First, there clearly is a difference in minutes of suffering, because some degree of suffering causes your heart to fail and then you die and either a) stop suffering (annihilationism) b) experience total bliss (heaven) or c) experience eternal constant torment

Second, certainty scales fuzzily with time. I can be confident somebody will die in the next 10 minutes if I can observe their pace of bloodless. I can be much less confident that a person of a given age will die in the next year. Likewise, I can be confident a person’s life will not improve in 10 minutes. I cannot be confident of the same over 10 years. Certainty degrades very rapidly.

Third, related to his argument about “if you’d destroy some net negative lives you should destroy all net negative lives,” no, not remotely true. Suppose we decide gila monsters have net negative lives and so in general it makes sense to prevent gila monsters from existing. But we also find that people with net positive lives are made extremely happy by the gila monster species existing. In that case continuing the net negative lives of gila monsters may make sense. For example, if they turn out to have magical saliva. More generally, because existence itself has nontrivial positive value apart from any suffering attendant on existing, we should be wary of any kind of exterminationist approach: it is simply better to have more life existing than less even if a given life has net-zero experiential wellbeing and possibly even slightly net negative, because existence aside from experience is not a zero-value thing.

The fact that an article on nature-paving does not upfront and foremost tackle the question of existence-value suggests the nature pavers have actually never read any of the literature on how environmental goods are valued. And that, my friends, checks out.