That quote in isolation is also evidence-free (and sort of appalling imo), I’ll have to look into all that Ord has to say about this. But I’d like to point out that choosing whether to improve lives in rich vs poor countries is not equivalent to choosing whether or not to engage with climate change aggressively.
The article is specific critique of the idea of longtermism. The article puts together a number of arguments and quotes showing people following the logic of weighing purely hypothetical far-future people against the actual interests of real people and advocating resource transfers accordingly. I've shown a bit of this in the quote above.
That quote in isolation is also evidence-free
-- Are you implying some caveat or extra bit of information could make the quote OK?
No just that cherrypicking quotes like that (by the author, not by you) does not really show that longtermism and climate change efforts are mutually exclusive, _even if_ it shows one influential and potentially mistaken person believes they are. Like I said before, I'm just looking for a plausible example of where pursuit of environmental goals would negatively affect the lives of people 10^3, 10^4, 10^5, 10^6 years in the the future; basically I think one can be an adherent to longtermism without having to denigrate environmentalism. The strawman the article creates is that these things are mutually exclusive when they are not, and creating this false dichotomy is not helpful to any of the important causes in question.
