Sometimes you find support for your position in the most unlikely places. In the New York Times, Eduardo Porter has been looking at the "Eco-modernist Manifesto", a document produced by a group of (mainly) academics including several from the Breakthrough Institute and Mark Lynas as well.
Here's the introduction to the manifesto.
To say that the Earth is a human planet becomes truer every day. Humans are made from the Earth, and the Earth is remade by human hands. Many earth scientists express this by stating that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans.
As scholars, scientists, campaigners, and citizens, we write with the conviction that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene. A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.
In this, we affirm one long-standing environmental ideal, that humanity must shrink its impacts on the environment to make more room for nature, while we reject another, that human societies must harmonize with nature to avoid economic and ecological collapse.
Remarkably, Porter seems to accept these views and even suggest that depriving destitute Africans of the benefits of fossil fuels is not actually a good thing to do.
Exciting times.