Or what other name might we give to this phenomenon of dismissing extinction level mistakes with the appeal to the idea that "hey, it's progress"?
If you don't acknowledge any of the tradeoffs involved in pollution and instead just make a point about harm in a vacuum, it's hard to know how to consider it.
Like the overwhelming exceptionalism of how we all care about the environment and the future health of our children... just don't take our gas-guzzling cars and non-stick pans way!
We are not rational beings, but we so deeply believe we are.
If the cybertruck was out a year earlier, I suspect I know a few people driving "gas guzzling" trucks that would have bought that instead, because it would have been cheaper, faster, and in almost every measurable and unmeasurable quality, better.
Why do you think people will forever hold on to ICE? It strikes me that electric cars are a step change in almost every way, maybe the reason people still have ICE is they didnt have a compatible electric alternative at the time.
Noble savage = humans fundamentally corrupted by civilisational progress
unless you're actually arguing for toxic chemicals in the water that didn't exist more than 60 years ago
All of those commenters deconstructing my clumsy use of "Noble Savage" (I admit it's not quite the right thing) - are indeed (maybe wilfully) missing the point.
A better expression might be the "Parochialism of the present". But that doesn't quite get to it. Nor even Thomas Hobbes' flowery and overblown conceit of past life as "Nasty, brutish and short".
It's about a phenomenon of lionising a one dimensional idea of "progress" in a patently self-deceiving way.