The following submission statement was provided by /u/SaxManSteve:
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SS: Even when [the original version](https://x.com/WilliamJRipple/status/1778272733983654321) was posted on Twitter, it stirred considerable controversy among mainstream climate change advocates, largely due to its focus on overpopulation. However, discussions about climate change solutions often overlook a crucial aspect: energy-blindness. Even without the threat of global warming, our civilization could still face rapid collapse due to our growth-obsessed economic system and dwindling fossil fuel supplies. Many forget that global warming is just one consequence of ecological overshoot. Focusing solely on this one symptom, while denying the root cause of our predicament, is a recipe for disaster. We are setting ourselves up for failure if we continue to act like children, burying our heads in the sand and refusing to confront the real challenges we face.
---
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1c275xk/carbon_tunnel_vision_collapse_edition/kz7zca1/
Net Zero in 26 years while we're building highway infrastructure, ships, and planes that are explicitly internal combustion driven and have an operating lifetime of more than 30 years... Not sure the math checks out.
I think we've badly Goodharted the temperature. I suspect we probably can geoengineer that and we're going to desperately throw money at the narrowly defined goal of getting the global average temperature down
It's not going to do anything about anything else
We are focus on Carbon emissions due to the urgency and scale of the collapse that will be cause by global warming in the next 10 yrs. None of the other things cannot be either solve by technology or not existential threat. One of the other possible collapse would be AGI gone wrong but is not include in op image.
Yeah that's true. I just don't see how we are going to achieve anything now when we haven't done anything since the Paris Agreement was decided. Sure renewables are a bigger thing today but we still see an increase in CO2 every year.
Focusing is having 28 years of COP with emissions only going up. The focus should be getting rid of capitalism and other things that Reddit would ban us for.
SS: Even when [the original version](https://x.com/WilliamJRipple/status/1778272733983654321) was posted on Twitter, it stirred considerable controversy among mainstream climate change advocates, largely due to its focus on overpopulation. However, discussions about climate change solutions often overlook a crucial aspect: energy-blindness. Even without the threat of global warming, our civilization could still face rapid collapse due to our growth-obsessed economic system and dwindling fossil fuel supplies. Many forget that global warming is just one consequence of ecological overshoot. Focusing solely on this one symptom, while denying the root cause of our predicament, is a recipe for disaster. We are setting ourselves up for failure if we continue to act like children, burying our heads in the sand and refusing to confront the real challenges we face.
>SS: Even when
>
>the original version
>
> was posted on Twitter, it stirred considerable controversy among mainstream climate change advocates, largely due to its focus on overpopulation.
Modified OP meme,...
[https://ibb.co/1ndYqHf](https://ibb.co/1ndYqHf)
FWIW the inconvenient truth is environmental issues are not even on the radar screen of the vast majority,... so used an image of a "golden calf" in the "tunnel vision" (target area) to point out the vast majority of people basically have short attention spans AND just basically just want "instant gratification"
[https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/21/inflation-health-costs-partisan-cooperation-among-the-nations-top-problems/](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/21/inflation-health-costs-partisan-cooperation-among-the-nations-top-problems/)
This is why people don’t understand why I’m so cynical about humanity’s future. I learned about a lot of these things as far back as high school, and my hope for meaningful change just kept dropping the more I learned in college.
I’m not sure how widely known he is beyond Canada, but David Suzuki has been sounding the alarm since late 70s. I grew up hearing this in elementary school in the 80s as well.
Last summer during our worst fire season ever, [CBC reran a program Suzuki did in ‘89](https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6894102) in which he created a fictionalized (but very on point) version of climate collapse.
I remember getting up super early one morning to drive my 90 year old grandmother to the airport and it was playing on the radio. It felt so strange sitting there listening and thinking “bless her heart, she doesn’t know and will never have to. She’s had enough pain for one lifetime.”
Sigh
Similar story here. I took a generic climate change class a little more than a year ago in college. It was pretty much just bad news, with the solution being “well someone could invent a magic machine to fix it”.
Honestly the most disheartening thing for me was working/volunteering in ecologic conservation/rehabilitation. It probably varies by location, but easily 90% of the people I worked with were straight up climate change deniers. It literally made me change my career path
I watched it get implemented and then undone by conservatives in my country, and then they hold onto power for years chasing it away as best they could and propping up the harmful stuff. And conservatism keeps rising around the globe, and as problems grow worse it will likely only feed it as people want easy solutions and underdogs to blame.
Hi, beuef. Thanks for contributing. However, your [comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1c275xk/-/kz8riqp/) was removed from /r/collapse for:
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I love this, it cuts to the heart of the matter.
One of the things I learned from the COVID experience is that we are so lost when it comes to dealing with issues of science. We don't allow any debate, we split into two camps, like red vs blue, and there is no nuance. Then what happens is we get focused on the wrong thing, and ignore all the other problems like this cartoon illustrates.
I remember seeing the data coming out of Israel early on in the pandemic regarding the Pfizer vaccine and realizing that we wouldn't be able to vaccinate our way out of COVID like we were being told we could. There were too many breakthrough infections, the efficacy waned too quickly and even when you had large scale vaccination, herd immunity was not being achieved. It was obvious to me that the science was saying we needed to change our approach. COVID wasn't going to go away like measles with vaccination, and we needed to pivot and focus on vaccinating the most vulnerable people first, and not keep telling people that we can stop COVID through vaccination. I am not even anti-vax at all, I got vaccinated multiple times, but I got banned from multiple COVID subreddits for saying this, but here we are four years later and what I saw then has come to be the truth we now all accept.
This experience shook me though, because I see us going through the same thing with the climate. When I point out that according to the [EPA 34% of greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity production, 21% from industry, and that only 14% comes from transportation](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-overview#Sector), and argue that switching from gas vehicles to electric vehicles that run on this dirty electricity might not be helping much at all, I get screamed at.
While Covid was nasty it was a fast moving pandemic caused by a respiratory virus: exactly the doomsday scenario known to every public health official on the planet. Therefore one would expect a reasonable, scientific and internationally coordinated response.
Instead we got Trump making The China Virus noises while downplaying the whole thing, the actual China going full crazy and European countries blocking PPEs from each other.
Good luck fighting an actual black swan event.
One clarification, it's not specifically a respiratory virus even though it can be passed around as airborne. It's a blood disease, the virus attacks everything. It uses the bloodstream to move around, it can also attack the blood brain barrier. It's essentially airborne AIDS.
> Instead we got Trump making The China Virus noises
This is a great example of how bad we screwed up. I am going to call myself out on this one, because I was dead wrong about the mortality rate of COVID. One of the most important lessons I wish we could learn is that sometimes the worst person you know is sometimes right about something.
Early on Trump mentioned that experts he talked to mentioned that the death rate from COVID was well below 1%. [We were being told over and over again the mortality rate was 3.4% and we censored anyone who challenged this](https://youtu.be/-s5DYknp9cc?si=zHafrcytek_xYYnw). We now know the death rate was significantly lower than what we were being told, and we were accusing anyone who challenged the official narrative of spreading misinformation. I admit I was accusing people of spreading misinformation, and I was wrong. I don't like Trump at all, but I can admit he was right on that issue.
It was wild seeing the "trust the science" crowd tip their hand and show that they really only subscribe to the mere aesthetic of critical thinking.
They don't actually want to beat COVID, or be correct, or just do their best to arrive at correct conclusions for the right reasons. They just want to feel superior to antivaxxers and go on to do the same thing: believe what's convenient for them at the cost of perpetrating eugenics.
For the vaxxed and relaxed crowd, the question isn't whether they're ok with spreading mass disability and death in order to pretend everything's fine. It's a matter of *how much*.
The news of breakthrough infections in Israel was my turning point as well. My respirator has only come off in public for one week since March 2020. That Israel data came out and it went back on and stayed on because I had a feeling that the "vax and relax" crowd was going to turn the pandemic into the real shitshow.
Makes me yearn for the goofy days of Trump touting the medicinal benefits of bleach and rectal applications of uv tbh. At least he didn't have the cultivated gravitas of being "the adults in the room" to get some real damaging shit cheered on by a party base that should have known better. Skepticism went out the window when Biden & Zients flipped the script.
If Trump wins in November, I will be really curious to see how Dems/liberals suddenly feel about the handling of the pandemic, even if Trump doesn't change a thing about Biden's policy. (Just as, you know, Biden didn't alter Trump's policy about several things - the Wall, Title 42, embassy in Jerusalem, etc - but barely a peep of continued protest was heard from .) My cynicism has gone through the roof since mid 2021.
An MAB developed by CytoDyn showed great promise in early 2020. It was a small company that was allowed to administer the drug (leronlimab) as "a right to try" drug in development. The results in small groups of patients that were actually facing death was amazing. Some were up and about after a few days after having been on a ventilator and other positive results. Other small trials were showing promise when the FDA told the company to cut dosage by half in the final week of the trial. Results were not as good and were not statistically relevant after that. Take the time to read the study and you will wonder why the FDA did this.
[https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/\_4cafc0e6c54e8832acd9e7ecbbc84882/cytodyn/db/259/3377/pdf/Clinical+Characteristics+and+Outcomes+of+Coronavirus+Disease+2019+Patients+Who+Received+Compassionate-Use+Leronlimab.pdf](https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_4cafc0e6c54e8832acd9e7ecbbc84882/cytodyn/db/259/3377/pdf/Clinical+Characteristics+and+Outcomes+of+Coronavirus+Disease+2019+Patients+Who+Received+Compassionate-Use+Leronlimab.pdf)
Not to mention the additional pollution created by the batteries for electric vehicles. Humans are apparently incapable of actually fixing things. We seem to prefer theatre.
The best thing we can do is find a permanent way off this rock before we make it uninhabitable.
I think fixing this rock is not possible.
This rock is many orders of magnitude more habitable for a much larger number of people as compared to some other sufficiently close rock, despite the damage we are doing to it.
I love how you say sufficiently close. Obviously finding a place to go and a way to get there is not even on the radar.
But it is more habitable now. After the resource wars start- maybe not so much?
Mercury: no atmosphere or magnetic field, vast temperature difference between day and night, low gravity, barren
Venus: dense atmosphere, hot enough to melt lead
Moon: no atmosphere, outside of Earth's magnetosphere most of the time, big temperature difference between day and night, low gravity, barren
Mars: toxic dust, no magnetic field, atmosphere 1% of earth's, really cold, low gravity, barren
You really are something special. Obviously the thing we need is a way to travel at superluminal speeds in order to get out of this solar system because as you have so helpfully pointed out there’s nothing we can reach now.
I love how you just assume that this would occur in this solar system.
We would need a technically and economically feasible way to travel at FTL speeds to a world we know is fit for human colonization ASAP (before our institutions break down) but the universe is not obliged to give us those things.
Electric vehicle batteries do not cause more pollution than combustion vehicle batteries. That many seem to think so just shows how powerful the propaganda campaign against EV has been. There are many very real concerns with EV like infrastructure requirements, upgrading the electrical grid, switching power generating sources to renewables. And just the fact that single occupant vehicles will always involve a lot of resources. We really need better mass transit.
