sound familiar?

From Hocus Pocus by Kurt Vonnegut:

In it, I remember, Wilder said that the trouble with conservationists was that they never considered the costs in terms of jobs and living standards of eliminating fossil fuels or doing something with garbage other than dumping it in the ocean, and so on.

Ed Bergeron said to him, "Good! Then I can write the epitaph for this once salubrious blue-green orb." He meant the planet.

Wilder gave him his supercilious, vulpine, patronizing, silky debater's grin. "A majority of the scientific community," he said, "would say, if I'm not mistaken, that an epitaph would be premature by several thousand years."

..."You want to hear the epitaph?"...

"If we must," said Wilder, and the grin went on and on. "I have to tell you though, that you are not the first person to say the game was all over for the human race. I'm sure that even in Egypt before the first pyramid was constructed, there were men who attracted a following by saying, 'It's all over now.'"

"What is different about now as compared with Eqypt...the difference is that we have the misfortune of knowing what's really going on," said Bergeron, "which is no fun at all. And this has given rise to a whole new class of preening, narcissistic quacks like yourself who say in the service of rich and shameless polluters that the state of the atmosphere and the water and the topsoil on which all life depends is as debateable as how many angels can dance on the fuzz of a tennis ball."

Bergeron's epitaph for the planet, I remember...was this:

WE COULD HAVE SAVED IT, BUT WE WERE TOO DOGGONE CHEAP.

Only he didn't say "doggone."