remember that by then we will be hampered by the climate crisis and severe shortages of both resources and the technology needed to use them. I have given up speculating on possible outcomes, because they are so inherently unpredictable. But what I’m discovering about the way life works at a deep level makes me continually less optimistic....We can’t manage de-growth, the recognition of limits, or even the application of the Precautionary Principle, because as a collective organism humanity doesn’t have free will. Instead we have an emergent behavior that is entirely oriented towards growth. The game is pretty well over."

I find myself saying, "How many different ways can I say humanity is fucked?"

Over 140 years ago, Friedrich Engels noted how the private ownership of the land, the drive for profit and the degradation of nature go hand in hand. “To make earth an object of huckstering — the earth which is our one and all, the first condition of our existence — was the last step towards making oneself an object of huckstering. It was and is to this very day an immorality surpassed only by the immorality of self-alienation. And the original appropriation — the monopolization of the earth by a few, the exclusion of the rest from that which is the condition of their life — yields nothing in immorality to the subsequent huckstering of the earth.” Once the earth becomes commodified by capital, it is subject to just as much exploitation as labour.

Yes, science helps us to understand what is happening. As Engels said, “ with every day that passes we are learning to understand these laws more correctly and getting to know both the more immediate and the more remote consequences of our interference with the traditional course of nature. … But the more this happens, the more will men not only feel, but also know, their unity with nature, and thus the more impossible will become the senseless and antinatural idea of a contradiction between mind and matter, man and nature, soul and body.”
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/09/06/pandemics-prevention-before-cure/

What do your coworkers think about the current state of affairs? Do they connect it with climate change?

Sorry to hear that you suffer from the same depressive thoughts as me. I suppose at some point I realized what some scientists have theorized...that higher intelligence is a lethal mutation and leads to self-destruction. Thus, make the best of each day because our fossil-fueled civilization is a mere blip in time on the geologic timespan.

https://chomsky.info/20100930/

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.” ― Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

“No one is in control. That is the major source of contemporary fear...” ~ Zygmunt Bauman

In reality, no mainstream media truthfully covers it, if at all:

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-media-impartiality-climate-ethically-misguided.html

https://www.mediamatters.org/abc/abc-news-spent-more-time-royal-baby-one-week-climate-crisis-one-year

https://www.mediamatters.org/broadcast-networks/how-broadcast-news-failed-climate-change-and-hurricane-dorian

https://www.mediamatters.org/abc/solutions-climate-change-get-short-shrift-broadcast-tv-news

https://www.michaelmann.net/content/how-mainstream-media-ignores-climate-change-crisis-may-12-2019

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/apr/22/why-is-the-us-news-media-so-bad-at-covering-climate-change

etc, etc, etc

Yes, some of the comments here are still exhibiting extreme ignorance of basic, settled science. And we have a President who wants to barricade the southern border with a moat filled with alligators and snakes. That is not an Onion headline but a sad, shocking reality.

“The story of its ruin is simple and obvious; and, instead of inquiring why humanity was destroyed, we should rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long.” - Nicholas P. Money

This guy says the same thing(and he's right)....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsbtt-6Dpww

I would like to sleep, someday never to awake and hopefully before I see the worst of what's to come.

Another problem that prevents action is that ordinary individuals can not individually do anything that will make a difference. We are encouraged to recycle. I do, faithfully, but as far as the difference it makes: pfffft. If we all did the same sensible and strategic things, say all 3 billion people in the industrialized world, that would make a big difference. When was the last time such a thing happened? — Bitter Crank

True and this has been proven in research papers and real life:

An Inconvenient Truth: Does Responsible Consumption Benefit Corporations More Than Society?

Are environmental and social problems such as global warming and poverty the result of inadequate governmental regulations or does the burden fall on our failure as consumers to make better consumption choices? According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, responsible consumption shifts the burden for solving global problems from governments to consumers and ultimately benefits corporations more than society.

“When businesses convince politicians to encourage responsible consumption instead of implementing policy changes to solve environmental and social problems, business earns the license to create new markets while all of the pressure to solve the problem at hand falls on the individual consumer. For example, global warming is blamed on consumers unwilling to make greener choices rather than the failure of governments to regulate markets to the benefit of society and the environment,” write authors Markus Giesler and Ela Veresiu (both York University).

The authors studied the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in order to examine the influence of economic elites on the creation of four types of responsible consumers: the bottom-of-the-pyramid consumer, the green consumer, the health-conscious consumer, and the financially literate consumer.

The authors identified a process that shifts responsibility from the state and corporations to the individual consumer. First, economic elites redefine the nature of the problem from political to one of individual consumption (for example, global warming stems from consumers failing to cultivate a sustainable lifestyle). Next, economic elites promote the idea that the only viable solution is for consumers to change their behavior. Third, new markets are created in order to turn this solution into a material reality (eco-friendly light bulbs, hybrid automobiles, energy efficient appliances). Finally, consumers must adopt this new ethical self-understanding.

“The implications of our study are far-reaching and relevant for consumers and policy makers alike. While the responsible consumption myth offers a powerful vision of a better world through identity-based consumption, upon closer inspection, this logic harbors significant personal and societal costs. The responsible consumption myth promotes the idea that governments can never achieve harmony between competing economic and social or environmental goals and that this instead requires a global community of morally enlightened consumers who are empowered to make a difference through the marketplace,” the authors conclude.

Markus Giesler and Ela Veresiu. “Creating the Responsible Consumer: Moralistic Governance Regimes and Consumer Subjectivity.” Journal of Consumer Research: October 2014. For more information, contact Markus Giesler (mgiesleratschulichdotyorkudotca) or visit <a href="http://ejcr.org/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">http://ejcr.org/</a>.

We're dealing with the superstructure of capitalist industrial civilization which cannot be reformed.

Plus recycling is a sham:

'Moment of reckoning': US cities burn recyclables after China bans imports

Plastic pollution: One town smothered by 17,000 tonnes of rubbish

Our waste problem has become a gargantuan, globe-trotting catastrophe!! :(

True. It's happening now and for many, end times have already arrived:

https://www.thenation.com/article/climate-change-media-humanitarian-crises/