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The primary reason is founder effects. Being a part of the rationalist diaspora, this community started out with a disproportionate amount of techno-optimist libertarians and has mostly shrunk since then. There are ways to get here from the collapsnik corner of the internet, but the path is much less straightforward than from the tech world, especially these days. I came by that road once upon a time, but it has since become overgrown and the markers have been lost.
You'll find a more receptive audience in the comments section at John Greer's blog, assuming you're not already a regular. His posts about astrology and magic may be offputting to some (then again, we have a lot of kooky ideas floating around here ourselves), but he wrote most of what he needed to about collapse at his old blog (archived here and several other places) and seems like the kind of person you might have found posting in some alternate universe 70's environmentalist version of the Motte.
I'll give the response to your 5 points from Greer's perspective (I read every post of his for about a decade, so I have a pretty good sense of it) rather than my own, because my beliefs are both more uncertain and less interesting than his:
While it's true that our society is in a downward spiral, these things take many lifetimes to play out (insert a reference to The Long Emergency by Kunstler) and worrying about imminent doom is simply the inverse of the idea that the AI singularity will solve all our problems overnight and usher in an age of fully-automated luxury space communism. In both cases, it serves as an excuse to abdicate responsibility for the future, since who cares what we do now if we'll all either die from climate change or be uploaded into a virtual utopia by our benevolant AI overlords?
What things will look like on the ground is that each successive generation will use a little less energy than their parents. There will be no abrupt discontinuity, outside of the wars and conflicts to which humans are prone in any age. The future won't look like a carbon copy of some period in the distant and barbaric past, as though you rewound the tape of history, but many innovations and inventions of our modern world will persist in some form, even if you falsely assume that all remaining nuclear or fossil fuels will be completely used up or inaccessible (the radio, the printing press, the bicycle, ultralight solar-powered aircraft, the germ theory of medicine, trains, hydropower, etc. don't need oil or coal to work). We aren't the first civilization to decline and we won't be the last; this cycle of birth and decay is something the Greeks, Indians, and Chinese all figured out and learned to live with thousands of years ago.
Climate change may render parts of the world undesirable to live in, but the Earth's flora and fauna, humans included, will rearrange themselves and find ways to adapt to this (in geologic terms) puny extinction event. Pandemics are nothing new either, and the Black Death didn't destroy Latin Christendom. If all our chickens and cows die from bird flu, then I guess that serves us right for factory farming, but it's not as though we'll run out of food (unless you're Jordan Peterson and on a carnivore diet or something). The birthrate problem is one that solves itself, as people who want to have children will quickly replace the ones who don't. Lastly, we won't have to worry about maintaining industrial civilization, because industrial civilization is by its nature unsustainable.
If you want someone else's very different thoughts on that last point, then check out Anatoly Karlin's series on Malthusian industrialism. The long and the short of it is that maybe dysgenics will trap us temporarily in a bad equilibrium where our descendants are just smart enough to preserve civilization but too dumb to make any advancements, living in crowded slums like third world megacities today, but this situation will itself provide eugenic selective pressure and bring IQ's back up enough to climb out of the hole.
Thanks for this reply. I am indeed a Greer-nik, and it seems that my post was too doomerish (judging from many other comments) to convey that. I share many of the perspectives that you write here as a Greer-sockpuppet. If I were to rewrite my original post reflecting this, I think I would probably reframe it terms of that perspective. Instead of the framing of "why aren't we more worried about these slow moving, natural, and impossible to stop problems", I would try and state instead: "why is the motte so concerned about things like AI/colonizing mars etc. when those things are energetically impossible pipe dreams?" I'm also not advocating we do nothing, but rather I see our resources (energy, but also human intelligence) as being misspent on futile treadmilling rather than "collapsing now to avoid the rush" as Greer might say. Localizing agriculture and manufacturing are really important for preserving the innovations that this civilization has built, and we are really not doing that at all.
I would like to take the time to reply to a lot of those down thread, but I think, because of what you state in the first paragraph, there is not much point. We are looking at different the world through two completely different narratives. Inconvenient facts like declining EROI of every fuel source we are using and greater and greater dependence on fragile global supply change can be brushed away in the name of technological innovation or market efficiency. At the end of the day our system is predicated on infinite growth, which is impossible on a finite planet, and when we bump up against those limits there will be some kind of collapse.
Welcome to the club. I've been posting along similar themes on here for several years, and it is nice to see someone else taking his points seriously. I've personally eaten vast numbers of downvotes for advocating his position on nuclear energy, but a lot of his other articles have gotten decent receptions here.
I think that this is something that can only be done by people in their own individual lives. I'm personally doing what I can (though part of me protests and says I could be doing more...), and while it would be nice if society actually turned around and wanted to implement this, I don't think the incentive structures and interest groups that actually run and control western governments would endorse this in the slightest.
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