Human 'Behavioral Crisis' At Root of Climate Breakdown, Say Scientists (theguardian.com) 300
In a new paper published in the journal Science Progress, author Joseph Merz argues that climate issues are symptoms of ecological overshoot, driven by exploited human behaviors such as overconsumption, waste, and population growth. The paper emphasizes the need to change societal norms and behaviors through various means, including using marketing and media strategies to promote sustainable living, rather than solely focusing on technological or policy solutions. The Guardian reports: Merz and colleagues believe that most climate "solutions" proposed so far only tackle symptoms rather than the root cause of the crisis. This, they say, leads to increasing levels of the three "levers" of overshoot: consumption, waste and population. They claim that unless demand for resources is reduced, many other innovations are just a sticking plaster. "We can deal with climate change and worsen overshoot," says Merz. "The material footprint of renewable energy is dangerously underdiscussed. These energy farms have to be rebuilt every few decades -- they're not going to solve the bigger problem unless we tackle demand."
"Overshoot" refers to how many Earths human society is using up to sustain -- or grow -- itself. Humanity would currently need 1.7 Earths to maintain consumption of resources at a level the planet's biocapacity can regenerate. Where discussion of climate often centers on carbon emissions, a focus on overshoot highlights the materials usage, waste output and growth of human society, all of which affect the Earth's biosphere. "Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behavior," says Merz. "For decades we've been telling people to change their behavior without saying: 'Change your behavior.' We've been saying 'be more green' or 'fly less', but meanwhile all of the things that drive behavior have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction -- and we've been wondering why nothing's changing."
The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signaling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviors which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one's status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies to create behaviors incompatible with a sustainable world. "People are the victims -- we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction," says the evolutionary behavioral ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. "Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?" Just one-quarter of the world population is responsible for nearly three-quarters of emissions. The authors suggest the best strategy to counter overshoot would be to use the tools of the marketing, media and entertainment industries in a campaign to redefine our material-intensive socially accepted norms. "We're talking about replacing what people are trying to signal, what they're trying to say about themselves. Right now, our signals have a really high material footprint -- our clothes are linked to status and wealth, their materials sourced from all over the world, shipped to south-east Asia most often and then shipped here, only to be replaced by next season's trends. The things that humans can attach status to are so fluid, we could be replacing all of it with things that essentially have no material footprint -- or even better, have an ecologically positive one."
"Overshoot" refers to how many Earths human society is using up to sustain -- or grow -- itself. Humanity would currently need 1.7 Earths to maintain consumption of resources at a level the planet's biocapacity can regenerate. Where discussion of climate often centers on carbon emissions, a focus on overshoot highlights the materials usage, waste output and growth of human society, all of which affect the Earth's biosphere. "Essentially, overshoot is a crisis of human behavior," says Merz. "For decades we've been telling people to change their behavior without saying: 'Change your behavior.' We've been saying 'be more green' or 'fly less', but meanwhile all of the things that drive behavior have been pushing the other way. All of these subtle cues and not so subtle cues have literally been pushing the opposite direction -- and we've been wondering why nothing's changing."
The paper explores how neuropsychology, social signaling and norms have been exploited to drive human behaviors which grow the economy, from consuming goods to having large families. The authors suggest that ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one's status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies to create behaviors incompatible with a sustainable world. "People are the victims -- we have been exploited to the point we are in crisis. These tools are being used to drive us to extinction," says the evolutionary behavioral ecologist and study co-author Phoebe Barnard. "Why not use them to build a genuinely sustainable world?" Just one-quarter of the world population is responsible for nearly three-quarters of emissions. The authors suggest the best strategy to counter overshoot would be to use the tools of the marketing, media and entertainment industries in a campaign to redefine our material-intensive socially accepted norms. "We're talking about replacing what people are trying to signal, what they're trying to say about themselves. Right now, our signals have a really high material footprint -- our clothes are linked to status and wealth, their materials sourced from all over the world, shipped to south-east Asia most often and then shipped here, only to be replaced by next season's trends. The things that humans can attach status to are so fluid, we could be replacing all of it with things that essentially have no material footprint -- or even better, have an ecologically positive one."
