Answer:
They’re USEFUL - we have populated the planet far beyond the level that can be supported by a primitive hunter-gatherer or even a pre-industrialization agriculture model. We require minerals and fossil fuels and so forth, or vast numbers of people will die.
It’s very ironic that the individuals who rail the hardest against our industrialized activities (or at least key components of them, such as the oil industry) are the ones who present themselves as caring so much about humanity. I think they just haven’t thought this through - if they could wave a wand and cause all mining and oil production and so on to simply vanish, they’d be directly murdering an enormous number of people.