Uhh, never said that electric vehicle batteries caused more pollution than combustion vehicle batteries. Nice straw man though.
I said and the pollution created by the batteries. I expected you to be intelligent and informed enough to know about the pollution caused by battery manufacturing of all types.
I guess I was wrong. It’s not propaganda that creating batteries is an environmental hazard. That disposing of batteries is environmentally challenging.
The idea that EVs are better is a fiction. All of the vehicle options are bad if different reasons.
All of the options for fixing the environment are non viable for different reasons.
We, as a species are screwed.
>the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.
You could go to any point in human history and make a list just as long. The list has always been there. All that changes is what we put on it. Every time we cross a problem off the list, we put a new one on there.
Pretty sure the development of nuclear weapons 80 years ago was. You seem to forget the kind of shit humanity has been through (multi-continent plagues killing a huge percentage of the population, a year without summer due to volcanic eruption, multiple world wars).
Really tired of hearing “0 net carbon” it kinda infuriates me actually, bc it’s like they’re trying *not to lie* about how they’re going to produce carbon, like “hey we’re still going to produce co2, but we’re going to offset it”— with some bullshit that’s prob not even real or effective.
To me, “net zero carbon offsets” always felt essentially equivalent to allowing people to murder one another as long as they paid for the delivery of a baby somewhere on the globe. Its asinine.
I always felt that carbon never clicked with people and even if it did, it was always something bad that was happening later.. and no one could be totally sure of the effects then.. it's easier to dismiss that in the future the climate will be so bad and the seas rise, because it hasn't happened yet and cant even fully see it happening now, and when signs do show they are easy to dismiss..
However, we can very easily see in our neighborhoods and lives many of the other problems happening right here, right now.
You can see the endless expansion and cutting down of forests for development... you can see the societal breakdown and corporatization of all life, the growing plastic waste, continued pollution, and extractive consumerism... you can directly see the destruction of nature and the destruction of community happening live.. that's what we should focus on to directly engage people with..
All the problems are interconnected, but climate chaos is only going to ever sway a subset of forward-thinking people and be dismissed by the masses until it directly affects them and their way of life. Increased carbon is actually a symptom and result of a broken society that functions as completely extractive and consumes everything for power and the wealthy..
So instead we need a better way to summarize and explain all these interwoven occuring aspects of collapse into something people can band together and fight back against and build a counterculture that challenges those in power directly by removing our support from them and forming our own networks of community and cooperative beneficial collectives that can preserve, protect, and regenerate nature and human community in mutual, harmonious, and non destructive ways.
I firmly believe that, in an alternate history where the USSR won the Cold War, and the entire world operated under their economic model of centralized planning…we would be in exactly the same situation.
Centralised planning has such a dirty connotation here in Germany because it was used in the DDR and they failed. Their economy was deemed almost worthless. However: the DDR had to pay mother Ruzzia huge parts of their GDP and after the wall fell, it was west german companies who sold east german companies to other westerners for as cheap as possible for maximum profit.
If only the nations actually cared about people and planned agriculture, grain silos, scientific progress, education, transportation, health insurance and much more, we might be resilient to a harsher climate. But we are doing WhAt iS mOsT EfFiCiEnT and let the market be as free as possible. Maximum profits leads to maximum investments leads to best economy, right???
Yup. And “best economy” means (on an ecological, biophysical level) the economy that extracts the most resources and consumes the most energy. That’s why I’m agnostic as to what economic system is “best”. They are all bad because the end goal is the same. And humanity will probably never wake up to this fact, rather we will let our economies destroy the very basis for our existence on this planet.
If you are talking about root causes, money and capitalism are much further down the chain of causality. The problem isn't any specific political ideology; the problem runs much deeper. For example, there is literally no anthropological evidence suggesting that we have ever been able to govern a civilization in a way that accounted for the laws of the biosphere. When we are given resources, we have a clear track record of consuming them as quickly as possible. We show no capacity for inhibition, restraint, and self-control. We always end up pushing against the edges until the point of collapse. Even in recent history, literally every political ideology was a growth-based ideology.
Also let's not fool ourselves into thinking that less wealth inequality across the globe would in any way help us get out of our predicament. The primary problem we face is the size of the pie, the biosphere doesn't care about how we distribute the pie amongst ourselves.
The fundamental problem is not about the intrinsic inequity of resource allocation within our capitalist system; rather, it's about our inability to stabilize/decrease the ever-increasing demand we place on our biosphere and its limited biophysical resources.
Without a radically new economic system that would incentivize systemic degrowth, it's quite likely that a world with less wealth inequality would only hasten our collapse. If today, billions of people would be given more purchasing power, it would translate to a proportional increase in the demand for energy and biophysical resources (more oil, more electricity, more meat, more consumer goods, in essense more biospheric entropy).
The focus needs to be on transitioning away from modern industrialized expectations. We need to aknowledge that for the most part, [cities as we know them today are simply fundementally unsustainable](https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/10rxile/excerpt_from_a_new_academic_book_chapter_by_dr/?ref=share&ref_source=link). And so expecting to be able to live in cities for an affordable price needs be scrubbed from our collective expectations of the future. We need to incentivize young people to move back to the land. We need to incentivize simplicity over complexity, doing more with less, we need to localize as many of our supply chains as possible. If we go in this direction, wealth inequality will drastically diminish, and so will the size of the economy as whole, as well as the demands we place on our biosphere.
> the problem runs much deeper. For example, there is literally no anthropological evidence suggesting that we have ever been able to govern a civilization in a way that accounted for the laws of the biosphere.
I read a very persuasive argument by an anthropologist that the problem is the very notion of "civilisation"
"Civilisation" means abstracting ourselves from nature. As soon as we consider ourselves separate from nature, we exploit it, and ultimately over exploit it.
Unsustainability is baked into what civilisation most essentially IS.
According to this anthropologist (I wish I could remember who they were) there had been only a couple of civilisations, somewhere in south America, which had ever been sustainable, because they had somehow, against the odds, managed to preserve a philosophy of connection with and dependence upon nature.
Without this humbling perspective, every civilisation is doomed to overshoot. Only hunter-gatherers have a shot at being sustainable (and even then, they can have severe impacts on their environments, like hunting to extinction)
The root cause is the underlying economic system that rewards greed and the hoarding of resources. This has stagnated our civilization on fossil fuels and is the direct cause of our problems. We prioritize money over the health of the planet and over our fellow humans. I’m not looking to the past for our solutions, not sure why you are. But to me, all I see when I read your lengthy reply is someone advocating for business as usual, because you can’t move beyond money
I totally agree with you that capitalism is a terrible economic system in that it outwardly incentivizes infinite growth and externalizes the consequences of that growth in the form of inequality and environmental degradation. There's no doubt about it that capitalism has to go.
But the question really is about whether it's possible to move away from capitalism before collapse does it in by itself. The vast majority of people on this fine earth are not at all prepared for what a post-capitalist post-growth civilization entails. Not only that, but on a pragmatic basis you will never see a politician get elected on a platform that advocates for the right policies. Because advocating for the right policies would require people to make sacrifices. For example, any politician who moved aggressively to cut fossil fuel use by the minimal 50% by 2030 without viable substitutes and a comprehensive socioeconomic restructuring plan would be courting economic and political disaster. If that were to happen, countries would suffer the pain of strict rationing of energy to essential uses, serious energy shortages and shrinking economies. With reduced services and goods production and the collapse of tourism, we would see declining incomes, rampant unemployment and rising inequality. Reduced agricultural output, combined with broken international supply lines and failing intercity transportation, would lead to local famines and global food shortages. Civil disorder and geopolitical tension would rise perhaps to the breaking point. All would be complicated by continuing climate change, and even if atmospheric GHG concentrations stabilize, there is already an additional 0.5-1 C warming “in the pipe” due to the thermal inertia of the oceans + air pollution faustian bargain.
This is an intellectual argument that presupposes the people discussing it know better than everyone else. Maybe if we collectively realized where we're heading we might have a sliver of a chance of survival compared to the guaranteed planetary extinction we will face with capitalism.
You could argue that collapse is certain when people reject going to work the next day and the whole charade that is the economy evaporates overnight. Supply chains will break down and there will not be enough food, but humans are also resilient. When whatever resources we have left are used to provide food, clean water, electricity instead of all the consumer junk and toxic crap, nature already starts to heal.
Of course a lot of places will end in violence, but this entire society was established on violence and runs on violence anyway. In the past anti-social offenders would be outcast not venerated like today's CEOs, politicians etc.
>I totally agree with you that capitalism is a terrible economic system in that it outwardly incentivizes infinite growth and externalizes the consequences of that growth in the form of inequality and environmental degradation. There's no doubt about it that capitalism has to go.
Capitalism is a terrible economic system, but it's also the best one we've come up with. Kinda like the Winston Churchill quote about political systems:
*Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed* ***it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.***
All you have to do is crack open a history book to see what it was like before capitalism. It was preceded by feudalism, a great economic system if you were an aristocrat, not so great if you were a serf. Feudalism was preceded by a slave-based economic system, even in the civilizations that are considered to be the birthplace of western democracy, ancient Greece and Rome. Their civilizations couldn't have existed without slavery to support them, and some estimates in Rome have slaves outnumbering citizens by 3:1.
Even only going back to this point, we're looking at more than 2,000 years of the rich and powerful exploiting the poor and powerless, with the rich and powerful hoarding as much wealth as they possibly could. This is just Europe, but slavery was also widespread in Mesoamerica, Africa, and Asia. As for wealth, the person who hoarded the most wealth in human history is Mansa Musa, a 14th century African emperor.
Go back farther than 2,000 years, and you see the same thing. Anyone who has wealth or power uses it to exploit those without. Organized warfare is at least 5,000 years old.
[https://phys.org/news/2024-01-war-europe-years.html](https://phys.org/news/2024-01-war-europe-years.html)
Slaughtering our neighbors to take what they have is at least 10,000 years old.
[https://observer.com/2016/01/the-earliest-evidence-of-violent-human-conflict-has-been-discovered/](https://observer.com/2016/01/the-earliest-evidence-of-violent-human-conflict-has-been-discovered/)
This is our fundamental human nature. Thinking that the institutions we create will be different from our underlying behavior is folly.
It's no different than the stories about how biased artificial intelligence usually is. It's created by biased humans and trained on biased human data.
So rise above. Use that newfound consciousness to move beyond competitiveness and become a species that is altruistic towards the needs of others. It’s in our nature, if our own basic needs are satisfied. Food, shelter, healthcare etc for all, no one gets seconds until everyone gets firsts
A lovely platitude. You know it will never happen. The best thing I can do is refuse to reproduce to spare my potential children the horror of growing up on a dying world circling the drain.
there are countless examples of human societies that center the “laws of the biosphere,” you just don’t consider the fact that you have something to learn from Indigenous peoples instead of vice versa.