Well, (Score:5, Interesting)
"changing perceptions" through marketing? that sounds like an arms race with the other side. Long time ago we thought the right way to change perceptions was through good education and development of critical thinking skills.
Where did it all go wrong :)
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Where did it all go wrong :)
Hope that good education and development of critical thinking skills will "fix things" is futile, this is what went wrong.
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Hope that good education and development of critical thinking skills will "fix things" is futile, this is what went wrong.
To often, a "Good" education no longer means The Three R's, and "critical" thinking is to be interpreted as to criticize everything everywhere everywhen.
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Re: Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
What if I tell a more compelling story where Reagan and "greed is good" enclosed everything (in blatant violation of the Lockean Proviso, thus reducing all claims of a moral foundation for capitalism to simply "might makes right") and took the outdoors out of America and neoliberalized us to death so suicides and overdoses and mass shootings are the only way out for so many?
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Let's also not forget his small religious revolution.
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At human laziness. Believing someone is far more convenient and less of an effort than learning and understanding requires.
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Unfortunately, yes.
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I'm lazy, and I believe him, so ipso facto...
Re:Well, (Score:5, Insightful)
This paper isn't saying anything that hasn't been said before but they've added neuro-psychobabble to try to make it sound more convincing.
The essential message is that we need to consume less. Leaving it to the markets, i.e. asking the people who profit from consumerism to save us, doesn't work for obvious reasons. How about asking tax-payers to subsidise consumerism less? Closing a few tax loopholes & shutting down the offshore banking system would be a start. Make the corporations pay the taxes they owe us, you know, for things like education, a fairer judicial system, more efficient infrastructure; the kinds of things that consume less natural resources & benefit the majority of people instead of everyone endlessly buying stuff that'll become landfill in a few months, weeks, days, or hours.
Re:Well, (Score:4, Interesting)
To me the real question is a relatively pedestrian one of the Tragedy of the Commons: capturing externalities.
Capitalism CAN solve these problems as long as those externalities are accounted-for and not just tossed into the midden of 'everyone just has to live with it'.
If a fast food restaurant offers its food in disposable packaging, what is the actual cost for the waste? How about if we include the realistic supposition that at least some of it is just going to end up as litter?
If a fossil fuel power plant provides power to 10,000 homes, who is paying for the particulate and emissions harm down the line?
On the flip side, the entire structure of direct and hidden subsidies in our legal and tax codes (ie tax breaks) needs to be 1) gone through with a fine tooth comb to purge them, 2) restructured so that incentives and subsidies (which there's a good reason to occasionally offer) ALWAYS have a expiry date, 3) always consider even second-order externalities.
I'd further state that any such legislation should be single issue; but then again I think our government would be much better served GENERALLY by single-issue bills instead of 30,000-issue omnibus monstrosities within which lobbyists and corrupt politicos can bury friendly advantages.
Not that the implementation is simple, but I think the principles behind it can be.
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Well, the other side is clearly better at it. Time to learn from them... :-/
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yes, and well-funded, too. the old story about the many who lose $1 versus the few who gain $1*market size.
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Actually it requires getting rational leadership and then there is no "other side" anymore. Sounds to me quite infeasible given how incapable of understanding even basic facts the average person is.
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That train has left, bribery is now so well institutionalized that no leadership can break through to power.
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Russian Marxists thought so too. Until they realized that conditioning by bayonet and firing squad is even faster.
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Yeah, they put an end to history a bit too early.
Simply put, "People are irresponsible." (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was a kid, it was common to just throw trash out of your window on the highway. It's not that people were dumb or lazy, we just didn't think about the fact that the trash stayed there unless someone picked it up. But then folks got tired of the highways being lined with trash, made some littering laws and education campaigns, and now people are aware of why that's not a good thing.
