Wallace-Wells follows that notion I just “cautioned” about, with another not so helpful notion:

“We found a way to engineer devastation, and we can find a way to engineer our way out of it—or, rather, engineer our way toward a degraded muddle, but one that nevertheless extends forward the promise of new generations finding their own way forward, perhaps toward some brighter environmental future.”

Wallace-Wells, David. The Uninhabitable Earth (p. 31). Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition.

This seems destined to feed the geo-engineering hope that many would say is the same kind of techno-optimism that got us here in the first place. I do not at all think that Wallace-Wells is being deliberately deceptive here; just very possibly dangerously naive on that point.