The oil barons have bought it.

...allowing fossil fuel economies to have ANY input in climate discussions, let alone leading those discussions, is straight-out suicide.

to the billions of poor people of the world who had little to do with causing the climate crisis. I keep thinking of Bangladesh, caught between glacial melt floods from the Himalayas and sea level rise in their flat river deltas.

The chances keep getting smaller, and it's tempting to give up and ride out our last decades in as much comfort as we can achieve, but we must still make an effort. Every bit we can do to slow down the rate of change will save innocent lives - and innocent species.

...save innocent lives or species if we don't achieve a certain level of progress, in a certain amount of time.

We are nowhere near where we need to be and we seem to be slowing down more and more each day.

Sorry for the pessimism but I'm beginning to lose hope.

But time is the key factor. Besides the measurement of 1.5C or 1.8C targets, there is the amount of time before we hit those numbers. Slowing the rate of change will give people time to adapt or move, and will give people time to move plant species to higher latitudes (that has begun), and give animal species time to change migration patterns or move to cooler climes.

...the ecological changes that about to start snowballing and cascading will not be held back unless we make major changes to our activities VERY soon.

This is not something that we pretend we can do on our chosen timeline.

I try to think of despair as a a first-world luxury, even if it's justified.

The changes are in process. If we stop emitting carbon right now, it will take years for things already in the process to turn around. There are many positive feedback loops like wildfires and methane clathrate emission that will continue and make things worse. Meanwhile, the global and national organs which could make quick and drastic change happen have been co-opted by petrobarons.

It looks to me like the only way we will make the drastic changes necessary to reverse the process will now be through catastrophe. Worldwide climate revolution is VERY unlikely. Using the pandemic as a model, we see that catastrophe can slow emissions, but that instance was temporary and quickly reversed when the first-world petroeconomy came booming back.

In the meantime, every ton of carbon we save will slow hitting 2C by some small amount, and buy time for some coastal Bangladeshis to find higher ground, or for some low-latitude plant ecosystems to find a new home. Despair is not a good reason to give up and accelerate the rate of change.

We missed the boat in the 1970s. Following the artificial OPEC "energy crisis", Jimmy Carter tried to change the paradigm by putting solar cells on the White House. The (heh) deep state (aka Wall Street) immediately struck back and Reagan took them down. That was the turning point that ultimately doomed billions to misery and death. We've delayed for too long.