The same thing will apply in this instance. People of the future won't just burn stuff "because". If they do it, they'll think about it.
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The examples you mention are good arguments for the point this post is making. People's thinking about their behavior needs to change.
FYI, smart people don't use the term "virtue signaling." It's Orwellian. Showing people you're good is bad!
Ever fly a flag, pledge allegiance, exchange pleasantries on meeting someone, or say "Thank you for your service"? Every wear clothes to walk out in public?
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You would have to be in your 70s to pre-date nationwide (US) anti-litter [motherjones.com] campaigns like Keep America Beautiful [kab.org]. Interestingly, lots of people accuse KAB of being virtue signaling of the greenwashing variety.
As for the term virtue signaling [psychologytoday.com], take it up with that Ph.D. He seems like a smart person who uses the term, but who also recognizes that often people use virtue signaling as a crutch to replace actually being virtuous.
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You would have to be in your 70s to pre-date nationwide (US) anti-litter [motherjones.com] campaigns like Keep America Beautiful [kab.org]. Interestingly, lots of people accuse KAB of being virtue signaling of the greenwashing variety.
"Keep America Beautiful" was literally an influence operation funded by a collation of beverage bottlers, fast food chains, and plastics manufacturers whose goal was to avoid regulations on disposable packaging that were being considered. The means to that end was to shift blame for one-use plastics that were destroying the environment away from the corporations that manufactured and distributed them and onto consumers.
They were wildly successful and now we have ineffective recycling programs instead of su
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Or ... maybe YOU grew up in some family of litterbugs decades after anti-littering campaigns became widespread (we can look back to at least the 1930s and Alice Rush McKeon's "The Litterbug Family" as "the very instant that a public education campaign starts" and to the 1950s as when it became, as I said, nationwide), and maybe YOU don't understand what everyone else means by the term "virtue signaling". YOU are the one appealing to an outdated, narrowly academic and briefly used definition of "virtue sign
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When I was a kid, it was common to just throw trash out of your window on the highway.
Really? I'm in my 40s and I don't remember it ever being OK to litter.
I'm in my 60s, and I DO remember that time. There was a campaign of television commercials specifically designed to raise awareness and discourage littering. If you've ever heard the phrase "Don't be a litterbug", you've experienced the effectiveness of that campaign.
ancient drives (Score:2)
ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies
Yeah, that's not it. Death cults are usually short-lived, pun intended, and "reduce" ideologies are no different. Those "ancient drives" are the result of a simple relation: Attracting a mate is literally what perpetuates your way of living. Having children, and more than other people, is what makes your values and your way of life more likely to succeed over others. The people who outfuck others succeed because they outfuck others. It's a numbers game. The laws of nature don't need help from "marketing str
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You are stupidly trying a qualitative argument to counter a quantitative fact. That cannot work.
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ancient drives to belong in a tribe or signal one’s status or attract a mate have been co-opted by marketing strategies
Yeah, that's not it. Death cults are usually short-lived, pun intended, and "reduce" ideologies are no different. Those "ancient drives" are the result of a simple relation: Attracting a mate is literally what perpetuates your way of living. Having children, and more than other people, is what makes your values and your way of life more likely to succeed over others. The people who outfuck others succeed because they outfuck others. It's a numbers game. The laws of nature don't need help from "marketing strategies" to do their thing.
This "it's a numbers game" thing is the natural process. But there is fuck-all to do with the natural order among most first-world folks these days. The well-educated, hard-working types tend to not have so many kids. The less-educated, hard-working or not, tend to have far more kids. Which is all well and good for the manipulative sector of the economic community to take advantage of, but is pretty much a doomsday scenario for the species as a whole. Unless the manipulative sector decides to pour their res
Luddites v Technophiles (Score:2)
can we at least wait for a decent McDonalds ice cream machine to be designed.
https://mcbroken.com/ [mcbroken.com]
Much needed (Score:2)
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As if morality messages in movies is some sort of new phenomena that doesnt massively predate the recent down turn in movie attendance.
