I think if you surround yourself with children it becomes difficult to hear the adults. It's too easy to drop a hot take and then dip out of the conversation, retreating back to safety, and never develop the tools needed for critical thinking or self-reflection.
You'll never have a chance to understand how the everyday people who aren't edgy internet pals see you, or why, or what that means for your life.
I mean your statement boils down to "is it possible for evil to do good" and I think the general consensus after a few thousand years of thought is "not really".
Initially I approached this concept as "can good do evil?" but after some reflection I think we have a series of choices and what we do in the moment is the only thing that matters. Good is only good if it does good.
If you want to tie religion into the issue, ask yourself "Is it possible to do evil in the name of good?"
Maybe? I wouldn't say there was any straw man argument here honestly. More just that they misunderstand issues regarding climate change. They think that people are saying that climate change is causing deforestation, and arguing against that. That's pretty easy to confuse with what people are actually trying to raise awareness of, which is that deforestation is leading to climate change (those same plants that thrive off the additional CO2 in the atmosphere can't do so if the additional CO2 in the atmosphere is there because they're already dead before they can take it out of the atmosphere).
Yes, plants grows massively faster with higher CO2, plants has been CO2 starved for millions of years now but add it in labs and you can see plants growing more than 100% faster.
Probably the reason we see less mineral density in crops today, CO2 levels has risen so they grow faster but mineral supply is the same. So probably not very beneficial, we aren't lacking in plant calories as is.
Note: Deforestation continues at a record pace in tropical areas, which leads to less trees and plants to consume the CO2. The exact parts of the planet that should be thriving is being turned into cattle pastures.
The other big sink for CO2 is the ocean, which does not thrive on CO2. CO2 in water turns the water more acidic, which affects the base of the food chain.
There's no propaganda that suggests that plants don't thrive in CO2.
This isn't "Woke Mind Virus", it's just Corporate Pandering. Apple has a huge PR problem with their factories in China, and they've determined that it's cheaper to "Be Green" than to fix their supply chain or move manufacturing back to the US. Their moves towards being green aren't "Bad", but they wouldn't be doing it if they didn't have to create PR to paper over the things they're doing that are actually Bad.
And this is just the iceberg for the beginning of conversation.
No one cares to watch the experts presented that aren't on the "CO2 is evil" bandwagon, nor then actually spending the time to counter their many arguments of these complex issues.
I don't understand yet why no one has created a "Wikipedia" for various organizations to list and offer their counter-argument for the 1000s of different talking points, so then everyone can view them in a matrix/table format - not only for the climate issue and climate alarmism, but for other complex issues such as the Israel-Palestine "conflict".
P.S. There's no life in the ocean that grows from CO2, and that then fish et al eat?
"Through photosynthesis, phytoplankton consume carbon dioxide on a scale equivalent to forests and other land plants."
"There are a billion billion billion phytoplankton in the world's oceans—more than there are stars in the sky. Phytoplankton are hugely diverse, with likely 100 thousand different species."
