Well...I see "keep the Earth at least (say) 80% as habitable as it currently is" as an "absolute must-do" engineering requirement. Praising progress already made, proclaiming faith in humanity's potential to unify toward that goal, etc. - those are social niceties & tactics. Extremely useful in advancing one's own social status within certain segments of the population. Not so useful in actually meeting the must-do requirement.

Certainly my own experience with big, tough "must-do" projects is that there's damned little overlap between the folks who jump up to do 95% of the posturing and talking, and the folks who show up and do 95% of that actual hard work needed to succeed. And that second crowd has fairly underwhelming respect for most of the first crowd.