Overpopulation (Score:3)
We have been hearing about overpopulation and especially the term "overshoot" since the Club of Rome report in 1970, which presumably follows on from earlier. Governments and industrialists were worried about rising population. Now either this is a real, actual problem, Or it's not. I don't really see how you can go from a population of say 500 million on through industrialization to a population of over 8 billion, heading for possibly 9 or 10 billion, and not know whether this is okay or not. Either overpopulation, i.e. there being 20 times more people on the planet than the planet can support is a real thing or it's not.
By all means, all these other initiatives and projects and memes around being green and being caring for the environment and reducing the amount of plastic bags you use, and increasing recycling, and cutting a bit here, and maybe flying a bit less, and maybe changing your car from a petrol one to an electric one, etc. Maybe all of that is all very well.
But if the population is 20 times what it should be, and has already been 20 times what it should be, for decades, then we're well, well past the limits of growth. We're well, well past the overshoot.
Either that's real or it's not. Either the overpopulation thing is real or it's not. It's that simple.
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There are too many people to maintain the biosphere in the face of the environmental impact of our preferred standard of living with our existing technology.
The people who really run things - i.e., those with power/money - like having a lot of people around to do stuff for them and don't care to give up either their power or the stuff we do for them, so population growth will continue. That means either a technological solution to limit the impact of so many people, or convincing us to be fulfilled living
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The Club of Rome report (aka "The Limits to Growth" Donella + Dennis Meadows, and others) presented about 10 various scenarios, with the "Business as usual" showing problems cropping up between 2010-2050. Other scenarios had problems earlier, others later, one was stabilized.
https://dash.harvard.edu/handl... [harvard.edu] Overlaid the scenarios with statistics.
Other interesting approaches is the "Planetary boundaries" framework, and William E. Rees' "ecological footprint" concept.
Whether or not overpopulation is a probl
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The overshoot hasn't caused failure due to functional limits, yet.
Water will fail first, it already is. Read up on aquafiers, at least snowfall can replenish annually (if it falls in the right places).
https://www.wri.org/insights/n... [wri.org]
Aqufiers will fail. Subsidence is when the land sinks from water (or oil) extracted from aqufiers. The California's Central Valley has sunk about 28 feet since the 1920s. I'm sure that's sustainable...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In other news, 2-3 billion people experi
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You are confused and try a simplistic view on a problem that is a bit more complex. There are short-term and longer-term limits of growth. Obviously, the short-term limits are far higher and are enabled by burning off stored resource pools that do not replenish or replenish far slower than burned off. So we can be massively over the longer term limits of population size and continue to grow for a while. Obviously doing something this abysmally stupid results in a big catastrophe at the end.
So are we overpop
Yes, obviously (Score:2)
I have been saying that for a long time. Humanity has exceeded its ecological niche and kept going. Hence the natural regulation mechanisms are beginning to show effect. Unless we want a reduction in numbers by massive deadly force from natural mechanisms, we have to get the numbers and behavior down to sustainable levels quite fast ourselves.
This is rather obvious. That most humans, and in particular the religious fuckups, believe growth is the thing to always do and are not smart enough to understand what
capitalism (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then what happens if you give everybody in an impoverished African villiage $1000, $10,000, or even $100,000 in cash, when there's little available to buy? It'll probably mostly disappear to inflation.
And then you have to add up the
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Actually, no. Capitalism with some sane regulation mechanisms on greed can work. Capitalism does not actually need growth or unlimited personal wealth for a few. It only becomes unsustainable if you allow that.
Free Market and Consumerism (Score:3)
This is not something we can expect the free market to solve, and not something that private corporations
will want, indeed will be pressured against by the nature of free market capitalism. Corporations want profits
in the short term, possibly in the long term, and all else is a side-effect of their chasing profit.
