I wasn’t aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.
I wasn’t aware just how good the news is on the green energy front until reading this. We still have a tough road in the short/medium term, but we are more or less irreversibly headed in the right direction.
We’re dealing with multiple imminent great filters that not only make the ecosystem way less inhabitable but will drastically slow the rate of recovery to where it will sustain diverse life again.
We’re already seeing agriculture fail, water supplies dry up, people migrate due to intolerable climate, evacuation of islands due to sea level rise, and so on.
If we succeed in mitigating the crisis and reaching net zero emissions, it’ll still be damage control rather than preventing disaster.
A massive population correction is inevitable. Our society, our culture, our way of life will all be radically altered into something unrecognizable. And we may be due for millennia of iron-age life if not a return back to migratory survival.
And that’s assuming we survive the next few centuries at all. Our existential risk is no longer insignificant.
Doomerism like this is fucking stupid and definitely leads to the wrong thing, which is to do nothing. If we’re already fucked, why even try? The truth is that IF we try, we very well might be able to avoid the worst. Which is worth fighting for.
I think you are misrepresenting the take. I’m only describing the situation, which, yes, may lead to some people giving up.
I’m skeptical of just doing something even if it’s useless, but that’s not to say there is nothing to be done.
When it comes to solving the rise of authoritarianism and movements towards autocracy, we don’t know what to do. The things we usually do (protest, escalate to violence) either don’t affect change, or can wreck society. But that means figuring out what to do, even if it means trying what hasn’t been done before.
In the case of the US, ours is a huge society that teams with the chaos of complexity, so we will have plenty of opportunities to sabotage the transnational white power movement’s takeover through local action seizing on this vulnerability. Think of the dinosaur clones on Isla Nublar breeding, migrating to the mainland and finding enough lysine to survive, despite all the efforts to keep them in control. (The infighting and brain-drain within the organizations trying to seize power may eventually drive them to collapse as well, but we have to give that time to fester).
In the case of the climate and plastic crises, we are fucked. The global food supply infrastructure will collapse and people are going to die. Few people like to look at those models (so most scientists just say this will be bad if it gets to here), so the few estimates suggest that if we act now to mitigate climate effects and drastically drop greenhouse emissions, we might be able to get the world to continue to sustain one billion people on the long term.
Do note that is seven billion people less than we have, and people who are alive today will get to experience this drop. Famine is going to become the new in thing, and it’s the sort of death we don’t wish on our worst enemies… unless we’re Benjamin Netanyahu.
Sophie From Mars has a long form discussion video The World Is Not Ending where she discusses the range of outcomes, noting that the concentration of wealth and power to people who cannot think rationally about it, except to hoard it, decides whether we figure out better how to organize and cooperate, or exist in a Mad Max future with far fewer cars and more cannibalism.
I don’t indulge in opinions, except to say I’m afraid of the cannibal famine future, and I’m afraid we might well kill ourselves, and not in a cool way like AI takeover or robot apocalypse. But I also recognize that we naked apes are not rational and have to be clever even to choose to govern ourselves by logic rather than feelings. We do tragedize any commons we come across, and that’s a habit we will have to break. I don’t yet know how.
It’s not to say we’re doomed. Rather it’s to say the odds of us coming out of this are really bad, considering the path of least resistance. We better start figuring out how we’re going to cleverly emerge from this fine mess.
The world population is going to stop growing, naturally, within the next decades as the last populous countries finish their demographic transition. It’s even going to see a reduction in many places unless steered against due to way below placement rate fertility. Long story short human fertility is intimately tied to child mortality: The fewer children die, the fewer kids we have, investing in quality over quantity.
The earth can easily sustain that population, even in a more fucked up state.