8 Comments

Brilliant and wonderfully explained, as usual.

Everyone will have their own peculiar angle that will call for some different kind of focus, though, and mine is the over-mention of the concept of “we decided…” Corporations own all the institutions of our modern world, and “they” decide on particular methods of resource capture and extraction and production nearly wholly unconstrained by other forces. None of the excellent critics mentioned here are of any significance against this massed global fossil fuel force and its drive to continue ur and amplify profits.

Corporations, including state corporations, are the supreme ultrasocial method of driving humanity to its self-caused extinction. Look how they dominate the lives of the critics: Greer is now a Trumpian tool,; Garrett works within the corporate higher education establishment; Substack is itself a corporate arm. Murphy got paychecks for being part of the nonsensical space race. Hagens gets paychecks “advising world leaders” XR protestors walk into criminal “justice” traps that corporations sponsor.

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true, true. corporations definitely accelerate (and greenwash) the damage!

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In essence: TOO MANY HUMANS are using TOO MANY NATURAL RESOURCES and producing TOO MUCH POLLUTION, and the oh so obvious solution: CONTRACEPTION to prevent the suffering otherwise facing children not yet conceived, and the dramatic INDIVIDUAL reduction in our carbon footprints and waste production.

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Yes to birth control and end to pro-natalism - AND - in "An Inconvenient Apocalypse", Robert Jensen suggests that what we will realistically see (also/instead), is looser "death control". Our modern pharmaceuticals, medical devices and emergency care are temporary anomalies. Nature will render them obsolete, and that too will influence population numbers. (I tend to focus on what is likely to happen, rather than ponder much about what should)

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Don't know what you mean by "death control", euthanasia? I'm 79 and a retired physician/psychiatrist/addictionist/recovered alcoholic-addict/stress researcher and author of the free online e-book PDF, "Stress R Us". If I know nothing else, it is that wisdom is the product of a long life with a curious mind and great skepticism about all things "modern". Nature has already rendered humanity "obsolete" and much, much worse.

Population density stress, defined in the book, is well along in the natural process of population extinction due to massive overpopulation and crowding. As for looser "death control", not to worry, our healthcare "industry" and predatory capitalism is in high gear to drive us all over the edge of extinction. Every day now, given the state of the US, I wonder what I'd do with 4 mgm of fentanyl, if it were offered to me. I have lost faith in humanity, after a lifetime of saving lives. Let that sink in.

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What I was referring to is that, if we think of the population at any given moment as the occupancy of a room, then the headcount is a matter not only of the rate at which people enter, but of the rate at which they exit. I mean to acknowledge that, yes, we have 8B+ humans alive today because of the birth rate (typically seen as mainly a Global South problem) but also because of the low death rate (a situation more typical of the Global North where we benefit from life-extending medicine and surgery)

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Bob Jensen does a better job of explaining- see the 7th “Bob Jensen” text block in the transcript here: https://www.postcarbon.org/crazytown/bonusbobjensen/

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So, last time I checked, about 265,000 human children are born daily, and about 65,000 of us die, leaving a net gain of 200,000. Here's what I mean: I am a fan of euthanasia. Give me 4mgm of fentanyl and I'll get out of the way return to dust under a favorite White Pine tree. Something has to give or population density stress will be the death of us, and a gruesome death it will be/is, let alone the prospects for any child born today facing the very real possibility of

celebrating a 23rd BD in a world 6 degC hotter than the 1991-2020 baseline (C3S).

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