By effectively prioritising consumer choice and private profit, as our current system does, we have
tied behind the back the hands of anybody who wants to do something about the problem.
Glancing again at the Neo-Malthusian elephant (Score:2)
This paper is basically stating what folks have been saying all along about consumerist society - that our industrialized consumerism is a force multiplier that more than counters the demographic transition in population that kept the neo-malthusians at bay. The only difference is that they are calling out cultural drivers and speculating that there are primordial behaviors being exploited, and that no solution that does not address this will succeed in changing mass behavior.
Which means TL/DR we are doome
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Praying for singularity is really the only thing you can do. Absent true AI the demographic collapse among the smart fractions is going to cause the mother of all overshoots, regardless of climate and resource depletion.
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They are trying to get at least some benefit from the slow moving suicide the human race is doing, namely to get some insight in the mechanisms behind it.
Obviously, it is far too late to stop a catastrophe that will kill most people and make life hell for the rest. The only question now is how large that "rest" will be (with zero a real possibility) and what amount of civilization will survive. With every day nothing decisive is done the outlook gets worse.
Systems, not behavior. It's the economy, stupid. (Score:2)
To consume less, we first have to be able to stop buying shit we don't need and not have large sections of the population face destitution as a result.
Coercion is propping up this casino system. The dollar and the stock market need to crash. All that fake wealth (claim to wealth) needs to be wiped out.
And we can't do that as long as money is required to fulfill basic needs.
Imagine my shock /s (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been saying most of this stuff for a couple of decades now, and I'm not the only one here on Slashdot expressing similar thoughts.
I had a quick look at the paper - I'll delve deeper when I have time - and was pleased to find this quote:
"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of".
– Edward Bernays, 'Propaganda', 1928
It would be useful if the above could be translated into a bunch of different languages and disseminated in such a fashion that seeing or hearing it becomes a daily experience for the majority of this planet's inhabitants. Then maybe - just maybe - humanity would wake up to what we're doing to ourselves and each other.
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Indeed. Fat chance of that happening though. Too much short-term profit would be at risk and short-term greed is everything for the actual rulers.
Unregulated, Unfettered Capitialism is killing us (Score:2)
This is what comes from treating capitalism as some kind of canon. From my understanding, socialism builds on the exact same principle, but tries to spread the wealth more evenly. We have elements of both. Some of the healthier societies have more of the latter than we do ( Nordic Model [wikipedia.org]). They are both only theories, and capitalism has known flaws, at least that's what I was taught in public high school. It listed 3 larger areas where there were issues. I don't remember all three, but one was "barriers to en
How much of this is side effects of the 1%? (Score:2)
The middle class are generally pretty reasonable in their cons
How feasible is this for an average person? (Score:2)
It's easy to take some really clear examples of people doing stupid stuff, but isn't a lot of the issue just being forced on the population by big players?
Ideally what we buy is ecological and fair trade, and durable. Most of the crap offered is none of that, and is marketed as all three, and good luck figuring out which claims are true or not.
Even huge companies struggle with supplychain management and making sure what they get is reliable.
It's so easy to say it's a behavioral crisis, but when the entire w
In the USA... (Score:2)
Breaking this training will be difficult, fortunately the current crop of USA'ians seems to be well on their way to break
We've known this for over 50 years (Score:3)
Unlike the right wingers that attack it by claiming one prediction was oil would run out by the year 2000, I've actually read Limits to Growth and the revised edition.
The book had a simple prediction: unless both projected population growth and projected industrial growth were reduced, in 1 century (by 2072) the system would collapse.
We're halfway through the "experiment" and the state of the world closely mirrors the "standard run" / "business as usual" assumptions the Club of Rome made in 1972.
Which means in the next few decades expect the wheels to start to come off the train.