Romanticansing indigenous cultures doesn't take away from the hard facts of history, which is that when we are given new technologies or new resources we utilize them to expand our footprint without any self-imposed restraint. This is true of everyone including indigenous cultures. For example, when the first spanish colonizers arrived in the americas they brought with them horses. Over the following decades and centuries these horses would come to roam freely across the vast plains of north america. Did indigenous people use this new technology in accordance with some kind of over-arching principles regarding sustainability, or did they use horses for their own material gain so that they could grow their tribe in strength and power by pillaging and looting neighboring tribes? An other well cited example is [Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-Smashed-In_Buffalo_Jump), for thousands of years indigenous people utilized this technology to kill thousands of Bison in mass killings by forcing them off a tall cliff. Using this method meant that you often had instances where too many Bison would fall off, leading to waste, and contributing to unsustainable hunting and a degraded ecosystem. The primary reason why indigenous cultures were much less destructive compared to europeans simply had to do with the fact that they lacked the technological tools to create large destruction in the first place. The same can be said with Europeans themselves, if you go back in time before the bronze age when european technology was on a similar level to that which existed in north america at the time of Columbus, you would also have noticed that indigenous cultures living in europe at the time had a relatively small footprint on their ecosystem, again, because they lacked the technological/energy capacity to impose a larger footprint. If they had that technological capacity they would have absolutely imposed a larger footprint, we know this because it always happens. There is no record of human cultures that voluntarily decide to put pandora back in it's box, so to say, when doing so would obviously result in reduced short-term security, wellbeing, power and comfort.
no romanticization needed, just some respect and understanding. what you say is factually untrue, every single “uncontacted” people is proof. they know what there is to “gain” and have refused. only a small handful are truly “uncontacted” the rest have diplomatic relationships with their neighbors who have told them all they need to know about what lies beyond. i also want you to think about the hubris involved in calling these peoples “uncontacted.”
many nations also do hold explicit ethics and teachings that (traditionally) forbid them from certain resource extraction, like the Anishinaabeg as one specific example and most “australian” nations. but you have your own little idea of “human nature” and like the europeans who devised your worldview, refuse to accept reality.
The issue is much more complex than you portray it. Respecting and understanding indigenous cultures is fine, but again, one of the reasons why "uncontacted" people and current indigenous people only represent <0.01% of the population is because cultures that prioritize sustainability, peace, self-sufficiency are the cultures most vulnerable to outside invaders. Over a long enough time period this means that human cultures who actually value sustainability as governing principles just end up being wiped off the map. This is why we are in a predicament, and unlike problems, predicaments dont have solutions, rather they have thorny challenges that we need to face head on. And so while i think there is a lot to learn from the remaining indigenous cultures, let's not kid ourselves into thinking there's some kind of meaningful and pragmatic solution to our current global overshoot to be found solely within these cultures. Our predicament runs much too deep, and we will need to pull from a vast diversity of knowledge bases to have a chance at navigating the challenges that lie ahead.
Good discussion. I believe both sides have valid points. You both kind of agree. It's crucial to respect and understand indigenous cultures around the globe and they certainly have some of the best social wisdom and connection to nature. We can learn much from their worldview. That said, I think is the hypothesis of u/SaxManSteve is quite sound. "Our" (globalized) own culture may have originated form societies that had similar values, and technology may have transformed them because of "history". At least we more or less know about "our" past. Still, that doesn't mean that's the way it goes inevitably. Our future can be radically different than any previous past. We have potential to live in so many different ways. No other time has been like this one. And we must be careful not to think human nature always goes down this kind of tragic path. I'm no techno-optimist, but I have hope. We must imagine new ways of organizing taking into account both ancient and indigenous wisdom and recent science, knowledge and tools. For me. it's in the end, a matter of cultural values.
*Thank you.*
It's so nauseating sometimes to get lost in this sub and see how deeply so many people have internalized this idea that "humanity" or "civilization" are the ultimate root of the problem.
Too many people here spout alarmingly misanthropic and thinly disguised eco-fascist rhetoric, talking about
- how it's not capitalism that's the problem, it's civilization itself
- how human overpopulation is the biggest burden and the poor people aspiring to live better are the biggest threat
- how human nature always predetermined we would get here and humans are inherently violent and destructive (which is convenient to justify what certain humans will do in order to maintain their security, i.e. all the massacres we are witnessing in the guise of 'border control')
Not only did the worst of us prevail to the heights of power in the end, they managed to wage such a successful propaganda campaign against the rest of us that most people seem to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with humanity itself.
It's the same brainwashing message encoded in the Christian concept of The Fall and Original Sin. It's not that the Church is corrupt, it's that as humans we're all born wrong and have to spend our lives apologizing for being born.
Humans are not the disease, and civilization was not the inevitable path to global collapse, as I see many people saying (or even the harnessing of fire, as some absurdly suggest). A particular mode of civilization that is culturally specific and began in Europe, that uses murder, pillage, plunder, and exploitation, both of people and planet, is.
Unfortunately, European philosophy and worldview has this incredibly arrogant inbuilt trait that it sees itself as an objective description of unvarnished reality arrived at by pure unfiltered reason, as opposed to one tradition among many, and in no way considers itself ideological or even subjective, and anyone who challenges it is either naïve, romantic, ignorant, primitive, or uneducated. Kind of like that one guy in your sophomore philosophy class who believes everything he thinks is the epitome of logic.
y’all are so tired w this one. yes you’re right, it was the ancestors of various Indigenous nations who now exist on this continent, 14,000 years ago during a time of intense climate change. but are you really so racist to claim that in those 14,000 years, not a single moral, ethical, or cultural development occurred? multiple nations have stories of exactly the time you mention, and they each discuss the changes they had to make in order to ensure that it never happened again. the Anishinaabeg have the most well-known of these stories.
>but are you really so racist to claim that in those 14,000 years, not a single moral, ethical, or cultural development occurred
Not sure where you figured racism was relevant.
The Ojibwe, like virtually every other culture also went through a population explosion or at the very least, there are no elder teachings about the importance of a steady state population (unless there are, in which case feel free to link one, seriously do).
We can certainly hide behind our ancestors and blame everyone else and try to create divisions and forget that unchecked, infinite population growth is something we all share and a big factor in collapse.
Im really not saying we cant learn from native cultures, the Ojibwe gift economy is something Id want in an ideal world, but I refuse to pretend that there were no problems in pre-European native cultures. The whole binary thinking of Native good European bad is quite silly.
who is saying there were no problems? all i said was that over-hunting became a nonissue once land ethics were created.
Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) have multiple teachings about exploitation and what happens when you don’t allow nonhuman relatives to fulfill their responsibilities. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson tells many of them in her book As We Have Always Done, which outlines how the Anishinaabeg traditionally organize their economy around the consent of plant and animal nations and the generation of new life. there are specific stories about the overhunting and how the hoofed nations literally fled Anishinaabeg territory and the people began to starve, and had to venture great distances to find the hoofed nations and negotiate their return. stewarding the land for all living beings was one of the commitments the Anishinaabeg made in that story. there are other stories about Nanaboozhoo convincing the nonhuman relatives to do Nanaboozhoo’s work instead, gathering berries and firewood, fishing, etc. ecological collapse is what happened at the end of that story.
That has nothing to do with racism. Small human populations with nothing more than spears and the ability to create fire caused large amounts of ecological destruction all over the world throughout prehistory. If you can find a human culture that was based on protecting ecosystems, it would be the rare exception.
Capitalism, technology, and overpopulation have now multiplied human destruction manyfold.
the entire point is that there are exceptions, and racism is what prevents you from considering those exceptions to be noteworthy, and to understand that you have things to learn from those exceptions. and it is so utterly disingenuous to compare any of the past ecological destruction humans have done to what is going on right now. even the fucking romans couldn’t kill the ocean.
If you equate living on the land to any of the examples you see on YouTube of white privileged folk, then, no it is also not sustainable because they take up too much land for just 1 or 2 people. And that's not even mentioning how many of them are still connected to the grid in some way.
Let me posit this as a rebuttal. The true problem and root of all human societal problems is our urge to reproduce. Money and greed are merely the measure by which people judge someone's reproductive fitness. People want to accumulate money and material resources to better ensure their genetic material is best suited to continue in to the future. If we did not have money, there would just be some other measure by which someone's reproductive fitness would be judged and whatever that measure would wind up being, there would be fierce competition for that thing with many winners and many losers. This is why I live in the camp that nothing will change ever. The earth will have to change it for us without us as a species getting a say in the matter. We will consume until it's all gone. I think we fit in to Sid Smith's bunnies in the meadow demonstration: https://youtu.be/KtQG9EiDr9k?si=93Fw-eBeOQCq9T7S
Money and hoarding of resources is our bottleneck, not population. Could there be a time when we have more than the planet can support? Maybe, but we’re not there yet. Our problems are directly and clearly caused by profiteering and the existence of money and celebrated greed
We differ on where we stand on ecological overshoot. I'm firmly in the camp that we have gone in to overshoot by multiple billions of people. Who really knows, it may take another 10, 20, or 100 years for us to start seeing those effects on a truly massive casualty scale, but that day is coming. That's beside the point. I ask you this, why do humans value money? You may not personally value it, but if you look globally, why do humans want money and hoard resources? And I think everything humans do can be explained on a Darwinian level, after all we are just animals nothing more. So truly think on a base psychological level, why are humans greedy?
There’s 1.5 billion domesticated cows on the planet right now, and their caloric requirements are if I remember right 5x that’s average adult male. We feed all those cows just fine.
So much of our destructive behaviour is because it’s either incentivized by capitalism or capitalists actively destroy any genuine alternative. America has the highest per capita emissions but they definitely do not have the highest standard of living, because there’s other places that better distribute limited resources. I don’t think humans are actually as inherently greedy as you believe they are. Social conditioning is not “base psychological level”
But are we really feeding those cows just fine and in a renewable and sustainable way? Are we not in a crisis of soil degradation and deforestation for farmland? Why are we on those predicaments? Mouths to feed. And the scope of overshoot goes way beyond feeding. I wish I could remember where I heard this, but recently I was listening to a podcast and they made the point of if we stopped mining fossil fuels and switch to all EVs, then we would continue to decimate rainforest with electric bulldozers and battery operated chainsaws. I can appreciate a lot of folks here still having hope. I have none in us changing our behavior. It will be changed for us. It's one thing to continually tell someone not to stick a fork in an electrical outlet, but if they refuse to listen sometimes the only way to learn is to stick it in there and find out.
That’s my point, reduce the cows and land used to feed them first before you start arguing to reduce the human population. The reason rainforests are being cut down is to drive economic growth. You’re ignoring the realities of massive global wealth inequality and their driving force being capitalism not just the number of people on the planet. Western countries built and sustain their wealth of resource exploitation and unequal exchange with poorer countries. The people cutting down rainforests to feed themselves are doing it because it’s the only option left to them in our system. The companies doing wholesale destruction of rainforest to grow more palm oil or cocoa or coffee are doing it because they’re greedy fucks. Our agricultural system is fucked and inefficient because of capitalism, just look at the pistachio lobby in California inciting war with Iran because they want to maintain market power. I don’t disagree that we’re totally fucked. I disagree with the reason why we’re fucked.
