To me this response just seems incoherent.
> The ways in which we fail to address societal issues are not in fact our responsibility, they're a systemic issue that is a function of human nature ... - that will not be solved by morose feelings of condemnation.
Are we not society? Do we not make up the system? But more importantly, you're refuting a statement of responsibility by saying the underlying problem won't be solved by feelings. Whether a statement of moral responsibility is _true_ and whether concurrent emotions on their own solve anything are fundamentally different propositions, and denying one implies nothing about the other. If I murder someone by stabbing them, perhaps that reflects part of human nature -- but a jury telling me I'm guilty is _correct_, even though their condemnation will not bring back my victim. It would be absurd for me to say "oh your moralizing emotional condemnation won't solve the issue of murder which has always existed in human societies, and certainly won't bring back the person I killed -- therefore I'm not responsible."
But somehow, if a few generations knowingly trash a whole planet, aware that this would cause chaos which results in a large number of deaths, illness, property damage, etc you want to believe that the fact that morose feeling will not suck carbon out of the atmosphere somehow implies that responsibility cannot be assigned.
One can argue about whether moral statements can meaningfully be "true" (I think they can), but one can't jump from "moral condemnation doesn't on its own solve problems" to "therefore moral responsibility can be denied in any instance".
If anything, I think the reluctance to fully face the problem and acknowledge our role in it, and to recognize the ways in which our own lives will need to be different to stop exacerbating the problem, is part of the foot-dragging.
> The whole thing reminds me of this thread [1] from a few weeks ago referencing Orwell's critique of Dickens:
>>> The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work.
But The Ministry for the Future is basically nothing _but_ constructive suggestions put in a nice palatable narrative container. We're not talking about a moral judgement in the absence of specific ideas about how to address climate change, environmental justice, and even wealth inequality. We're talking about acknowledging responsibility when, though opportunities stare us in the face, we do little or nothing to fix the situation we've created.