Just like if you manage a forest of 1,000,000 trees which grows 1,000 trees a year and you harvest 10,000, everything can look just fine for decades as you draw down natural resources beyond the replacement capacity.
Re:These people. (Score:5, Insightful)
The actual death cult are the disciples of the perpetual growth gospel, the ones that do exactly what the article describes. Using 1.7 times what our planet can supply is not sustainable, that is bound to fail sooner or later because you can only take what is there. Eventually, we'll run out of resources. But that's ok. Our species was the dominant species on the planet for about 100,000 years. Recorded history shows us about 10,000 years. And we only had what we'd consider an industry for a mere 200 years. Compared to the age of the planet, that's not even the blink of an eye.
We'll go down as a footnote in the history of this planet, a irrelevant blip that appeared as a flash in the pan anomaly during its existence. We could hope to retain some relevance as a warning to whatever species emerges next as the dominant one in a couple more million years. That it's quite possible to cause your own extinction, provided the means to do so.
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This pessimism is simply not needed. There are lots of good ways to prevent global warming:
* Have more, but smaller cities
* Build mass transit in large cities
* Build recycling centres
* Build hydro plants, nuclear plants, or solar plants - or better yet, the Hoover Dam - instead of conventional power plants.
* Have your engineers clean up pollution wherever it occurs near your cities.
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Cities only produce pollution if the combined impact of their population and production exceeds a given threshold.
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The actual death cult are the disciples of the perpetual growth gospel, the ones that do exactly what the article describes. Using 1.7 times what our planet can supply is not sustainable, that is bound to fail sooner or later because you can only take what is there. Eventually, we'll run out of resources.
So much this.
And while it is not illogical to desire better - longer life, better heath in it, better food, cleaner surroundings, when coupled with the unrestrained population growth, such as India's adding half a billion people since 2013, and China's failed attempt to control population - this will fail.
As we deplete resources, the world will come to look a lot more like the third world than the first. It isn't possible to create a first world environment to say countries that add 1.5 USA's worth of
Some Unfashionable Optimism (Score:3)
Using 1.7 times what our planet can supply is not sustainable
Clealry, but you have just blindly accepted the claim that we are using 1.7 Earth's worth of resources from a random person on the internet. I've no idea whether or not that figure is true but I'm definitely not going to believe it until I've seen the evidence and argument supporting it.
The actual death cult are the disciples of the perpetual growth gospel.
Clearly, we cannot have perpetual growth but what the article sees as "exploitation" I would say is literally just nature. Every other species on the planet grows until it is limited by the available resources. Our growth
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The density of humans is minuscule. With lowering renewable energy costs we will approach almost zero cost energy soon.
This has to be written by insane person.
Re: These people. (Score:3, Informative)
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Yep, keep pushing that lie. You are part of the problem.
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Insane? That person is the most clear headed poster here. Our main problems are how we gather our energy and food.
Exactly! The people writing the article and most people commenting are the insane ones. We don't need to stop improving lives for everyone, we just need to stop fucking up. Human development requires energy. Once we have that energy, almost anything is possible, including keeping the Earth healthy.
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You can't keep pumping aquifers, digging up phosphorus, and flushing both into the oceans forever. There are ways to close the nutrient and water cycles with sustainable farming methods, but they are more labor intensive (cost more), and don't produce nearly as much food/acre as our current methods.
We can't feed everyone at a price everyone can afford, and be sustainable at the current population levels. Fortunately, the trend seems to be bending towards population leveling off and even declining in the n
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94% of all living mammals on this planet are humans or human related (cattle). That is the opposite of minuscule.
80% of all birds are chickens.
10% of humans that have ever lived are alive right now.
Energy equations don't support us going interplanetary.
Re: These people. (Score:2)
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Not even the universe is infinite. Infinity does not exist in reality. There will always be a limit, even if it's so astronomical we can't imagine it.
