Enough politics, let's talk about something that really matters, a 6th mass extinction

[bshole]

Looks like NYC in the 70's before the evil EPA started getting that clean air act going.

Its actually worse. Its more like the early 20th century. In my lifetime the air/water in Wisconsin has gotten much cleaner. The EPA did a world of good. I am a little upset that we still occasionally dump waste in Lake Michigan. We built a deep tunnel to prevent that from ever happening but it still does. My dream is to have a pristine Lake Michigan. We are still pretty far from that.

 

[kage69]

For anyone still clinging to the hilarious notion that this topic isn't subject the same political bullshit everything else seems to be... then by all means, please explain this: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016...e-change-trumped-by-party-affiliations-in-us/

"One significant voice about climate change has been Pope Francis, who released a letter (called an “encyclical”) in 2015 titled Laudato si’ (or Praise be to you). The encyclical acknowledges human-caused climate change as an unavoidable reality and frames action as a moral imperative. Many hoped that this might have an impact among Catholics who still doubted climate science.


A group of researchers led by Texas Tech’s Nan Li neatly planned out a pair of before-and-after surveys to assess those hopes with data. So what impact did the encyclical actually have on American Catholics?

Many prominent climate “skeptics” and politicians demonstrated one possible response that fell somewhat short of sudden conversion—they stuck to their guns and criticized the pope’s statements. They argued that this was a political and economic issue rather than a moral or doctrinal one, leaving the pope perfectly capable of being fallible."


And people wonder why I laugh at holy rollers and republicans who spew about worshiping anything but money and control. Dogma, it's a bitch.

 

[Sheik Yerbouti]

Its actually worse. Its more like the early 20th century. In my lifetime the air/water in Wisconsin has gotten much cleaner. The EPA did a world of good. I am a little upset that we still occasionally dump waste in Lake Michigan. We built a deep tunnel to prevent that from ever happening but it still does. My dream is to have a pristine Lake Michigan. We are still pretty far from that.

you should see the shit they dump around Gary, IN, or maybe you shouldn't. I doubt we will ever have any pristine waters anywhere in the world anymore.

 

[trenchfoot]

I think I deserve what you have..... um. Not sure that you have anything I want. The oligarchs certainly do though... the power they have to taint the judgment of our politicians to make laws that hurt American engineers. That is something I want taken from them and given back to the voters.

A matter of perception between the have's and the "have not's" is the idea that the "have's" consider what they "have" are things they acquired out of thin air, while disregarding the fact that what they acquired are things they took from somebody else through their desire to have EVERYTHING all to themselves.

The point of contention here is that the oligarch class took many of those things by corrupting our politicians into giving these oligarchs and especially those oligarch wanna be's the ability to be just that way via tax loopholes and regulatory policies that they either wrote for themselves or neutered into obscurity. They corrupt to gain the upper hand and then they corrupt even more to keep the upper hand so that they can corrupt the system of finance and government even further. There is no limit to their greed.

These "benefits" that the "have's" literally bought for themselves are benefits that are exclusive to their class and absolutely kept away from the working class so as to keep them in their place. And their place, so far as the oligarch class is concerned, is to be a source of income to be exploited to their heart's content, to be an indentured class of serfs as it were.

The have's understand that to keep what they have and to keep having more and more and more of it is to keep having a source that they can exploit, and the only way that can happen is to rig the system in their favor, and that they have done par excellence.

This idea of the "have not's" desiring what the "have's" have is an acquired attitude and quite representative of the systematic corruption of the government so as to create a mere shell of its intentions, all while masking the reality that the nation is a nation of the very wealthy, for the very wealthy and by the very wealthy.

The irony found in this situation is that the tenets of our Constitution and Bill of Rights have given those that wish it the ability to corrupt the Constitution and the Bill of Rights into a form of government these documents were specifically created to prevent.

 

[JSt0rm]

Don't you wish you could believe it? Contemplation of one's mortality with no second bite of the apple is very depressing, especially when the only bite you got contained nothing but worms and seeds.

That's so not true. 1 life means you try to make the most of it. You understand that life is precious and this world is an amazing gift. The simple religious way leads to war and suffering and destruction of the planet because "whocares we will move on to the after life"

Opiate for the masses. It was an amazing way to control large amounts of people 2000 years ago but it either needs to go away or this world will die. I think our major evolutionary mistake was the "god spot" being too large. I think you have to have something like this for any creature that has evolved sentience, its just that ours is too large.

 

[HamburgerBoy]

While I get what your saying you are missing the fact that every first world country does. It consume at the same rate.

Electric power consumption per capita makes a reasonable proxy for relative consumption.
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EG.USE.ELEC.KH.PC

While the US was using 13,000 kWh per capita in 2013 other first world countries like Italy and the U.K. were using only 5,000 - 5,500 kWh per capita. (Italy has a neagtive replacement rate.) Your chart actually shows how much less some of Europe consumes.

Assume conservatively 20% efficiency increases over the next century and we only need an increase of 3,000-3,500kWh over the 500-1,000kwh average use of the third world currently.

By doing this we push population growth towards the lower estimates:

Which further reduces the total amount of new power required by 2100.

I did a rough calculation of the required power in another thread a year or so ago. Which I could find.

At any rate the third world doesn't need to follow directly in our footsteps. We already know how to build solar, wind and nukes. We know how make drought and disease resistant GMO crops so the environmental impact doesn't have to look like the 20th century all over again.

So I think you are being overly doom and gloom.

