I might be missing something but population growth isn’t necessarily synonymous with economic growth though, is it?
No, you’re quite right, it isn’t. Infant mortality as a measurable yardstick and its relationship to economic growth isn’t the same thing though (although I grant you, as a side effect, it does tend to result in population growth).
Economic growth isn’t necessarily required for a reduction in infant mortality, even if it has correlated with it in the past?
Nicely euphemistic term “de-growth”. The elephant in the room is population growth, and it’s a wounded bull-elephant with a rage-boner and anthrax. There are a lot of creative means to try to prevent anthropogenic ecosystem collapse, thus allowing the unchecked “virus-with-shoes” growth of our population to mindlessly continue - but the absolute best you’re doing is delaying confronting the issue and leaving it to generations yet unborn to deal with instead. And we all know kids are fucking idiots, right?
Right.
Dancing alongside the septic proboscoidean, is the Irritable Goat of “Why the fuck should all of humanity accept an ever-declining quality of life just so the gamete-incontinent can satisfy their selfish, primate urge to shit-out worthless, brachiating progeny all over the face of the Earth?”
Good question, Mr. Goat, good fucking question.
Sure, for the simple-minded sky-faery believers the answer is simple: it feeds the machine and along the way, makes the Baby Jeebus happy. Same is true for most belief systems - including capitalism and socialism. They’re all just machines that need feeding with pointless human lives - all so that tiny numbers of greed-ghouls and clinical egomaniacs can wield power and wealth . . . . . taking us squarely back to the topic of Sex Toys In Space…
Personally, being at the very least a sociopath, I wouldn’t hesitate to Thanos the fuck out of every human being with a subpar IQ, criminal record, pro-Brexit, bigots of every stripe, Trumptards, anyone who hurts animals for fun, Sun and Daily Mail readers, Wetherspoons-owners … fucking long list, you know how it goes, I’d probably crumble myself inadvertently, but so what?
I get this far and despair. We need to slow, stop and reverse population growth - we need to start talking about it now, we need to educate, inform, empower and enrich, and we need to do it voluntarily or the alternative will be condemning unborn billions to something far, FAR worse than not selfishly getting their own childish way about every fucking thing they think they want… It’s not going to be very fucking popular - which is kind of ironic - but when did being popular get to be the one and only policy 8 billion fucking morons agreed on?
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There are places where it is happening. I was reading today that in 50 years or so Japan may be down to 30M but on the other hand Nigeria may be up to 800M. Demographic bulges, very much out of sync with one another. I understood that current thinking was that population will peak soonish & then start to decline.
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Again- correct; the article I linked to goes so far as to note that.
The thing is that de-growth; an actual curtailment of activity and reduction in output, generally results in marked decline in various demographic markers. Thus far, in human history, degrowth comes with death. My point- and it’s the only point- is that any debate about it needs to be undertaken with an honesty that this hasn’t so far been the case and it isn’t just a ‘go vegetarian and it’ll be golden’ sort of thing.
FWVLIW, I hold the view that humanity is generally only crisis reactive. When it is called upon to do so though, it tends to be at its most innovative. For all the pessimism, Western Europe has decarbonised at a hell of a rate (we’ll see this winter quite how successful that’s been I guess). We- again propelled by crisis- have just carried out a truly extraordinary reduction in commuting and the attendant wastage. I might well wind up a participant in a mountain of human skulls (easy come, easy go) but things are changing. For me, there’s no finer way of curtailing these changes than telling everyone it’s pointless and they need to die. YMMV.
Depends how much of that has just been offshored to China and other countries. Moving the pollution isn’t really a win.
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China produces Europe’s electricity? Huge if true.
Infant mortality inprovements actually reduce population growth. When kids are your pension and care provider, you need an n-sigma chance of having enough alive to do the job. Less chance of kids kicking the bucket=less needed to be sure of having some left.
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You’re being obtuse now. We’ve offshored most of the wests heavy industry, most of our mining, most of our recycling and everything else we want to ignore. We even burn wood shipped halfway around the world (by diesel powered ships) in our nice green Drax powerstation.
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I believe wood pellet burning power stations are not included in CO2 calculations by the great and the good, even though they produce even more CO2 and dust than coal.
Most UK CO2 production is by industry and farming. We outsource the factories producing plastic rubbish to China, the factories produce huge amount of pollutants.
We face some tough decisions or things will be decided by default. We could do with some world leaders or at least someone with a bit of backbone.
I vote for
Europe in 2021 gets an extraordinary amount done in a low carbon manner. Yes, there’s more to do but it’s going in the correct direction. Again, I’m inclined to ask about the alternative. I remind you at this point, you’ve already stated you don’t actually intend to participate in the one you mentioned earlier.
This leads on to;
We do. It’s almost like its emblematic of an electorate yelling ‘Do sOmEtHiNg,’ seeking some sort of shitty solution that makes them feel better about themselves while not actually changing anything. Like every other aspect of modern politics, environmentalism is chock full of giant, pointless gestures. It’s used in the same way as all other politics, to build powerbases, seek personal glory and mask other intentions. That it is is neither a failure of the concept nor justification to say that everything done so far is wrong.
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Not going to attempt to summarise but Mayer Hillman has written pretty extensively on why a technological solution to climate change is extremely unlikely.
I know that technological progress has defied predictions before, but it would be foolhardy to bank on it.
I’m aware of him thanks. I’d group him in the group of people who’ve decided we’re already fucked which feeds back to the ‘then why try?’ area.
(I mean… far be it for me to also suggest that Hillman is an example of someone who has used environmental issues as at least a partial shield for longstanding ideals that they couldn’t secure a mandate for via more conventional means but that’s subjective and FWIW, I agree with plenty of the more societal things he’s said over the years).
If we don’t try, we’ll lose all the GDP growth opportunity that trying to reach net zero affords us. That would be criminal.
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I didn’t say, we shouldn’t try. I said;
So, I don’t necessarily feel this approach is helpful.
Contingent on the spread of western-levels of wealth and healthcare that seems to be the model population tends to follow. The main potential issue is that western economies tend to be both exploitative and predicated on constant growth. To date that’s tended to form a vacuum somewhere else as we suck resources and skills out of other populations. At some point - if everyone everywhere’s going to attain similar levels of personal security - there’s going to be an interesting bit of bootstrapping going-on. All be a lot easier if a few megalomaniac billionaires weren’t pointlessly wanking fair pay and taxes into space because their parents withheld approval or they were unpopular in school…
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The focus today is on air source & ground source heat pumps (and a few but not enough grants for these).
I was looking into electric boilers today & was somewhat surprised to learn they are more efficient than gas fired boilers. The downside is the relatively higher price of electricity per kWh compared with gas.
I’m also surprised there isn’t more focus on these & then making sure there’s much more in the way of renewable electricity to run them.
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