What are your exact plans for 'going interplanetary', anyway? If we terraform and settle Mars, and on Mars use 1.7 times the resources Mars can provide, we have solved NOTHING. We've just copied the problem.
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The density of humans is minuscule.
I'm assuming you mean population density. The global density of the human population is one person per 4.5 acres of land. That's all land, including deserts, mountains, swamps, bogs, forests, tundra, ice sheets, etc.
Re:These people. (Score:5, Insightful)
Well everyone took the covid vaccine so we'll probably see a population decline.
You're also forgetting there's other planets.
This glaring ignorance and self delusion is pretty much the WHY of the issue. We belong dead.
Re: These people. (Score:2, Troll)
Space Nuttery has always been a mental health problem, and combined with other issues make for very ... interesting people, let's say.
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Re:These people. (Score:5, Insightful)
It is really surprising to me how somebody so completely bereft of any insight and any understanding as you was even able to learn how to read and write.
Re:These people. (Score:5, Insightful)
two words, "home schooling"
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Well everyone took the covid vaccine so we'll probably see a population decline.
A) Not everyone got vaccinated against covid. You didn't so your comment is a lie.
B) Far greater numbers of people who are unvaccianted against covid have died than those who are vaccinated. And we thank you.
C) We keep hearing how the covid vaccines will end humanity. It's will never happen, just like those other failed predictions [imgur.com] people were so sure of.
D) And finally, speaking of death cults [imgur.com].
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Yup, just like we don't have measles vaccines. They are not 100% effective [cdc.gov] at preventing contracting measles so they're not vaccines.
The MMR vaccine is very safe and effective. Two doses of MMR vaccine are about 97% effective at preventing measles; one dose is about 93% effective.
Which is why we have measles rampaging through the lands. They're not vaccines and don't work.
Re:These people. (Score:5, Informative)
Bullshit. You are lying by misdirection in order to push a bigger lie. You should be ashamed of yourself.
Obviously the covid vaccines are vaccines. All it takes for something to be a vaccine is to be a substance that "provides active acquired immunity to a particular infectious or malignant disease". The covid vaccines clearly do that.
Re:These people. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well....I guess after the US CDC redefined what a "vaccine" was, then the covid shots kinda fit the new definition.
It certainly isn't a vaccine in the terms of how we'd always thought of vaccines in the past. Certainly not in their effectiveness and longevity of protection.
Re:These people. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually They did change it. [king5.com]
Example of old page May 2018 [archive.org]
And current definition from last change Sept 2021 [archive.org]
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Don't know what the word inoculation [cambridge.org] means, do you? Let's help you out:
the action of inoculating someone (= giving them a weak form of a disease as protection against it), or something such as an injection that is given for this reason:
inoculation with After inoculation with the 2nd vaccine the animals' temperature will go up.
Inoculation is the action of giving a vaccine.
People that say that there is a vaccine for Covid are either poorly informed or lying.
People that claim there isn't a vaccine for covid are misinformed and lying. If the measles vaccine I cited above doesn't give 100% effectiveness against getting measles, then it is not a vaccine, is it? Based on your definition and the other liars out ther
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I appreciate that people are currently working to change the dictionary definitions, but I am very old.... Historically (like before Covid), 'vaccine' meant a conveyance of permanent immunity. Me, personally, I have been vaccinated against many things. Measles, mumps, chicken pox, polio, and shingles. Probably more if I thought about it. Basically, for some viruses (I forget the class name), they are in the 'you get them once' category. If you have had chicken pox once, well you don't get it again.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Nope.
The problem is there is a political motivation to not do anything
Those on the left are fine with abortion, but also fine with transgender/nonbinary people existing. This should in theory act as a population braking system. In other animals, if there are too many of one sex (eg fish, birds) they start taking on the characteristics of the other sex, not just behavior. So it's not an unreasonable assumption that CIS/Transgender and Nonbinary people becoming more visible once they graduate from "am I gay?"