Many of the countries with the fastest growing populations (largely sub-Saharan Africa) are below even 500kWh per capita. Even if we take the case of Italy, we're still talking about somewhere around a several-fold increase in consumption. If extrapolating out to 2100, you also have to consider that Africa is currently estimated to increase its current population by about 200%, which much more than offsets any efficiency gains.

 

[agent00f]

Many of the countries with the fastest growing populations (largely sub-Saharan Africa) are below even 500kWh per capita. Even if we take the case of Italy, we're still talking about somewhere around a several-fold increase in consumption. If extrapolating out to 2100, you also have to consider that Africa is currently estimated to increase its current population by about 200%, which much more than offsets any efficiency gains.

The best way to reduce reproduction is to educate women so they have feasible alternatives to popping out kids. It's frankly a pittance compared to what's spent on military or similar pork.

 

[Blue_Max]

You want depressing news? Pollution. The more you research the decline in air, water, and soil quality, the more terrified/depressed you'll get.
Toxins.
Radioactivity.

...shit.

 

[Sunburn74]

That's the wrong way to go about it.

The moral/ethical way to reduce population is by raising the third world to first world standards of living.
Many first world countries already have negative replacement rates because people choose to have fewer kids. The trick is to take what we've already learned and apply it to third world countries. So avoid coal and instead use solar, wind, and nukes.
The faster we do this the more likely we are to hit peak population this century and start contracting. If the impact from the rate of population decrease is slower than the rise in worker efficiency world GDP continue to increase.
As population pressure reduces so will habitat destruction. An 80% increase in the worlds rainforests equals the equivalent weight of a reduction of 50PPM of atmospheric carbon for example.

1) I would disagree. Moral and unethical? No. It is not in anyway. I'm talking about aggressive family planning here.
Is it moral and unethical to tell people to not smoke or drink or take anabolics or drive without seatbelts? It may be unethical to force them, but it isn't to encourage them or teach them and establish policies that reward good behaviors. For example, we give tax credits to people who have MORE kids in this country. What if we chose to simply eliminate tax credits for kids and even went as far as to give tax REBATES to people who have less kids? The US is a bad example as our growth rates have been relatively slow compared to the rest of the world (almost being flat) but I'm just using this concept as an example. Explosive growth however is happening in africa (in Burkino Faso the average woman has about 7 children in her lifetime) and in Asia and again we are adding about a billion people each 10 years or so. The point is, its clear that people have the right to have kids but the freedom to have all the kids a person wants is not sustainable and is actually harmful to the rest of us. Much of the impetus for large families comes from archaic religious idea and practices which have less relevance today and possibly potential harm. Moving away from those practices on a global level may be the thing we need to save us all.

2) We don't have time to bring every developing company to first world standards in order to effect the changes we need. Climate change and irreversible ecological destruction is happening now and the window of opportunity to act may be as little as 1-2 decades. A global strategy of reducing population would actually allow the world to meet those targets in that time period. Pretty much everything else you said would fail. I think nuclear power is well underutilized but it takes about 18 years of operation for a single nuclear power plant to turn an energy profit if you account for the energy required for construction, fuel retrieval, and maintenance. If you're really interested affecting climate change rapidly, some sort of global population control strategy has to be part of the equation

Modernity causes over-consumption of our natural resources far more than population alone. Solar, wind, and hydroelectric are nice and all, but incredibly far away from supporting the first-world's economy. For the third-world nations where population is booming, yes solar is more capable, but population booms in undeveloped countries don't really matter on a global scale. There is no way to raise the third-world to our standard without raising their consumption to our standard; our living is primarily based on a consumption-heavy market economy, which agrarian societies can never enjoy by the nature of their operation.

Actually I would strongly disagree. So the carbon impact of a person varies depending on where they live (ie US vs small village in central africa). Not having a US kid will have a much larger carbon impact than not having a kid in central africa. However, overpopulation causes a need to expand food sources. As a species we mostly feed people by growing crops and by grazing animals on land (with some supplementation from fishing). As populations grow, most land gets utilized as crop land and grazing land. This leads to ecological destruction. Furthermore, often farm land isn't perfectly sustainable and doesn't do a lot of the things a forest would do ecologically and so you have further ecological destruction. Then you think about the fertilizer needed for modern farming and its ecological impact which is incredible (nitrates are poisoning our oceans. There is a freaking dead zone in the gulf of mexico due to this). Then you think about the contribution of grazing animals to greenhouse gas production and you have more ecological destruction as species die from rapid global warming.

At the end of the day, population growth drives these processes. If you have more people you have to feed them, clothe them, warm them up, give them medicines, and so on and to do so we have to utilize natural resources. The more people showing up each day with births the faster we deplete our resources. It is not rocket science. Even the chinese at some level understand this, with their one child per family rule. I don't agree with that rule, but they grasp that slowing population growth was absolutely necessary to stave off basically the collapse of their society (again you have to feed people, clothe people, warm people up, give them medicines, and if your population is increasing by 200 million people per 10 years and your land isn't increasing nor your energy and food resources, you have a real problem. Either shrink down or go to war and try and get more land or rapidly develop technology that allows you to take care of all of these people. The easiest thing to do is to shrink down).

Again, the issue isn't US population growth. The US has mostly been very slow or even flat and europe is at times negative, but rather growth in other countries that have ecological effects as well as market effects here that are highly damaging to the environment.

 

[blankslate]

Don't worry with Hillary as president we'll Frack our way out of this crisis with Energy independence.


https://weather.com/science/environment/news/studies-highlight-risks-of-methane-from-fracking



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