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> The only way this is happening is if the planet gets depopulated of humans rapidly. Please don't tell me you're one of those "earth would be better of were w

• c048 7y ago
  It's easy when you just focus on doom thinking and relegate everything else as fake or irrelevant.
• spynxic 7y ago
  The proposed solution of depopulation is based on a flawed premise. It isn't necessarily true that a growing population needs greater access to fossil fuel. Rather, as access to fossil fuel grows so can the population.
• icxa 7y ago
  If these people really believed that overpopulation was the problem, then why don't they start depopulating with themselves?* It sounds terrible I know, but it serves to demonstrate the hypocrisy of the stance. Like George Carlin said, "I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists, these white, bourgeois liberals who think the only thing wrong with this country is that there aren’t enough bicycle paths. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a shit about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me." * note: don't actually do this if you believe this wretched, damned worldview, go seek help, I don't really want anyone to off themselves because they think it "helps the world"
  • MrBuddyCasino 7y ago
    > You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. IMO that’s the wrong conclusion to draw. Its just natural behavior. Its simply an argument for localism and accountability.
  • jacquesm 7y ago
    I'm a huge fan of George Carlin and many of his observations are spot on but it should at all times be remembered that his main mission was to entertain, not to make political statements designed to impact future policy. Yes, there is some hypocrisy involved (people that vote green, drive Porsches and go on two airplane holidays per year) but at the same time he benefits from the caricature, and that is too broad a brush to paint very large swathes of the population with. If the planet is overpopulated then that is a problem, regardless of whether people observing this fact or reaching that conclusion see themselves as part of that problem, and regardless of whether or not they take themselves out of the genepool to remove the hypocrisy.
  • EGreg 7y ago
    For the same reason a regular Progressive who believes in Medicare for All isn’t going to opt out of private health insurance and give 30% of their money to the government. There is no program in place for the money to go to. Under a progressive tax system, they might not owe all that much, if anything. And the goal is to put the program in place and require everyone to participate. Look at the success of the Toronto Protocol banning CFCs to save the Ozone layer. How do George Carlin’s arguments apply there? “If you are really worried about the hole in the ozone layer, just stop buying hair spray, and stop pestering the rest of us!”
  • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Perhaps, having had no say in their own conception, it's reasonable to allow them as much a chance of a life as anyone else? Overpopulation is clearly a problem, probably the problem, but you don't solve it by guilt induced suicide, mandated death or shipping people off to camps (not in the "civilised" world anyway). You discourage excess procreation. Tax after the first child, free birth control, and advertising campaigns should reduce numbers. After all many nations did all that in reverse to encourage more children, but they didn't make breeding compulsory. There is no hypocrisy in the stance. I'm sure there's other non-dystopian possible approaches that stay safely away from holocaust and eugenics. The hypocrisy is pretending a finite planet has infinite space for expansion where we keep expanding until there is a catastrophic crash. Perhaps some wildlife will remain, perhaps not. Far better to have a controlled stop and seek to find a sustainable population - where earth can regenerate what we use, and we still have sustainable wildlife, insect, sea and plant populations and some wilderness. Humanity keeps on demonstrating they can't do self-controlled, so your worldview wins. Future crash it will be then.
• dictum 7y ago
  > post-modernist, nihilistic garbage This argument predates postmodernism by two centuries. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap If anything, postmodernism wouldn't acknowledge a way to classify people into "worth-living" and "not-worth-living"; if not by ethics or humanism, because it would find most or all criteria in the filters to be bullshit.
  • bin0 7y ago
    Malthusianism more or less espouses an equilibrium - short on food, people die, more food available, people have more kids, cycle repeats. Not that all the humans need to die. There's also a great deal of difference between "I believe there may be a lack of food" (but not passing a value judgement on the situation) and "I believe people need to die" (claiming the "greater good").
    • EGreg 7y ago
      I don’t think the parent you responded to meant by depopulation the TOTAL extinction of humans. It’s likely they meant, say, massive increases in family planning and women’s education leading to people having fewer kids later. Child mortality has been greatly reduced, someone should tell many African men! Religion plays a big role in this as well, around the world. We have learned how to live on a credit card at the expense of our children. We imagine we have “escaped the Malthusian trap”, but the bill comes due! More people means more factory farms, overfishing, desertification, deforestation, plastic pollution, garbage and releasing greenhouse gases. The accumulation of garbage and the depletion of resources can throw delicate ecosystems out of whack (bleached corals, for instance, or collapse of bee colonies). Ar best, we are reducing biodiversity greatly and turning the earth into a monoculture of fatory farms for feeding a growing population of humans. At worst, that’s one unsustainable step away from collapse.
• trophycase 7y ago
  You use "post-modernism" like Jordan Peterson uses "post-modernism"... incorrectly, and likely without having read any of it. If anything, reducing population (not through genocide obviously) for expedience is actually a very neoliberal idea
  • hokkos 7y ago
    There is liberal in neoliberal, and there would be no population control like the one child policy with more limited intervention from the state.