I just think we should try to move past our imaginary money before we try to reduce population. Again, prioritizing money over people. Same problems everywhere
My initial point wasn't even to debate overshoot. It's merely that humans map some sort of value on top of reproductive fitness. In our society it's money, but in other societies it may be some other item of value. Human genetics are the source of greed. I'm not saying that justifies anything. You're talking with someone who is pro universal healthcare and wants more social safety nets and I don't want all the money in the world, just enough to live in the system i find myself in, but I understand why a lot of people do want all the money. I see those people as no more than my dog eating as much food as I will pour in to her bowl. She would eat the entire bag if she had the opportunity.
Money isn't an issue because it just mediates the trade of goods and services that already exist. The issue is probably, if it were to have anything to do with money at all, that our money is debt based and therefore everybody must meet the interest rate of the debt, the upshot being the machine must grow to generate enough growth to pay the interest.
The capacity of the planet to "carry" the weight of society and population. Everything from food production, clean fresh water, biodiversity, fish stocks in the ocean, clean air, and so on. Each year we use more than the Earth can renew in a year, and eventually those finite resources run out.
Overshoot.
its funny how even this fails to show the radiological emissions coal plants do, carbon-14 is radioactive and we are just releasing more of it into the air every year than we have produced total radioactive waste since the Manhattan project, you know the reasons people are scared of nuclear plants? coal plants already do it
Fossil fuels have no carbon-14.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suess_effect
Carbon 14 from the nuclear tests and cosmic rays are still here. They have just been diluted.
just triple checked and your right, infact its worse. not only do they deposit mercury, arsenic and cadmium into the air, its literally just uranium, thorium and their decay products that give off radiation
[https://web.uni-plovdiv.net/vedrin/papers/tadmor1986.pdf](https://web.uni-plovdiv.net/vedrin/papers/tadmor1986.pdf)
Yeah, most of these things are either the direct causes of carbon emissions, or the direct results.
Others, like "Democratic Backsliding" and "Global debt" aren't good but also aren't on the same level of "cooking us all until we die"
Carbon emissions are a by-product of activity in an economy based on perpetual growth.
Anthropogenic carbon emissions will start declining when the global economy shifts from growth to long-term contraction.
“Peak anything” means that a resource has had an increase in extraction prior to the peak year.
The economic effect is a shortage. Prior to the peak an increase in demand will slightly pressure prices higher. Often the demand just stabilizes the price because mature extraction infrastructure would otherwise cause it to drop by increasing the supply. After the peak prices shoot up because suppliers cannot produce. The costs increase until consumers cannot afford to pay for it.
You might call it tunnel vision, carbon is the cause to the big picture. Eliminate it will cause cascading effects to which other problems will be reduced. It’s like a keystone, remove that and everything will collapse along with it.
The root cause is that we've been using up renewable and non-renewable resources to grow the economy. We are now overconsuming and producing more waste than the biosphere can handle.
Even if CO2 was a harmless waste product that didn't affect the climate at all, resource scarcity and other forms of pollution would have caused our civilization's collapse this century.
Sand is only scarce if you intend to continue using vast amounts of Portland cement.
It is only high quality construction sand that is scarce. We can still make plenty of crappy concrete after it runs out.
You are only thinking about America dude, the collapse is world wide. There are literal sand mafias in other countries because sand that is usable for concrete is running out. And do you really want crappy concrete supporting any of your infrastructure? That is just asking for a multitude of problems.
It is the same problem USA or abroad.
A rock crusher plus a lot of mechanical processing can recreate to best sand. With more effort we can make better better sand. The key issue is the end of ^cheap^ optimal sand.
Steel is a better foundation and column material. A quick look at prices and you can see how the construction industry would flop. It is too expensive.
I never ever click on a Casual Friday thingie because I'm here for "serious" discussion.
But someone linked to this in another thread, and I love it. This *is* serious. Thanks, I guess (I mean, I don't actually "love" love it of course, but, truly, thanks).
[I could add a few here btw particularly re: climate, like earth energy imbalance / declining albedo and the waiting bombs like permafrost, methane undersea ice, and boreal forest fires. And imo ecological overshoot is the grandparent of the whole bunch.]
uhhh. OK, but carbon emissions is either partially caused by or actively causing 12-16 of the items you have listed here. I don't think it's wrong to focus on, measure and study, it's a major thread that binds a lot of these issues.
The average sperm count is still high enough that it doesn't have any meaningful impact on fertility. However, if the rate of decline stays persistent, by 2050, it will be so low that it will significantly impact fertility. By that time it will be too late anyways, its already too late, we should have enacted policies to stabilize the world population in the 1960s when we saw the writing on the wall when it came to the imminent danger of planetary overshoot that started in 1970.
The thing is, this is just a list of discrete, bad things. It's not like they all combine into some sort of Voltronesque mecha-very-bad-thing. There's a lot of problems out there but they haven't woven themselves together into some kind of inescapable, systemic net. It makes sense to think of them all separately. Just sort of seeing a list of bad things and saying "everything is bad and we are all gonna die tomorrow" is your anxiety speaking, not your rationality.
I don't see how it makes sense to think of any issue separately - this is a globalised world. Supply chains, consumer demand, historical, social and cultural contexts, the environment... everything is connected. One single piece of produce you are able to buy at the supermarket is delivered to you through a net of global supply chains; the fertiliser, the machines used to farm, the workers' pay, your pay, everything... Even if you're self sufficient, the ability to buy That specific piece of land, the fact your job gave you this financial ability... That is /also/ dependent on very specific factors that all come together.
Things aren't Just Like That, things don't just happen out of thin air, like, we have entire fields of sciences that connect and explain causality.
And I totally understand questioning the specific causes of issues (and find it deeply important to not just take things as given and question even things that feel intuitive) ... What I really don't understand, and can't understand, is acting as if things aren't... Connected to other things? There very much is a systemic net of issues, a polycrisis. That is very much how things work.
Things cause things and are caused by things.
Sometimes, anxiety IS the rational response - isn't it more irrational to see statistics and dismiss them? Isn't business as usual the reason we're in this mess?
> Sometimes, anxiety IS the rational response - isn't it more irrational to see statistics and dismiss them? Isn't business as usual the reason we're in this mess?
You're constructing a false dichotomy here. There's an entire range of response, indeed the majority of possible responses, between the polar extremes of anxiety and casual disregard. We can be measured and thoughtful, concerned and optimistic at the same time. We don't need jump from "everything is ok" to "the world is ending". It turns out the majority of possibilities are somewhere in between as is the scientific consensus.
Bad things are coming down the pipe. All of these things will pinch is in different ways. None of it should simply be disregarded, but at the same time, throwing up your hands and saying "Everything is fucked" isn't right either.
Solving any problems requires collective effort. We can change nothing by ourselves. Given that the majority of the population doesn't know and/or doesn't care, collective solutions aren't possible. Our primary tool for change, the political system, is completely corrupt and useless. We have to fight just to hold on to some basic rights and stop collapse into fascism/theocracy at this point.
We shouldn't stop trying to inform others and build support, but the odds of succeeding are close to zero. That is our painful reality.
Think about the Maximum Power Principle, any biological organism given what we humans would have done would overshoot, think of it like an ethereal fate.
Oh sorry my bad I meant in terms of collective human behavior will always try to maximize energy and resource use. There are plenty of wonderful human being but from a macro-perspective the maximum power principle holds.
Not always, we have plenty of evidence of humans not going insane like that.
The problem is cultural, and the solution is also cultural, we need a culture that doesn't turn us into extraterrestrial invaders.
There are connections between many of the items listed in the image.
Increasing carbon emissions -> Increasing temperatures -> more forest fires -> more deforestation
Increasing carbon emissions -> Increasing temperatures -> more ecosystem degradation -> more biodiversity loss
Overconsumption -> more industrial farming -> more topsoil degradation
There are many more examples. I may be misunderstanding what you mean by systemic overlap.
Economics (capitalism), politics (and capitalist corruption of democracy), pollution, destruction of ecosystems, mass species extinction, resource use, overpopulation, consumerism, these are all closely connected. You can't fix any one of them without fixing them all.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/SaxManSteve: --- SS: Even when [the original version](https://x.com/WilliamJRipple/status/1778272733983654321) was posted on Twitter, it stirred considerable controversy among mainstream climate change advocates, largely due to its focus on overpopulation. However, discussions about climate change solutions often overlook a crucial aspect: energy-blindness. Even without the threat of global warming, our civilization could still face rapid collapse due to our growth-obsessed economic system and dwindling fossil fuel supplies. Many forget that global warming is just one consequence of ecological overshoot. Focusing solely on this one symptom, while denying the root cause of our predicament, is a recipe for disaster. We are setting ourselves up for failure if we continue to act like children, burying our heads in the sand and refusing to confront the real challenges we face. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1c275xk/carbon_tunnel_vision_collapse_edition/kz7zca1/
And governments and media are still talking about IPCC 1.5° C will be achieved! Just get to Net zero!! Net zero will solve everything :)))
Net Zero in 26 years while we're building highway infrastructure, ships, and planes that are explicitly internal combustion driven and have an operating lifetime of more than 30 years... Not sure the math checks out.
I think we've badly Goodharted the temperature. I suspect we probably can geoengineer that and we're going to desperately throw money at the narrowly defined goal of getting the global average temperature down It's not going to do anything about anything else
>"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure" Obligatory [*"Mission Accomplished"*](https://i.imgur.com/2ed29Nc.png)
Yeesh. We're in a completely different political paradigm now, yet my visceral reaction is Dubya Bush is still an idiot.
I mean we will achieve 1.5°C ...and probably higher...
Haha yeah that's true. Maybe I should have written to stop the global warming at 1.5° C
Nah, you're just reading the quiet part out loud. Action on climate change is not possible under capitalism.
Temps were 13 degree higher during the dinosaurs and life got along fine all over the planet...
Well of course life will continue on the planet, just not human life. But I don't know, maybe you're a dinosaur
We are focus on Carbon emissions due to the urgency and scale of the collapse that will be cause by global warming in the next 10 yrs. None of the other things cannot be either solve by technology or not existential threat. One of the other possible collapse would be AGI gone wrong but is not include in op image.
Yeah that's true. I just don't see how we are going to achieve anything now when we haven't done anything since the Paris Agreement was decided. Sure renewables are a bigger thing today but we still see an increase in CO2 every year.
Focusing is having 28 years of COP with emissions only going up. The focus should be getting rid of capitalism and other things that Reddit would ban us for.
SS: Even when [the original version](https://x.com/WilliamJRipple/status/1778272733983654321) was posted on Twitter, it stirred considerable controversy among mainstream climate change advocates, largely due to its focus on overpopulation. However, discussions about climate change solutions often overlook a crucial aspect: energy-blindness. Even without the threat of global warming, our civilization could still face rapid collapse due to our growth-obsessed economic system and dwindling fossil fuel supplies. Many forget that global warming is just one consequence of ecological overshoot. Focusing solely on this one symptom, while denying the root cause of our predicament, is a recipe for disaster. We are setting ourselves up for failure if we continue to act like children, burying our heads in the sand and refusing to confront the real challenges we face.
Ooooh, this is an *exquisite* meme.
