Yeah - his point is that bacon costs $14 a pound because that's what your friendly neighborhood butcher has to charge for it. The $11/lb difference is the stuff that's gonna shake out when things fall apart.

Because that's his larger point - things are falling apart, things will continue to fall apart, and when putting things back together again requires the entire planet working together towards a better future, the prudent course is to plan for a fallen apart world. The entire first half of Eaarth isn't that a dark future is an inevitability, it's that the dire predictions everyone is making are likely to come true because that's the direction of inertia and short of a fundamental sea-change in culture, you'd best prepare for the worst. He goes out of the way to argue that everyone should do what they can to minimize that dire future because every little bit helps but also argues that little bits aren't going to get us to the same place that sweeping cultural change will.

It's a long damn way from conspiracy theory. He named his environmental organization 350.org because 350ppm CO2 is where we hit irreversible climate change; we've hit 400.

My opinion here is that we're best served by finding solutions that need little or no change from the public, and lacking those, how do we manage the ensuing failures?

The subtitle of the book is "making a life on a tough new planet." This sentence is basically the whole drive of the book. You might like it.