3.9 billion years ago, the first undeniable living thing, a protoprokaryote, appeared on Earth. It did all the things living things do. Among them, it ingested water and carbon dioxide and produced oxygen as a waste. That protoprokaryote did not die; it simply regenerated itself by dividing into two cells identical to the original, as did the two cells and their offspring. For the next two billion years, the prokaryotes, and their mutations, that covered the Earth. By then, they had produced so much waste (oxygen) that the original life-forms began to find themselves restricted to ever more remote and diminished regions as their oxygen-breathing mutants began to take over. Today, the original forms are limited to environments such as pond scum and garbage dumps.
The original protoprokaryote was the ancestor of all plants and animals (all of which have a common genetic language). Now it seems humans are going the same route as the prokaryotes. Our survival is put in peril by our own wastes. We may be at, or very near, the pinnacle of evolution. What follows us may be a devolution to a time when the prokayotes, or some mutations, rule the Earth. People cannot adapt to anywhere near the environmental conditions that bacteria can. Sadly, our imminent extinction will demonstrate that we are no brighter but a great deal more fragile than a simple bacterium.

What's with the snarky "Oakland of all places" comment at the end of the segment about the guy trying to run his coffee shop sustainably? I've lived in Palo Alto and I've lived in Oakland, and believe me, I found a lot more serious and innovative thinking about climate change in Oakland than in P.A. And as to per capita emissions of greenhouse gases, counting consumption, travel, and everything else, I'll bet you and your Stanford colleagues put out about six times as much as the average Oaklander.

Climate Change in my view is a moral issue.
1. Descriptive Definitions of ?morality?: source :http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/morality-definition/
?Morality? is an unusual word. It is not used very much, at least not without some qualification. People do sometimes talk about Christian morality, Nazi morality, or about the morality of the Greeks, but they seldom talk simply about morality all by itself. Consistent with this way of talking, many anthropologists used to claim that morality, like law, applies only within a society. They claimed that ?morality? refers to that code of conduct that is put forward by a society. However, even in small homogeneous societies that have no written language, distinctions are sometimes made among morality, etiquette, law, and religion. So, even for these anthropologists ?morality? does not often refer to every code of conduct put forward by a society.
Etiquette is sometimes included as a part of morality, but it applies to norms that are considered less serious than the kinds of norms for behavior that are part of morality in the basic sense. Hobbes expresses the standard view when he discusses manners. ?By manners I mean not here decency of behavior, as how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth or pick his teeth before company, and such other points of small morals, but those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in peace and unity.? (Leviathan, Chapter XI, paragraph 1)
Law or a legal system is distinguished from morality or a moral system by having explicit written rules, penalties, and officials who interpret the laws and apply the penalties. Although there is often considerable overlap in the conduct governed by morality and that governed by law, laws are often evaluated on moral grounds. Moral criticism is often used to support a change in the law. Some have even maintained that the interpretation of law must make use of morality (Dworkin).
Religion differs from morality or a moral system in that it includes stories about events in the past, usually about supernatural beings, that are used to explain or justify the behavior that it prohibits or requires. Sometimes there is no distinction made between a moral code and a code of conduct put forward by a religion, and there is often a considerable overlap in the conduct prohibited or required by religion and that prohibited or required by morality. But religions may prohibit or require more than is prohibited or required by guides to behavior that are explicitly labeled as moral guides, and may allow some behavior that is prohibited by morality. Sometimes morality is regarded as the code of conduct that is put forward by religion, but even when this is not the case, morality is thought by many to need some religious explanation and justification. However, just as with law, some religious practices and precepts are criticized on moral grounds, e.g., discrimination on the basis of race, gender, or sexual orientation. Morality is only a guide to conduct, whereas religion is always more than this.
When ?morality? is used simply to refer to a code of conduct put forward by any actual group, including a society, whether it is distinguished from etiquette, law, and religion, then it is being used in a descriptive sense. It is also being used in the descriptive sense when it refers to important attitudes of individuals. Just as one can refer to the morality of the Greeks, so one can refer to the morality of a particular person. This descriptive use of ?morality? is now becoming more prominent because of the work of psychologists (Haidt) who have been influenced by the views of David Hume, who tried to present a naturalistic account of moral judgments. In the 20th century, R.M. Hare, in his earlier books (The Language of Morals, Freedom and Reason) regarded moral judgments as those judgments that override all nonmoral judgments and that the person would universalize. This account of moral judgments naturally leads to a view of morality as being concerned with behavior that a person regards as most important and as a guide to conduct that he wants everyone to adopt. All guides to behavior that are normally regarded as moralities involve avoiding and preventing harm to others, but all of them involve other matters as well. Hare's view of morality as that which is most important allows that these other features of morality may be more important than avoiding and preventing harm to others. This view of morality as concerning that which is most important allows those features related to religious practices and precepts, or those features related to customs and traditions, e.g., purity and sanctity, to be more important than avoiding and preventing harm.

The trouble with focusing on an issue is that it leads to reductionism. Think of the value of something when it gets rarer, it drives extinction (The less there is of something, the more it costs to buy).