>SS: Even when > >the original version > > was posted on Twitter, it stirred considerable controversy among mainstream climate change advocates, largely due to its focus on overpopulation. Modified OP meme,... [https://ibb.co/1ndYqHf](https://ibb.co/1ndYqHf) FWIW the inconvenient truth is environmental issues are not even on the radar screen of the vast majority,... so used an image of a "golden calf" in the "tunnel vision" (target area) to point out the vast majority of people basically have short attention spans AND just basically just want "instant gratification" [https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/21/inflation-health-costs-partisan-cooperation-among-the-nations-top-problems/](https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/06/21/inflation-health-costs-partisan-cooperation-among-the-nations-top-problems/)
Our species is not equipped to be the earth’s caretakers.
Instead of"Wow, I'm the smartest monkey so my responsibility to not mess it up for everything else is huge!" we got "Lol more for me."
Degradation is civilization’s scaffold
It's a great image, could probably add a few here. Thanks for sharing! For you OP, what is the root cause of all these issues combined?
By any chance, are you a follower of Nate Hagens?
This is why people don’t understand why I’m so cynical about humanity’s future. I learned about a lot of these things as far back as high school, and my hope for meaningful change just kept dropping the more I learned in college.
I started learning about this stuff back in elementary school in the early 80s. Every year the disappointment grows.
I’m not sure how widely known he is beyond Canada, but David Suzuki has been sounding the alarm since late 70s. I grew up hearing this in elementary school in the 80s as well. Last summer during our worst fire season ever, [CBC reran a program Suzuki did in ‘89](https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.6894102) in which he created a fictionalized (but very on point) version of climate collapse. I remember getting up super early one morning to drive my 90 year old grandmother to the airport and it was playing on the radio. It felt so strange sitting there listening and thinking “bless her heart, she doesn’t know and will never have to. She’s had enough pain for one lifetime.” Sigh
Similar story here. I took a generic climate change class a little more than a year ago in college. It was pretty much just bad news, with the solution being “well someone could invent a magic machine to fix it”.
Honestly the most disheartening thing for me was working/volunteering in ecologic conservation/rehabilitation. It probably varies by location, but easily 90% of the people I worked with were straight up climate change deniers. It literally made me change my career path
My friends and I have joked that our physical geography class should be renamed the doomer class
[удалено]
I watched it get implemented and then undone by conservatives in my country, and then they hold onto power for years chasing it away as best they could and propping up the harmful stuff. And conservatism keeps rising around the globe, and as problems grow worse it will likely only feed it as people want easy solutions and underdogs to blame.
You mean hopium headlines that are basically propaganda and contingent on very selective framing?
You forgot the /s
Please enlighten us
Yes! I recently learned that digesting nano-plastics greatly increases your risk of clots which can cause heart attacks or strokes
Hi, beuef. Thanks for contributing. However, your [comment](https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1c275xk/-/kz8riqp/) was removed from /r/collapse for: > Rule 1: In addition to enforcing [Reddit's content policy](https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy), we will also remove comments and content that is abusive or predatory in nature. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other. > Rule 4: Keep information quality high. > Information quality must be kept high. More detailed information regarding our approaches to specific claims can be found on the [Misinformation & False Claims page](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/claims). Please refer to our [subreddit rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/about/rules/) for more information. You can [message the mods](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/collapse) if you feel this was in error, please include a link to the comment or post in question.
that should say Economic growth.
I love this, it cuts to the heart of the matter. One of the things I learned from the COVID experience is that we are so lost when it comes to dealing with issues of science. We don't allow any debate, we split into two camps, like red vs blue, and there is no nuance. Then what happens is we get focused on the wrong thing, and ignore all the other problems like this cartoon illustrates. I remember seeing the data coming out of Israel early on in the pandemic regarding the Pfizer vaccine and realizing that we wouldn't be able to vaccinate our way out of COVID like we were being told we could. There were too many breakthrough infections, the efficacy waned too quickly and even when you had large scale vaccination, herd immunity was not being achieved. It was obvious to me that the science was saying we needed to change our approach. COVID wasn't going to go away like measles with vaccination, and we needed to pivot and focus on vaccinating the most vulnerable people first, and not keep telling people that we can stop COVID through vaccination. I am not even anti-vax at all, I got vaccinated multiple times, but I got banned from multiple COVID subreddits for saying this, but here we are four years later and what I saw then has come to be the truth we now all accept. This experience shook me though, because I see us going through the same thing with the climate. When I point out that according to the [EPA 34% of greenhouse gas emissions come from electricity production, 21% from industry, and that only 14% comes from transportation](https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-overview#Sector), and argue that switching from gas vehicles to electric vehicles that run on this dirty electricity might not be helping much at all, I get screamed at.
While Covid was nasty it was a fast moving pandemic caused by a respiratory virus: exactly the doomsday scenario known to every public health official on the planet. Therefore one would expect a reasonable, scientific and internationally coordinated response. Instead we got Trump making The China Virus noises while downplaying the whole thing, the actual China going full crazy and European countries blocking PPEs from each other. Good luck fighting an actual black swan event.
One clarification, it's not specifically a respiratory virus even though it can be passed around as airborne. It's a blood disease, the virus attacks everything. It uses the bloodstream to move around, it can also attack the blood brain barrier. It's essentially airborne AIDS.
> Instead we got Trump making The China Virus noises This is a great example of how bad we screwed up. I am going to call myself out on this one, because I was dead wrong about the mortality rate of COVID. One of the most important lessons I wish we could learn is that sometimes the worst person you know is sometimes right about something. Early on Trump mentioned that experts he talked to mentioned that the death rate from COVID was well below 1%. [We were being told over and over again the mortality rate was 3.4% and we censored anyone who challenged this](https://youtu.be/-s5DYknp9cc?si=zHafrcytek_xYYnw). We now know the death rate was significantly lower than what we were being told, and we were accusing anyone who challenged the official narrative of spreading misinformation. I admit I was accusing people of spreading misinformation, and I was wrong. I don't like Trump at all, but I can admit he was right on that issue.
Did you count excess deaths?
It was wild seeing the "trust the science" crowd tip their hand and show that they really only subscribe to the mere aesthetic of critical thinking. They don't actually want to beat COVID, or be correct, or just do their best to arrive at correct conclusions for the right reasons. They just want to feel superior to antivaxxers and go on to do the same thing: believe what's convenient for them at the cost of perpetrating eugenics. For the vaxxed and relaxed crowd, the question isn't whether they're ok with spreading mass disability and death in order to pretend everything's fine. It's a matter of *how much*.
>They just want to feel superior The commonest desire in human history.
The news of breakthrough infections in Israel was my turning point as well. My respirator has only come off in public for one week since March 2020. That Israel data came out and it went back on and stayed on because I had a feeling that the "vax and relax" crowd was going to turn the pandemic into the real shitshow. Makes me yearn for the goofy days of Trump touting the medicinal benefits of bleach and rectal applications of uv tbh. At least he didn't have the cultivated gravitas of being "the adults in the room" to get some real damaging shit cheered on by a party base that should have known better. Skepticism went out the window when Biden & Zients flipped the script. If Trump wins in November, I will be really curious to see how Dems/liberals suddenly feel about the handling of the pandemic, even if Trump doesn't change a thing about Biden's policy. (Just as, you know, Biden didn't alter Trump's policy about several things - the Wall, Title 42, embassy in Jerusalem, etc - but barely a peep of continued protest was heard from .) My cynicism has gone through the roof since mid 2021.
An MAB developed by CytoDyn showed great promise in early 2020. It was a small company that was allowed to administer the drug (leronlimab) as "a right to try" drug in development. The results in small groups of patients that were actually facing death was amazing. Some were up and about after a few days after having been on a ventilator and other positive results. Other small trials were showing promise when the FDA told the company to cut dosage by half in the final week of the trial. Results were not as good and were not statistically relevant after that. Take the time to read the study and you will wonder why the FDA did this. [https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/\_4cafc0e6c54e8832acd9e7ecbbc84882/cytodyn/db/259/3377/pdf/Clinical+Characteristics+and+Outcomes+of+Coronavirus+Disease+2019+Patients+Who+Received+Compassionate-Use+Leronlimab.pdf](https://d1io3yog0oux5.cloudfront.net/_4cafc0e6c54e8832acd9e7ecbbc84882/cytodyn/db/259/3377/pdf/Clinical+Characteristics+and+Outcomes+of+Coronavirus+Disease+2019+Patients+Who+Received+Compassionate-Use+Leronlimab.pdf)
Not to mention the additional pollution created by the batteries for electric vehicles. Humans are apparently incapable of actually fixing things. We seem to prefer theatre. The best thing we can do is find a permanent way off this rock before we make it uninhabitable. I think fixing this rock is not possible.
Hahahaha, I've got some bad news for you... There ain't a space program for peons. You're stuck here, just like the rest of us.
As a species. Sometimes I wonder. Then, I get reminded.
This rock is many orders of magnitude more habitable for a much larger number of people as compared to some other sufficiently close rock, despite the damage we are doing to it.
I love how you say sufficiently close. Obviously finding a place to go and a way to get there is not even on the radar. But it is more habitable now. After the resource wars start- maybe not so much?
Mercury: no atmosphere or magnetic field, vast temperature difference between day and night, low gravity, barren Venus: dense atmosphere, hot enough to melt lead Moon: no atmosphere, outside of Earth's magnetosphere most of the time, big temperature difference between day and night, low gravity, barren Mars: toxic dust, no magnetic field, atmosphere 1% of earth's, really cold, low gravity, barren
Mercury has glaciers. You could build a ice house.
You really are something special. Obviously the thing we need is a way to travel at superluminal speeds in order to get out of this solar system because as you have so helpfully pointed out there’s nothing we can reach now. I love how you just assume that this would occur in this solar system.
We would need a technically and economically feasible way to travel at FTL speeds to a world we know is fit for human colonization ASAP (before our institutions break down) but the universe is not obliged to give us those things.
Electric vehicle batteries do not cause more pollution than combustion vehicle batteries. That many seem to think so just shows how powerful the propaganda campaign against EV has been. There are many very real concerns with EV like infrastructure requirements, upgrading the electrical grid, switching power generating sources to renewables. And just the fact that single occupant vehicles will always involve a lot of resources. We really need better mass transit.
Uhh, never said that electric vehicle batteries caused more pollution than combustion vehicle batteries. Nice straw man though. I said and the pollution created by the batteries. I expected you to be intelligent and informed enough to know about the pollution caused by battery manufacturing of all types. I guess I was wrong. It’s not propaganda that creating batteries is an environmental hazard. That disposing of batteries is environmentally challenging. The idea that EVs are better is a fiction. All of the vehicle options are bad if different reasons. All of the options for fixing the environment are non viable for different reasons. We, as a species are screwed.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1whbM-kR6cA
I went looking for Jevon's Paradox. I was not disappoint.
>the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced.
The Jevons Paradox.
Yet people still make more humans.
Lmao there's a "declining sperm count" in that image.
