I have written about this before, and I remember having discussions about this back to middle and high school. (Including with a teacher who didn’t agree!)
Climate change doesn’t matter. Or, more precisely, whether climate change is happening (which it is), and whether climate change is human created (which it is), doesn’t matter. We still need to make the same changes.
There are innumerable reasons why we need to create a more deeply and genuinely sustainable way of organizing our lives, globally and locally, independent of climate change. We need to because our health and well-being is dependent on the health and well-being of the Earth as a whole. We need to because of unravelling ecosystems, which are life-support systems also for us. We need to because of environmental toxins. We need to because of dying oceans. We need to because of overuse of limited natural resources. We need to because of an economical system theoretically (but not in actuality) divorced from ecological realities. We need to because it harms us to harm non-human living beings. We need to because it harms us to harm future generations of our own and other species. We need to because of international laws and agreements benefiting multi-national corporations while harming people and nature. We need to because it just makes sense. We need to because it will be a boon to innovation and the economy. We need to because living in a way we know supports life (instead of harming it) is good for us as thinking feeling beings.
In this equation, climate change really doesn’t matter. It’s still happening. It’s still caused by us. It’s still serious, and has and will have serious consequences. And it doesn’t matter because there innumerable other reasons why we need to transform ourselves as a society and a species to live in a more deeply and genuinely life-supporting way.