Environ-mentally Challenged

Candlewhisper Archive is a smart nation, with well developed educational systems, an ingrained cultural love of knowledge in all its forms, and a high level of scientific literacy.

How is it then, that it has such a poor track record with environmentalism? The following transcribed excerpt from an online video-chat might provide insight:

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HairyGuy: Look, it's not as if we don't believe in global warming. We're not idiots. We've read the papers, assessed the evidence, absorbed the XKCD comic. We know that the environment is going to crap. We're just... realistic.
SpaceRace2000: For sure, though I prefer pragmatic. The world is full of lunatics, right? There's extremist nations out there with nukes aplenty, and the population of the planet is growing so fast that the World Census can't keep up. What are the odds of Planet Earth surviving for another hundred years?
HairyGuy: Close to zero. And that's the point.
BigEyedSmallMouthedGirl: That's a tad nihilistic, wouldn't you say? Look, nuclear stockpiles have been multiplying since 2003, and Brasilistan has been nuked... how many times... but generally there's peace all across the world. I can't see that the various nation-states are going to be annihilated any time soon.
SpaceRace2000: Look, it's a numbers game, expected outcome and all that.
HairyGuy: We all know how to work the stats, no need to go into that.
SpaceRace2000: Sure, sure. But if CWA were to go all eco-friendly, we'd be diminishing our wealth and industrial output. If we were living in a sane world, where we're thinking about future generations living on this rock of a planet, then it'd be a no brainer to take a productivity cut now to serve the future. The greatest good, and all that.
HairyGuy: And all that.
BigEyedSmallMouthedGirl: I get the feeling you're not suggesting nihilism here, but rather the Big Leap Outwards.
SpaceRace2000: Got it in one. Our moral responsibility to future generations is to maximise their chance of survival. To do that, we need to get off this planet - which is frankly doomed - and to get space colonised asap. If that means doing damage to our ecosphere here to give us the economic boost to make space programs feasible, then mathematically that's a sacrifice worth making.
BigEyedSmallMouthedGirl: But what about the immediate externalities? The short lifespan of your average Archivist, the awful cancer rates, the destruction of wild life. Don't you care?
SpaceRace2000: Call me cold and logical -
HairyGuy: You are that, you green-blooded Vulcan.
SpaceRace2000: Thanks. As I said, it may be cold and logical, but its maths. It's about the maximum chance of human survival -
HairyGuy: Correction, of mindstate survival.
SpaceRace2000: Correction accepted, please stop interrupting me though... It's about the maximum chance of mindstate survival in the universe as a whole. We have scant decades to get ourselves off Earth and into space. Ecological concerns deal with the health of the planet in centuries, but that's irrelevant: we won't be here to see the benefits of environmentalism.
BigEyedSmallMouthedGirl: Sounds like cognitive dissonance to me, justifying a self-destructive and short-sighted attitude to make yourself feel better.
HairyGuy: She got you there.
SpaceRace2000: Yeah, you got me there. Ah well.

(transcript ends)