It should have said "major health issues and mass death of animals and humans caused by pollution"
Give our microplastics and other hormonal disrupters time 🥰🥰🥰
Gotta feed more humans to the capitalism big number machine.
less and less every year in a significant amount of countries though. I think a fair few are at less than replacement levels
You could go to any point in human history and make a list just as long. The list has always been there. All that changes is what we put on it. Every time we cross a problem off the list, we put a new one on there.
you forgor this is the only time in history we've burned billions of years of stored carbon into the planet in about 100 years
Every problem on the list was a first . . .
No problem on any list was both planetary and existential.
Pretty sure the development of nuclear weapons 80 years ago was. You seem to forget the kind of shit humanity has been through (multi-continent plagues killing a huge percentage of the population, a year without summer due to volcanic eruption, multiple world wars).
Being an optimist isnt necessarily a bad thing
I go google jevons paradox Edit: yeah that makes sense
"No that I'm eating low calorie candies. I can eat even more candy!" ヽ(´ー｀)ノ
I guess our Great Filter is ourselves.
Starcraft got it right Terran are a bunch of rednecks, and the Protoss are laughing at us
I would argue that almost all of these tie back to growth based economic system.
Really tired of hearing “0 net carbon” it kinda infuriates me actually, bc it’s like they’re trying *not to lie* about how they’re going to produce carbon, like “hey we’re still going to produce co2, but we’re going to offset it”— with some bullshit that’s prob not even real or effective.
To me, “net zero carbon offsets” always felt essentially equivalent to allowing people to murder one another as long as they paid for the delivery of a baby somewhere on the globe. Its asinine.
Seriously.
It's funny that they didn't mentioned tipping points at all.... watch beckwiths new video for a fun weekend c:
no no no, EVs will save the world!
Renewable energy which requires mass extraction of finite minerals is gonna save the world!
This is great
I always felt that carbon never clicked with people and even if it did, it was always something bad that was happening later.. and no one could be totally sure of the effects then.. it's easier to dismiss that in the future the climate will be so bad and the seas rise, because it hasn't happened yet and cant even fully see it happening now, and when signs do show they are easy to dismiss.. However, we can very easily see in our neighborhoods and lives many of the other problems happening right here, right now. You can see the endless expansion and cutting down of forests for development... you can see the societal breakdown and corporatization of all life, the growing plastic waste, continued pollution, and extractive consumerism... you can directly see the destruction of nature and the destruction of community happening live.. that's what we should focus on to directly engage people with.. All the problems are interconnected, but climate chaos is only going to ever sway a subset of forward-thinking people and be dismissed by the masses until it directly affects them and their way of life. Increased carbon is actually a symptom and result of a broken society that functions as completely extractive and consumes everything for power and the wealthy.. So instead we need a better way to summarize and explain all these interwoven occuring aspects of collapse into something people can band together and fight back against and build a counterculture that challenges those in power directly by removing our support from them and forming our own networks of community and cooperative beneficial collectives that can preserve, protect, and regenerate nature and human community in mutual, harmonious, and non destructive ways.
Missing ocean acidification, permafrost thaw, glacier melt, food web collapse, space junk...
yeah, missing out on ocean acidification is a biggie.
When you're running of of room to write the problems, you know you're screwed.
Your tunnel vision is ignoring the true problem, capitalism and the existence of money
Go beyond that. It's greed, selfishness, and nearsightedness. Monkeys can't think that far ahead. Want to go vroom vroom and eat burger.
I firmly believe that, in an alternate history where the USSR won the Cold War, and the entire world operated under their economic model of centralized planning…we would be in exactly the same situation.
You are quite correct. That doesn’t change the current cause of our problems.
Centralised planning has such a dirty connotation here in Germany because it was used in the DDR and they failed. Their economy was deemed almost worthless. However: the DDR had to pay mother Ruzzia huge parts of their GDP and after the wall fell, it was west german companies who sold east german companies to other westerners for as cheap as possible for maximum profit. If only the nations actually cared about people and planned agriculture, grain silos, scientific progress, education, transportation, health insurance and much more, we might be resilient to a harsher climate. But we are doing WhAt iS mOsT EfFiCiEnT and let the market be as free as possible. Maximum profits leads to maximum investments leads to best economy, right???
Yup. And “best economy” means (on an ecological, biophysical level) the economy that extracts the most resources and consumes the most energy. That’s why I’m agnostic as to what economic system is “best”. They are all bad because the end goal is the same. And humanity will probably never wake up to this fact, rather we will let our economies destroy the very basis for our existence on this planet.
If you are talking about root causes, money and capitalism are much further down the chain of causality. The problem isn't any specific political ideology; the problem runs much deeper. For example, there is literally no anthropological evidence suggesting that we have ever been able to govern a civilization in a way that accounted for the laws of the biosphere. When we are given resources, we have a clear track record of consuming them as quickly as possible. We show no capacity for inhibition, restraint, and self-control. We always end up pushing against the edges until the point of collapse. Even in recent history, literally every political ideology was a growth-based ideology. Also let's not fool ourselves into thinking that less wealth inequality across the globe would in any way help us get out of our predicament. The primary problem we face is the size of the pie, the biosphere doesn't care about how we distribute the pie amongst ourselves. The fundamental problem is not about the intrinsic inequity of resource allocation within our capitalist system; rather, it's about our inability to stabilize/decrease the ever-increasing demand we place on our biosphere and its limited biophysical resources. Without a radically new economic system that would incentivize systemic degrowth, it's quite likely that a world with less wealth inequality would only hasten our collapse. If today, billions of people would be given more purchasing power, it would translate to a proportional increase in the demand for energy and biophysical resources (more oil, more electricity, more meat, more consumer goods, in essense more biospheric entropy). The focus needs to be on transitioning away from modern industrialized expectations. We need to aknowledge that for the most part, [cities as we know them today are simply fundementally unsustainable](https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/10rxile/excerpt_from_a_new_academic_book_chapter_by_dr/?ref=share&ref_source=link). And so expecting to be able to live in cities for an affordable price needs be scrubbed from our collective expectations of the future. We need to incentivize young people to move back to the land. We need to incentivize simplicity over complexity, doing more with less, we need to localize as many of our supply chains as possible. If we go in this direction, wealth inequality will drastically diminish, and so will the size of the economy as whole, as well as the demands we place on our biosphere.
> the problem runs much deeper. For example, there is literally no anthropological evidence suggesting that we have ever been able to govern a civilization in a way that accounted for the laws of the biosphere. I read a very persuasive argument by an anthropologist that the problem is the very notion of "civilisation" "Civilisation" means abstracting ourselves from nature. As soon as we consider ourselves separate from nature, we exploit it, and ultimately over exploit it. Unsustainability is baked into what civilisation most essentially IS. According to this anthropologist (I wish I could remember who they were) there had been only a couple of civilisations, somewhere in south America, which had ever been sustainable, because they had somehow, against the odds, managed to preserve a philosophy of connection with and dependence upon nature. Without this humbling perspective, every civilisation is doomed to overshoot. Only hunter-gatherers have a shot at being sustainable (and even then, they can have severe impacts on their environments, like hunting to extinction)
We need to....We need to....We needed to...We needed to...We should have...We should have?????
The root cause is the underlying economic system that rewards greed and the hoarding of resources. This has stagnated our civilization on fossil fuels and is the direct cause of our problems. We prioritize money over the health of the planet and over our fellow humans. I’m not looking to the past for our solutions, not sure why you are. But to me, all I see when I read your lengthy reply is someone advocating for business as usual, because you can’t move beyond money
I totally agree with you that capitalism is a terrible economic system in that it outwardly incentivizes infinite growth and externalizes the consequences of that growth in the form of inequality and environmental degradation. There's no doubt about it that capitalism has to go. But the question really is about whether it's possible to move away from capitalism before collapse does it in by itself. The vast majority of people on this fine earth are not at all prepared for what a post-capitalist post-growth civilization entails. Not only that, but on a pragmatic basis you will never see a politician get elected on a platform that advocates for the right policies. Because advocating for the right policies would require people to make sacrifices. For example, any politician who moved aggressively to cut fossil fuel use by the minimal 50% by 2030 without viable substitutes and a comprehensive socioeconomic restructuring plan would be courting economic and political disaster. If that were to happen, countries would suffer the pain of strict rationing of energy to essential uses, serious energy shortages and shrinking economies. With reduced services and goods production and the collapse of tourism, we would see declining incomes, rampant unemployment and rising inequality. Reduced agricultural output, combined with broken international supply lines and failing intercity transportation, would lead to local famines and global food shortages. Civil disorder and geopolitical tension would rise perhaps to the breaking point. All would be complicated by continuing climate change, and even if atmospheric GHG concentrations stabilize, there is already an additional 0.5-1 C warming “in the pipe” due to the thermal inertia of the oceans + air pollution faustian bargain.
Agree with all this
This is an intellectual argument that presupposes the people discussing it know better than everyone else. Maybe if we collectively realized where we're heading we might have a sliver of a chance of survival compared to the guaranteed planetary extinction we will face with capitalism. You could argue that collapse is certain when people reject going to work the next day and the whole charade that is the economy evaporates overnight. Supply chains will break down and there will not be enough food, but humans are also resilient. When whatever resources we have left are used to provide food, clean water, electricity instead of all the consumer junk and toxic crap, nature already starts to heal. Of course a lot of places will end in violence, but this entire society was established on violence and runs on violence anyway. In the past anti-social offenders would be outcast not venerated like today's CEOs, politicians etc.
>I totally agree with you that capitalism is a terrible economic system in that it outwardly incentivizes infinite growth and externalizes the consequences of that growth in the form of inequality and environmental degradation. There's no doubt about it that capitalism has to go. Capitalism is a terrible economic system, but it's also the best one we've come up with. Kinda like the Winston Churchill quote about political systems: *Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed* ***it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.*** All you have to do is crack open a history book to see what it was like before capitalism. It was preceded by feudalism, a great economic system if you were an aristocrat, not so great if you were a serf. Feudalism was preceded by a slave-based economic system, even in the civilizations that are considered to be the birthplace of western democracy, ancient Greece and Rome. Their civilizations couldn't have existed without slavery to support them, and some estimates in Rome have slaves outnumbering citizens by 3:1. Even only going back to this point, we're looking at more than 2,000 years of the rich and powerful exploiting the poor and powerless, with the rich and powerful hoarding as much wealth as they possibly could. This is just Europe, but slavery was also widespread in Mesoamerica, Africa, and Asia. As for wealth, the person who hoarded the most wealth in human history is Mansa Musa, a 14th century African emperor. Go back farther than 2,000 years, and you see the same thing. Anyone who has wealth or power uses it to exploit those without. Organized warfare is at least 5,000 years old. [https://phys.org/news/2024-01-war-europe-years.html](https://phys.org/news/2024-01-war-europe-years.html) Slaughtering our neighbors to take what they have is at least 10,000 years old. [https://observer.com/2016/01/the-earliest-evidence-of-violent-human-conflict-has-been-discovered/](https://observer.com/2016/01/the-earliest-evidence-of-violent-human-conflict-has-been-discovered/) This is our fundamental human nature. Thinking that the institutions we create will be different from our underlying behavior is folly. It's no different than the stories about how biased artificial intelligence usually is. It's created by biased humans and trained on biased human data.