Things left to grow or stay the same (be preserved), do so best without too much outside interference. It's like money in the bank. If we leave it there and forget about it, interest grows. Should we keep fixating on what we've got, fear that we might lose it and the desire to spend it, in equal portions, leaps into our heads. Panic and desire leads resources to be squandered, not preserved.

mirugal, your input has greatly enriched the topic. I tend to concur with Jacob and Patricia that human extinction will not occur in one great dying off; there will be a recovery of sorts, how far it gets depends upon several factors and is a matter of speculation for another time.
You questioned the matter of consciousness in an evolutionary context, and while I am somewhat out of my tree addressing such a topic, I will offer some speculations.
I would guess that the protoprokaryote and its progeny were ruled by natural (physical-chemical) laws of nature, and though they had the means of locomotion, they lacked any of the self-awareness needed for conscious reactions. After the protoprokaryote, the trail of human lineage becomes fuzzy until the appearance of the "roundish flatworm" about 3 billion years later. Though only a thirty-secondth of an inch long, it had animal features such as a gut and a hydrostatic skeletal system. At this point, rather than speculating on the consciousness from this ancestor onward, it seems desirable to condense 900 million years of evolution into 9 months by considering Ernst Haeckel's theory of recapitulation, which holds that the human embryo repeats the entire course of evolution during its nine months of development.
The newly fertilized human egg, or zygote, is actually an immense advance on the lowly race of prokaryotes. Nevertheless, the zygote also begins without awareness of itself, its environment, or of right and wrong. As the brain and nervous system of the embryo develop, the embryo acquires an unconsciousness and perhaps later, still in the womb, scattered glimpses of consciousness. Consciousness develops mostly after birth, in three stages: awareness of self, awareness of environment and awareness of right and wrong (although nothing in nature is quite that orderly and neat). Nevertheless, this is still the way a naive person might address moral issues:
First, how does it affect me?
Second, how does it affect everyone and everything else?
Third, how does it fit in with universal principles and values (or, perhaps, religious ordinances)?

Fred, I have to challenge you on your interpretation of morality. If I understand you correctly, you are taking the "intuitionist" interpretation of morality, which implies as a given (a) the acceptance of an external authority as arbiter of what one may and should properly do and (b) the concept of what the authority requires. But, as Henry Sidgwick of Oxford pointed out just over a century ago, moral decisions are more complicated and people approach them in three different ways (I alluded to them in my previous comments). Besides the paradigmatic requirements of an authority, we would be remiss to overlook the utilitarian interpretation of morality and what Sidgwick called the "egoistic" interpretation (which you actually used in arguing "we and everybody else in the world should be able to waste all the energy we want, the only limiting factor being how much we feel like paying for it"). The utilitarian might object that such an approach does not produce the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number; the intuitionist might respond that you have completely neglected the influence of such a policy on future generations.
It turns out the that practical morality is extraordinarily amenable to discussion; but raising the question, what kind of discussion? I suggest negotiation is preferable to debate. Debate ends up with a winner and a loser, or else a tie but not necessarily any real progress; negotiation, on the other hand, allows taking the best out of each position to arrive an optimal solution.

I was using a rather older definition of Intuitionism which "regards as the practically ultimate end of moral actions their conformity to certain rules or dictates of Duty unconditionally prescribed." Thus, "discerned directly" means that, to the Intuitionist, actions are right or wrong without consideration of their consequences.
For sure, when Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, he didn't expect debate about them from anyone. That was the point of the whole exercise. That is why the laws of Sumer, the world's first civilization, allegedly came from a Supreme God, and why the laws that Hammurabi presented to Babylon, the world's first empire, also allegedly originated with the Highest God. Because the laws of Sumer, Babylon and Moses allegedly came from a supreme (divine) authority, they were unexceptionable, inviolable, and unalterable. But, even so .....
Consider one of the Ten Commandments, the seventh: "You shall not commit adultery." This commandment was reiterated in elaborated form in Deuteronomy 22:22, which was, from the beginning, understood to apply to all cases in which a married woman had relations with a man other than her husband, including rape under any circumstances. It wasn't long before prominent men realized that it was more convenient to have a troublesome wife raped and stoned to death than it was to go through a messy divorce proceeding. As the bodies of the unfortunate women began to accumulate outside the city gates, such a public protest arose that the rabbis were obliged to revisit their texts, whence they noticed that Deuteronomy 22:22 did not specifically mention rape.Thereupon, they were able to equate the rape of a married woman and that of an engaged virgin. (Deuteronomy 22:23-27) This undoubtedly saved a few married women, though probably not many, since any competent rape-crisis counselor will probably tell you that the laws of Deuteronomy reveal a profound ignorance of the psychology of rape.
On your final point, I am reminded of the environmentalist, Aldo Leopold, who, many decades ago, accused all world leaders, whatever their professed religion, of worshipping at the altar of Technology. It is true that the modern world is sustained by technological progress winning over imminent catastrophe; but, it is a race we must eventually lose. Our only hope is to extricate ourselves from the race and find a rational basis for a moral and sustainable future. (But, I am with you asregards space colonization.)

When we harm the planet we harm ourselves.
It is not so much a question of morality but rather simply and unquestionably a matter of self-abuse.
Be one.
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I missed the Eco Conference in my town this week. There were other priorities. I also missed seeing Carlos Santana, many years ago. Again, there were other priorities. Life often gets in the way of growth. The next world eco conference will be in France in more years than I care to think about. Oh---well. Life has been fun. E.O. Wilson was here, I am told---sorry I missed him.