Re:These people. (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think food waste is a big problem in itself, but we create an awful lot of waste to prevent it: plastic packaging and a protective atmosphere or vacuum. And we don't really know how to recycle all that plastic (food packaging is easily the larger part of my hard-to-recycle waste stream). So is it better to package the food in plastic and reduce waste, or to produce a little extra and accept the shorter shelf life and extra waste? Standardizing on packaging might go a long way towards making it much more recyclable. JIT fresh food delivery is an interesting idea but comes with its own environmental impact... and fewer fresh options in the supermarket might lead to even more unhealthy eating habits.
I agree on building better cities and suburbs. Not a fan of an anti-car culture, but here in NL the car is put in its proper place alongside public transport, and cycle infrastructure. More importantly, there's pretty much a ban on big box stores (with a few exceptions), and the newer neighborhoods are generally build as new towns rather than suburbs: they include shops, entertainment, schools, so that everything is close to hand. There's room for cars, but not everyone is going to need one, and you certainly don't need it for most everyday activities.
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Interestingly, people in rich countries (both men and women) want more children than they actually have. Turns out that prosperity and education do reduce the desired number of children, but that "target" of how many kids they want to have comes short of reality due to how expensive and time-consuming children are. It comes at around 2.4-2.8 ideal number of children vs the below replacement line of most OECD countries.
What does this mean? Left to their own devices, people will in general have an "above repl
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No it is not. Performing breeding is ingrained in our biology, desire for children is not. Besides, https://www.bps.org.uk/psychol... [bps.org.uk] ?
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Footprint per capita is quite irrelevant (although that is what everyone is measuring). Footprint per km2 (or per resources available in that country, but area is an approximate proxy for that) is what you should measure. After realising that, look up India or Bangladesh.
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Tell us about the microchips in the vaccines again.
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Religion, with its basically universal "be fruitful an multiply" is the prime offender here and guilty of upcoming mass death on a scale never seen before. While religion is not the root of all evil, it is clearly the undisputed Number 1 champion.
As to legislating morality, no you cannot do that. Morality comes from within. Any attempt to impose it is bogus. And the law is not about legislating morality at all (unless done by religious fuckups, hence utterly perverting the idea), it is about keeping society
Nah.... (Score:2)
'And the law is not about legislating morality at all... it is about keeping society functioning.'
You totally miss the point; what people believe is necessary to 'keep society functioning' is a function of their morality. Which has got to come from somewhere. The Roman criminal law allowed slavery and infanticide. This was necessary to keep their society function in their view. The South enabled slavery for the same reason...
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Nope. I am exactly on point here. You are clueless though. The law is not and never has been about "moral".
How do you decide what is 'criminal'? (Score:3)
There really isn't an immediate answer. Every imperialistic society has regarded conquest as legitimate. Julius Caesar appears to have indulged in something like genocide in Gaul. Roman armies enslaved the people of the losing side. Their 'criminal law', reflecting their morality, allowed this behaviour. Now we find it abhorrent.
So yes, criminal law is always enforcing somebody's morality.
Your downvote is well deserved (Score:2)
From my comment you have no actual idea of my views, especially on drug control. It is disappointing to see an incoherent rant on /. I expect better.
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It is disappointing to see an incoherent rant on /. I expect better.
Why? Are you new here? :)
Whilst that upvote is also well deserved (Score:2)
Thank you for a good laugh... You're right of course, but I'm allowed to hope. The only question is whether my hope is irrational as that which drives Trump supporters.
Re:Shit psychobabble won't solve the Climate Crisi (Score:4, Informative)
The paper is written in a style hard to read if you are not from their field, but it is in no way "psychobabble" or "pseudoscientific". It is actually pretty solid. All you are showing is a lack of education and insight on your part.
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Just look at the name of the piece, which begins: "World scientists' warning". A clear indication that w
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So you wish to be ignorant, uninformed and not have anybody available that understands complex mechanisms and can explain them?