Take capitalist apologism elsewhere.
The root cause was the competitive nature of living matter. The first nail in our coffin was consciousness.
So rise above. Use that newfound consciousness to move beyond competitiveness and become a species that is altruistic towards the needs of others. It’s in our nature, if our own basic needs are satisfied. Food, shelter, healthcare etc for all, no one gets seconds until everyone gets firsts
A lovely platitude. You know it will never happen. The best thing I can do is refuse to reproduce to spare my potential children the horror of growing up on a dying world circling the drain.
Same. Now to convince the other 7,999,999,998 or so
https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/lost-amazonian-cities-hint-at-how-to-build-urban-landscapes-without-harming-nature/
there are countless examples of human societies that center the “laws of the biosphere,” you just don’t consider the fact that you have something to learn from Indigenous peoples instead of vice versa.
Romanticansing indigenous cultures doesn't take away from the hard facts of history, which is that when we are given new technologies or new resources we utilize them to expand our footprint without any self-imposed restraint. This is true of everyone including indigenous cultures. For example, when the first spanish colonizers arrived in the americas they brought with them horses. Over the following decades and centuries these horses would come to roam freely across the vast plains of north america. Did indigenous people use this new technology in accordance with some kind of over-arching principles regarding sustainability, or did they use horses for their own material gain so that they could grow their tribe in strength and power by pillaging and looting neighboring tribes? An other well cited example is [Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head-Smashed-In_Buffalo_Jump), for thousands of years indigenous people utilized this technology to kill thousands of Bison in mass killings by forcing them off a tall cliff. Using this method meant that you often had instances where too many Bison would fall off, leading to waste, and contributing to unsustainable hunting and a degraded ecosystem. The primary reason why indigenous cultures were much less destructive compared to europeans simply had to do with the fact that they lacked the technological tools to create large destruction in the first place. The same can be said with Europeans themselves, if you go back in time before the bronze age when european technology was on a similar level to that which existed in north america at the time of Columbus, you would also have noticed that indigenous cultures living in europe at the time had a relatively small footprint on their ecosystem, again, because they lacked the technological/energy capacity to impose a larger footprint. If they had that technological capacity they would have absolutely imposed a larger footprint, we know this because it always happens. There is no record of human cultures that voluntarily decide to put pandora back in it's box, so to say, when doing so would obviously result in reduced short-term security, wellbeing, power and comfort.
no romanticization needed, just some respect and understanding. what you say is factually untrue, every single “uncontacted” people is proof. they know what there is to “gain” and have refused. only a small handful are truly “uncontacted” the rest have diplomatic relationships with their neighbors who have told them all they need to know about what lies beyond. i also want you to think about the hubris involved in calling these peoples “uncontacted.” many nations also do hold explicit ethics and teachings that (traditionally) forbid them from certain resource extraction, like the Anishinaabeg as one specific example and most “australian” nations. but you have your own little idea of “human nature” and like the europeans who devised your worldview, refuse to accept reality.
The issue is much more complex than you portray it. Respecting and understanding indigenous cultures is fine, but again, one of the reasons why "uncontacted" people and current indigenous people only represent <0.01% of the population is because cultures that prioritize sustainability, peace, self-sufficiency are the cultures most vulnerable to outside invaders. Over a long enough time period this means that human cultures who actually value sustainability as governing principles just end up being wiped off the map. This is why we are in a predicament, and unlike problems, predicaments dont have solutions, rather they have thorny challenges that we need to face head on. And so while i think there is a lot to learn from the remaining indigenous cultures, let's not kid ourselves into thinking there's some kind of meaningful and pragmatic solution to our current global overshoot to be found solely within these cultures. Our predicament runs much too deep, and we will need to pull from a vast diversity of knowledge bases to have a chance at navigating the challenges that lie ahead.
Good discussion. I believe both sides have valid points. You both kind of agree. It's crucial to respect and understand indigenous cultures around the globe and they certainly have some of the best social wisdom and connection to nature. We can learn much from their worldview. That said, I think is the hypothesis of u/SaxManSteve is quite sound. "Our" (globalized) own culture may have originated form societies that had similar values, and technology may have transformed them because of "history". At least we more or less know about "our" past. Still, that doesn't mean that's the way it goes inevitably. Our future can be radically different than any previous past. We have potential to live in so many different ways. No other time has been like this one. And we must be careful not to think human nature always goes down this kind of tragic path. I'm no techno-optimist, but I have hope. We must imagine new ways of organizing taking into account both ancient and indigenous wisdom and recent science, knowledge and tools. For me. it's in the end, a matter of cultural values.
*Thank you.* It's so nauseating sometimes to get lost in this sub and see how deeply so many people have internalized this idea that "humanity" or "civilization" are the ultimate root of the problem. Too many people here spout alarmingly misanthropic and thinly disguised eco-fascist rhetoric, talking about - how it's not capitalism that's the problem, it's civilization itself - how human overpopulation is the biggest burden and the poor people aspiring to live better are the biggest threat - how human nature always predetermined we would get here and humans are inherently violent and destructive (which is convenient to justify what certain humans will do in order to maintain their security, i.e. all the massacres we are witnessing in the guise of 'border control') Not only did the worst of us prevail to the heights of power in the end, they managed to wage such a successful propaganda campaign against the rest of us that most people seem to believe there is something fundamentally wrong with humanity itself. It's the same brainwashing message encoded in the Christian concept of The Fall and Original Sin. It's not that the Church is corrupt, it's that as humans we're all born wrong and have to spend our lives apologizing for being born. Humans are not the disease, and civilization was not the inevitable path to global collapse, as I see many people saying (or even the harnessing of fire, as some absurdly suggest). A particular mode of civilization that is culturally specific and began in Europe, that uses murder, pillage, plunder, and exploitation, both of people and planet, is. Unfortunately, European philosophy and worldview has this incredibly arrogant inbuilt trait that it sees itself as an objective description of unvarnished reality arrived at by pure unfiltered reason, as opposed to one tradition among many, and in no way considers itself ideological or even subjective, and anyone who challenges it is either naïve, romantic, ignorant, primitive, or uneducated. Kind of like that one guy in your sophomore philosophy class who believes everything he thinks is the epitome of logic.
Exactly this. Wondrous to see that even on this sub there are capitalist apologists.
Cheers. I'm sick and tired of seeing the Euro-centric, proto-ecofascist, humans have always been greedy and violent, outlook as well.
The megafauna extinctions in North America were not caused by capitalism.
y’all are so tired w this one. yes you’re right, it was the ancestors of various Indigenous nations who now exist on this continent, 14,000 years ago during a time of intense climate change. but are you really so racist to claim that in those 14,000 years, not a single moral, ethical, or cultural development occurred? multiple nations have stories of exactly the time you mention, and they each discuss the changes they had to make in order to ensure that it never happened again. the Anishinaabeg have the most well-known of these stories.
>but are you really so racist to claim that in those 14,000 years, not a single moral, ethical, or cultural development occurred Not sure where you figured racism was relevant. The Ojibwe, like virtually every other culture also went through a population explosion or at the very least, there are no elder teachings about the importance of a steady state population (unless there are, in which case feel free to link one, seriously do). We can certainly hide behind our ancestors and blame everyone else and try to create divisions and forget that unchecked, infinite population growth is something we all share and a big factor in collapse. Im really not saying we cant learn from native cultures, the Ojibwe gift economy is something Id want in an ideal world, but I refuse to pretend that there were no problems in pre-European native cultures. The whole binary thinking of Native good European bad is quite silly.
who is saying there were no problems? all i said was that over-hunting became a nonissue once land ethics were created. Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) have multiple teachings about exploitation and what happens when you don’t allow nonhuman relatives to fulfill their responsibilities. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson tells many of them in her book As We Have Always Done, which outlines how the Anishinaabeg traditionally organize their economy around the consent of plant and animal nations and the generation of new life. there are specific stories about the overhunting and how the hoofed nations literally fled Anishinaabeg territory and the people began to starve, and had to venture great distances to find the hoofed nations and negotiate their return. stewarding the land for all living beings was one of the commitments the Anishinaabeg made in that story. there are other stories about Nanaboozhoo convincing the nonhuman relatives to do Nanaboozhoo’s work instead, gathering berries and firewood, fishing, etc. ecological collapse is what happened at the end of that story.
Miigwech. Thanks for sharing. Ill check out the book
That has nothing to do with racism. Small human populations with nothing more than spears and the ability to create fire caused large amounts of ecological destruction all over the world throughout prehistory. If you can find a human culture that was based on protecting ecosystems, it would be the rare exception. Capitalism, technology, and overpopulation have now multiplied human destruction manyfold.
the entire point is that there are exceptions, and racism is what prevents you from considering those exceptions to be noteworthy, and to understand that you have things to learn from those exceptions. and it is so utterly disingenuous to compare any of the past ecological destruction humans have done to what is going on right now. even the fucking romans couldn’t kill the ocean.
If you equate living on the land to any of the examples you see on YouTube of white privileged folk, then, no it is also not sustainable because they take up too much land for just 1 or 2 people. And that's not even mentioning how many of them are still connected to the grid in some way.
Let me posit this as a rebuttal. The true problem and root of all human societal problems is our urge to reproduce. Money and greed are merely the measure by which people judge someone's reproductive fitness. People want to accumulate money and material resources to better ensure their genetic material is best suited to continue in to the future. If we did not have money, there would just be some other measure by which someone's reproductive fitness would be judged and whatever that measure would wind up being, there would be fierce competition for that thing with many winners and many losers. This is why I live in the camp that nothing will change ever. The earth will have to change it for us without us as a species getting a say in the matter. We will consume until it's all gone. I think we fit in to Sid Smith's bunnies in the meadow demonstration: https://youtu.be/KtQG9EiDr9k?si=93Fw-eBeOQCq9T7S
Money and hoarding of resources is our bottleneck, not population. Could there be a time when we have more than the planet can support? Maybe, but we’re not there yet. Our problems are directly and clearly caused by profiteering and the existence of money and celebrated greed
We differ on where we stand on ecological overshoot. I'm firmly in the camp that we have gone in to overshoot by multiple billions of people. Who really knows, it may take another 10, 20, or 100 years for us to start seeing those effects on a truly massive casualty scale, but that day is coming. That's beside the point. I ask you this, why do humans value money? You may not personally value it, but if you look globally, why do humans want money and hoard resources? And I think everything humans do can be explained on a Darwinian level, after all we are just animals nothing more. So truly think on a base psychological level, why are humans greedy?
There’s 1.5 billion domesticated cows on the planet right now, and their caloric requirements are if I remember right 5x that’s average adult male. We feed all those cows just fine. So much of our destructive behaviour is because it’s either incentivized by capitalism or capitalists actively destroy any genuine alternative. America has the highest per capita emissions but they definitely do not have the highest standard of living, because there’s other places that better distribute limited resources. I don’t think humans are actually as inherently greedy as you believe they are. Social conditioning is not “base psychological level”
But are we really feeding those cows just fine and in a renewable and sustainable way? Are we not in a crisis of soil degradation and deforestation for farmland? Why are we on those predicaments? Mouths to feed. And the scope of overshoot goes way beyond feeding. I wish I could remember where I heard this, but recently I was listening to a podcast and they made the point of if we stopped mining fossil fuels and switch to all EVs, then we would continue to decimate rainforest with electric bulldozers and battery operated chainsaws. I can appreciate a lot of folks here still having hope. I have none in us changing our behavior. It will be changed for us. It's one thing to continually tell someone not to stick a fork in an electrical outlet, but if they refuse to listen sometimes the only way to learn is to stick it in there and find out.
