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It's a collective action problem and there's almost no way it can be addressed politically in today's world. There's too much win for populists to say to their
by barrkel 8y ago
It's a collective action problem and there's almost no way it can be addressed politically in today's world. There's too much win for populists to say to their population, "screw those foreigners / globalists / westerners / elites telling us what to do, we're going to look after ourselves". This is a hard message to compete with in domestic politics. And everybody ends up worse off because everybody else has the same dynamics.
So IMO we'll need to deal with mass migration and political instability in poor countries. That's the next battle; parts of the world with subsistence agriculture will become unsustainable, and there will be large migrations of population to elsewhere. That needs to be dealt with rationally, because if it becomes irrational, we'll get into the realms of fascism and genocide.
I don't think the whole planet is going to die, FWIW. Instead, I think we're going to see a shift in ecosystems, where the relative balance of flora and fauna will alter. Some may be edible, some less so. Prices will change and people will adjust, but adjustment will be much harder where there's subsistence agri. I don't think humans are seriously at risk of being wiped out - we're pretty adaptable and we have a lot of technology we could apply when prices rise enough for it to make sense. But food prices may rise generally, and some specifics may become very expensive. This too will lead to political instability and migration.