Cleaning all that stuff up is an opportunity for growth. Entire industries will need to be involved in order to pull it off.

That’s like saying poisoning is good for people because the sicker people are, the more hospitals and doctors you’ll need. The money has to come from somewhere. There is no profit in cleaning up messes, just loss reduction. The money, trillions of dollars just for climate change alone, has to come from somewhere. If past generations had not been so greedy, that money would be in our pockets. Instead, it will be burned because we have to clean up the unfathomable messes older people have created.

No, it is saying that it is worth it to clean up after ignorance and folly.

And there are eventually gains to be had.

Those clean areas are worth more, the money paid to labor means demand, growth, etc...

We can still do those things.

Perhaps we need to value things differently.

Instead of what could have been, we can and need to focus on what can be.

Longer term, that is the better play.

We all live here and are going to do that for a very long time yet.

It is worth it to make sure living here makes sense, period.

Sounds like the broken window fallacy: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/08/broken-window-fa...

The fallacy is that it's good to break windows. Even though it's not good to break them, fixing windows that are already broken is worthwhile.

In some cases, sure, where there is a clearly identifiable problem. But widespread pollution is particularly insidious because it can cause large amounts of people to develop serious health issues that have no clear cause and no reliable treatment.

Only on hacker news would your comment be ok and the parent is downvoted

Sure. That's great. But where are the incentives to promote this "opportunity" to those who want to do so without net loss?