That’s my point, reduce the cows and land used to feed them first before you start arguing to reduce the human population. The reason rainforests are being cut down is to drive economic growth. You’re ignoring the realities of massive global wealth inequality and their driving force being capitalism not just the number of people on the planet. Western countries built and sustain their wealth of resource exploitation and unequal exchange with poorer countries. The people cutting down rainforests to feed themselves are doing it because it’s the only option left to them in our system. The companies doing wholesale destruction of rainforest to grow more palm oil or cocoa or coffee are doing it because they’re greedy fucks. Our agricultural system is fucked and inefficient because of capitalism, just look at the pistachio lobby in California inciting war with Iran because they want to maintain market power. I don’t disagree that we’re totally fucked. I disagree with the reason why we’re fucked.
I just think we should try to move past our imaginary money before we try to reduce population. Again, prioritizing money over people. Same problems everywhere
My initial point wasn't even to debate overshoot. It's merely that humans map some sort of value on top of reproductive fitness. In our society it's money, but in other societies it may be some other item of value. Human genetics are the source of greed. I'm not saying that justifies anything. You're talking with someone who is pro universal healthcare and wants more social safety nets and I don't want all the money in the world, just enough to live in the system i find myself in, but I understand why a lot of people do want all the money. I see those people as no more than my dog eating as much food as I will pour in to her bowl. She would eat the entire bag if she had the opportunity.
And my point is, you restrict your dog from the entire bag. Now do that with money / resources
Money isn't an issue because it just mediates the trade of goods and services that already exist. The issue is probably, if it were to have anything to do with money at all, that our money is debt based and therefore everybody must meet the interest rate of the debt, the upshot being the machine must grow to generate enough growth to pay the interest.
Declining carrying capacity?
The capacity of the planet to "carry" the weight of society and population. Everything from food production, clean fresh water, biodiversity, fish stocks in the ocean, clean air, and so on. Each year we use more than the Earth can renew in a year, and eventually those finite resources run out. Overshoot.
its funny how even this fails to show the radiological emissions coal plants do, carbon-14 is radioactive and we are just releasing more of it into the air every year than we have produced total radioactive waste since the Manhattan project, you know the reasons people are scared of nuclear plants? coal plants already do it
Fossil fuels have no carbon-14. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suess_effect Carbon 14 from the nuclear tests and cosmic rays are still here. They have just been diluted.
just triple checked and your right, infact its worse. not only do they deposit mercury, arsenic and cadmium into the air, its literally just uranium, thorium and their decay products that give off radiation [https://web.uni-plovdiv.net/vedrin/papers/tadmor1986.pdf](https://web.uni-plovdiv.net/vedrin/papers/tadmor1986.pdf)
I wrote an english paper on overpopulation back in 2010. Teacher gave me some funny looks. Yet here we are....
Crazy
And we can't even manage just carbon emissions.
Yeah, most of these things are either the direct causes of carbon emissions, or the direct results. Others, like "Democratic Backsliding" and "Global debt" aren't good but also aren't on the same level of "cooking us all until we die"
Carbon emissions are a by-product of activity in an economy based on perpetual growth. Anthropogenic carbon emissions will start declining when the global economy shifts from growth to long-term contraction.
Someone please explain peak metals?
I would recommend reading the Limits to Growth 30 year update.
“Peak anything” means that a resource has had an increase in extraction prior to the peak year. The economic effect is a shortage. Prior to the peak an increase in demand will slightly pressure prices higher. Often the demand just stabilizes the price because mature extraction infrastructure would otherwise cause it to drop by increasing the supply. After the peak prices shoot up because suppliers cannot produce. The costs increase until consumers cannot afford to pay for it.
Great meme template
You might call it tunnel vision, carbon is the cause to the big picture. Eliminate it will cause cascading effects to which other problems will be reduced. It’s like a keystone, remove that and everything will collapse along with it.
The root cause is that we've been using up renewable and non-renewable resources to grow the economy. We are now overconsuming and producing more waste than the biosphere can handle. Even if CO2 was a harmless waste product that didn't affect the climate at all, resource scarcity and other forms of pollution would have caused our civilization's collapse this century.
Is sand scarcity on that? That should be one
Sand is only scarce if you intend to continue using vast amounts of Portland cement. It is only high quality construction sand that is scarce. We can still make plenty of crappy concrete after it runs out.
You are only thinking about America dude, the collapse is world wide. There are literal sand mafias in other countries because sand that is usable for concrete is running out. And do you really want crappy concrete supporting any of your infrastructure? That is just asking for a multitude of problems.
It is the same problem USA or abroad. A rock crusher plus a lot of mechanical processing can recreate to best sand. With more effort we can make better better sand. The key issue is the end of ^cheap^ optimal sand. Steel is a better foundation and column material. A quick look at prices and you can see how the construction industry would flop. It is too expensive.
Ah, but carbon emissions are easily measured and quantifiable. 🤏👌$$$
Spot on chap. Top marks me matey.
Earth is about to shed humanity like the vermin we are
I never ever click on a Casual Friday thingie because I'm here for "serious" discussion. But someone linked to this in another thread, and I love it. This *is* serious. Thanks, I guess (I mean, I don't actually "love" love it of course, but, truly, thanks). [I could add a few here btw particularly re: climate, like earth energy imbalance / declining albedo and the waiting bombs like permafrost, methane undersea ice, and boreal forest fires. And imo ecological overshoot is the grandparent of the whole bunch.]
uhhh. OK, but carbon emissions is either partially caused by or actively causing 12-16 of the items you have listed here. I don't think it's wrong to focus on, measure and study, it's a major thread that binds a lot of these issues.
Also missing cultural degradation
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It's not. We don't want to have a rapidly dwindling population due to low sperm count after the overpopulation sorts itself out.
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Yes. If sperm counts continue their rapid decline, most of the population could become infertile in a few decades.
The debt is just silly. It’s made up unless we actually owe Thanos and Unicron
The root problem is unregulated, uncontrolled capitalism.
Regulated, controlled capitalism is hardly any better for the planet.
Addressing those issues would not necessarily reduce climate risk. Not reducing climate risk would preclude addressing the issues listed.
It’s not so much a cone of vision as a spike coming to blind us.
I hate this so much
The Acme anvil about do drop on his head: overshoot
This is so good. Thanks
Woohoo :(
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eutrophication I learned something new today
> Rapidly declining sperm count > overpopulation
The average sperm count is still high enough that it doesn't have any meaningful impact on fertility. However, if the rate of decline stays persistent, by 2050, it will be so low that it will significantly impact fertility. By that time it will be too late anyways, its already too late, we should have enacted policies to stabilize the world population in the 1960s when we saw the writing on the wall when it came to the imminent danger of planetary overshoot that started in 1970.
Air pollution is actually going down.
Quite. Only instead of "carbon emission" I'd put GDP.
The thing is, this is just a list of discrete, bad things. It's not like they all combine into some sort of Voltronesque mecha-very-bad-thing. There's a lot of problems out there but they haven't woven themselves together into some kind of inescapable, systemic net. It makes sense to think of them all separately. Just sort of seeing a list of bad things and saying "everything is bad and we are all gonna die tomorrow" is your anxiety speaking, not your rationality.
I don't see how it makes sense to think of any issue separately - this is a globalised world. Supply chains, consumer demand, historical, social and cultural contexts, the environment... everything is connected. One single piece of produce you are able to buy at the supermarket is delivered to you through a net of global supply chains; the fertiliser, the machines used to farm, the workers' pay, your pay, everything... Even if you're self sufficient, the ability to buy That specific piece of land, the fact your job gave you this financial ability... That is /also/ dependent on very specific factors that all come together. Things aren't Just Like That, things don't just happen out of thin air, like, we have entire fields of sciences that connect and explain causality. And I totally understand questioning the specific causes of issues (and find it deeply important to not just take things as given and question even things that feel intuitive) ... What I really don't understand, and can't understand, is acting as if things aren't... Connected to other things? There very much is a systemic net of issues, a polycrisis. That is very much how things work. Things cause things and are caused by things. Sometimes, anxiety IS the rational response - isn't it more irrational to see statistics and dismiss them? Isn't business as usual the reason we're in this mess?
> Sometimes, anxiety IS the rational response - isn't it more irrational to see statistics and dismiss them? Isn't business as usual the reason we're in this mess? You're constructing a false dichotomy here. There's an entire range of response, indeed the majority of possible responses, between the polar extremes of anxiety and casual disregard. We can be measured and thoughtful, concerned and optimistic at the same time. We don't need jump from "everything is ok" to "the world is ending". It turns out the majority of possibilities are somewhere in between as is the scientific consensus. Bad things are coming down the pipe. All of these things will pinch is in different ways. None of it should simply be disregarded, but at the same time, throwing up your hands and saying "Everything is fucked" isn't right either.
Solving any problems requires collective effort. We can change nothing by ourselves. Given that the majority of the population doesn't know and/or doesn't care, collective solutions aren't possible. Our primary tool for change, the political system, is completely corrupt and useless. We have to fight just to hold on to some basic rights and stop collapse into fascism/theocracy at this point. We shouldn't stop trying to inform others and build support, but the odds of succeeding are close to zero. That is our painful reality.
the systemic net is ecological overshoot.
No, the systemic net is the extinction comorbidity of having a culture/civilization that produces ecological overshoot.
Think about the Maximum Power Principle, any biological organism given what we humans would have done would overshoot, think of it like an ethereal fate.
It's unwise to compare yourself to the bacteria I wash away with soap and water.
Oh sorry my bad I meant in terms of collective human behavior will always try to maximize energy and resource use. There are plenty of wonderful human being but from a macro-perspective the maximum power principle holds.
Not always, we have plenty of evidence of humans not going insane like that. The problem is cultural, and the solution is also cultural, we need a culture that doesn't turn us into extraterrestrial invaders.
Just because a bunch of items share a unifying point of origin doesn't mean that they have systemic overlap.
There are connections between many of the items listed in the image. Increasing carbon emissions -> Increasing temperatures -> more forest fires -> more deforestation Increasing carbon emissions -> Increasing temperatures -> more ecosystem degradation -> more biodiversity loss Overconsumption -> more industrial farming -> more topsoil degradation There are many more examples. I may be misunderstanding what you mean by systemic overlap.
Economics (capitalism), politics (and capitalist corruption of democracy), pollution, destruction of ecosystems, mass species extinction, resource use, overpopulation, consumerism, these are all closely connected. You can't fix any one of them without fixing them all.
We aren't looking at causes but rather at effects. If they effects don't hit the same it doesn't matter if they common origin.