People frequently try to say the right things to convince the "stupid sheep" people but nobody bothers to think of how to convince themselves. Activists typically believe what they believe for bad reasons so they aren't able to make a good argument for why they're right.
How about estimate the future cost of climate change and the cost of various measures to prevent/reduce it. Do they result in a net gain or loss? There's no point doing something will help less than it hurts.
It's hard to predict future costs but we should at least try instead of (incorrectly) pretending it's the end of the world and no expense is too great to stop it. People probably have a sense that some measures (like reforestation) might not be worth the cost but others consider any cost is worth paying if it does anything.
Any investment can be argued to be not worth it before the return is received. If you constrain the timeframe to exclude the timeframe of the expected return, then of course it won't be worth it. Point taken if you're talking about a sufficiently long timeframe, though.
Second, there's the behavior of the thing you're trying to fix. If you're accelerating towards a wall, you don't analyze the cost of switching to your current velocity. You're still going to get smashed apart by the wall. With Covid, people wondered if a lockdown is worth the economic cost compared to not locking down, without stopping to consider if no-lockdown's economic cost exceeds the cost of the lockdown, which is the bleedingly obvious reality. Comparing the cost of mitigating climate change over not mitigating climate change sometimes ignores we aren't in a static reality - the status quo is that we are accelerating in a direction that leads to higher and higher costs.
Finally, the return on an investment can change over time. For many people, planting one tree is obviously worth the cost of planting one tree. I've got space in my backyard, and I have seeds. It's a few square feet and it sequesters about a ton of CO2 over 40 years. I mean, that's a hell of a return on an investment, compared to not planting the tree. Now, that return will go down over time, as it becomes harder and more expensive for society to plant trees, several billion trees from now. But right now it's easy money. A US Citizen can currently offset their own carbon footprint by paying tree-planting services somewhere between $120 and $200 per year. That's cheap. It'll get more expensive over time until the point it's not "worth it" by some argument, and that can also mean that "the effort of offsetting the worlds carbon footprint through world reforestation isn't worth it", but that doesn't mean it's not worth it at first.
How about estimate the future cost of climate change and the cost of various measures to prevent/reduce it. Do they result in a net gain or loss? There's no point doing something will help less than it hurts.
It's hard to predict future costs but we should at least try instead of (incorrectly) pretending it's the end of the world and no expense is too great to stop it. People probably have a sense that some measures (like reforestation) might not be worth the cost but others consider any cost is worth paying if it does anything.