Comment by Animats

Many arguments arise over the valuation of future money. See "discount function" [1] At one extreme are the rational altruists, who rate that near 1.0, and the "drill, baby, drill" people, who are much closer to 0.

The discount function really should have a noise term, because predictions about the future are noisy, and the noise increases with the distance into the future. If you don't consider that, you solve the wrong problem. There's a classic Roman concern about running out of space for cemeteries. Running out of energy, or overpopulation, turned out to be problems where the projections assumed less noise than actually happened.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discount_function