    • trophycase 7y ago
      Neoliberalism is a fairly conservative ideology ironically enough
  • bin0 7y ago
    > You use "post-modernism" like Jordan Peterson uses "post-modernism"... incorrectly, and likely without having read any of it. Incorrect on both counts. And I use it to describe the philosophical base that essentially, there is no absolute truth and nothing can be taken for reality. Which, ironically, post-modernists use their only absolute truth. > reducing population (not through genocide obviously) for expedience is actually a very neoliberal idea What makes you think I'm a neoliberal? And what does that have to do with what I said? More importantly, how would you reduce it? It took hundreds of years for the West to reduce birth rates. Cultural factors often mean people have many children, even if they have access to birth control. See the attempts to do this in Africa. There has been some success, but not a ton.
    • trophycase 7y ago
      "Incorrect on both counts. And I use it to describe the philosophical base that essentially, there is no absolute truth and nothing can be taken for reality. Which, ironically, post-modernists use their only absolute truth." Ok so remind me what that has to do with population control or believing that things would be better off without humanity. Also feel free to refer me to major post modern philosophers who advocate for such a thing, because I've never read them. Most post-modernism is very life affirming in a very backwards way. The people I hear advocating for this sort of ideology is actually many in the mainstream "left" (read Democratic) in the US. I didn't say you were a neoliberal, just that such a policy is. In the sense of "for the greater good" and it's insistence on dehumanization and erosion of any non-Capital based relations
• valw 7y ago
  > At some point, pulling energy out of thin air will end up cheaper than doing expensive drilling operations. A lot of people seem to believe that abundant clean energy is a sufficient solution for our environmental problems. A huge part of GHG emissions is due to deforesting and cattle, which has little to do with energy consumption. History also seems to show that giving humanity abundant energy will only lead to it wrecking itself in some other way. Sustainability is simply not compatible with our crazy paradigm of unlimited growth and consumption.
  • bin0 7y ago
    Cattle likely won't change. I'm going to keep eating meat. And deforestation may not change due to exploding population. However, that doesn't mean we can't capture carbon. I've seen numerous promising business ideas to capture carbon and convert it into useful materials; I think it's more feasible to do that than to force veganism on every one.
    • valw 7y ago
      > I've seen numerous promising business ideas to capture carbon and convert it into useful materials; I think it's more feasible to do that than to force veganism on every one. Yeah, we've all seen them - they make for fantastic headlines. None of them is as viable as protecting forests / planting trees by a long shot. They systematically fail to mention that the energy consumption is super high or that they're not scalable in another way - at least not in time. > Cattle likely won't change. I'm going to keep eating meat [...] more feasible to do that than to force veganism on every one. You don't need everyone to go vegan - we only need people to eat a lot less meat and diaries, and / or choose meat with a smaller footprint (e.g chicken). It's simply not reasonable to use 40% of arable lands to feed cattle given the environmental and food challenges of the 21st century. If you're not willing to make the relatively small lifestyle change that is changing your diet, then let me tell you with blunt honesty: you're an instance of the most severe cause of climate change - privileged people not willing to give up on some of their comfort. This attitude is also collectively irrational, because climate change if not prevented will force us to much more radical lifestyle changes. I do hope you will reconsider.
• noonespecial 7y ago
  "earth would be better off were we all dead" The right answer to this is "for who?" and "why would it matter then?" We don't save the earth for the earth. We save it for ourselves.
  • richev 7y ago
    > We don't save the earth for the earth. We save it for ourselves. I was hoping that we were trying to save it (from us!) because this is simply the right thing to do.
    • noonespecial 7y ago
      Not trying to be the least bit facetious: What makes it the right thing to do?
      • toss1 7y ago
        For starters: What says that we have more right to liver here, take the air, water and other resources than any of the other clearly sentient & intelligent beings among whom we live? I have a hard time finding any good answers to that question that do not boil down to <might makes right>, i.e., we're more intelligent, capable, etc., so screw all the other animals and plants (upon which, BTW, our continued existence depends). So, from an ethical POV, mere consideration of the other beings makes it hge right thing to do. Even if we want to save it for only ourselves, we need to wise up damn fast. Look at the list starting with AGW shifting the climate faster than any time since the asteroid 65MM yrs ago (& now showing serious signs of runaway feed-forward effects), plastic debris and microplastics choking the food chain on sea and land, neonicotinid pesticides destroying the insect population & especially pollinators at well into double digit levels, monoculture industrial agriculture, massive habitat destruction... the list goes on and on. The result is that we are likely getting dangerously close to breaking the food web. When that happens (even without war) there will only be a few survivors, if any, and they likely not consider themselves lucky. So, even if only for selfish motives, merely acting like it is right to preserve the earth's biosphere, is the right thing to do.
• rexpop 7y ago
  Post-modernist? Really? To me, this common sentiment reads as run-of-the-mill Modern Capitalism: more for me, even if you have to die.
• Der_Einzige 7y ago
  What you describe is not postmodernism. Antinatalism is certainly not nihilism. You seem to be confused
• dang 7y ago
  Would you please not take HN threads into generic ideological flamewar? I feel like we've had this conversation with you many times already. It's not what this site is for, so please stop. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html