Today’s environmental problems are certainly bad, but it’s nothing compared to 30 or 40 years ago.

What we lack in degree, we make up for in volume. "Carbon emissions aren't nearly so bad as sulfur emissions" is technically true, right up until you're living in a village that's crushed by a glacier.

The global scale of industry is so much larger than it was 30 or 40 years ago. Even if you want to talk about microplastics, we're creating such an enormous waste disposal crisis that it's having cumulative effects at scale. The Holocene Extinction has not abated in the last generation. It's accelerating.