The claim that scissor statements are dangerous is itself a scissor statement: I think it’s obviously false, and will fight you over it. Social interaction is not that brittle. It is important to notice the key ruptures between people’s values/beliefs. Disagreements do matter, in ways that sometimes rightly prevent cooperation.
World population is ~2^33, so 33 independent scissor statements would set you frothing in total war of everyone against everyone. Except people are able to fluidly navigate much, much higher levels of difference and complexity than that. Every topic and subculture has fractal disagreements, each battle fiercely fought, and we’re basically fine. Is it productive to automatically collaborate on a project with someone who disagrees with your fundamental premises? How should astronomy and astrology best coexist, especially when one of the two is badly out-numbered?
Vigorous, open-ended epistemic and moral competition is hard. Neutrality and collaboration can be useful, but are always context-sensitive and provisional. They are ongoing negotiations, weighing all the different consequences and strategies. A fighting couple can’t skip past all the messy heated asymmetric conflicts with some rigid absolutes about civil discourse.
I expect you already know this, but, the role of activists is not the same as the role of experts, and that’s okay. You will never know everything relevant to the situation you’re hoping to intervene in. Even if you did, institutions ignore their own environmental experts all the time. Usually, you aren’t there as some sort of policy consultant, you’re there to pressure their interests into alignment with yours. Even if you have zero clue what other constraints they are balancing, it can still be reasonable to loudly voice your problems; you are yourself one of their constraints. (There’s actually an analogy you could make with price signals, where the buyer and seller don’t need to know the other’s budget calculations, they just need to freely pursue their goals against one another.)
Ideological information is still information, the high-level conceptual narratives and emphases you place on different factors. It felt like the aura of ‘seriousness’ you talk about with money points to something more general: tradeoffs. Black-and-white thinking in politics is, uh, easy to fall into. But it’s a lot more powerful when you can say, “Sure, there are benefits/harms x y and z...and they’re completely outweighed by a b and c.” You can pay attention to those tradeoffs without losing sight of the Very Important Things. Maybe x needs to be mitigated more carefully. Maybe y is a core obstacle that needs to be dealt with first.
Obviously, though, having some in-depth subject knowledge doesn’t hurt! It helps you make sure you’re fighting for the right thing, in the most effective way, and can give you greater legitimacy dealing with other parties. It’s a tragic historical fluke that radicals the last few decades have been so, innumerate and technophobic. Get a few of your activist friends and call yourselves a research team, or a reading circle, and then spread whatever knowledge you gain. I think you’re on the right track, and good luck. :)