This is defeatist and also not true. We adopt nuclear, invest in carbon capture technologies, and employ geoengineering strategies as needed until fusion comes online. This is a solvable technical problem with significant political hurdles.
Nuclear is dead, it's better to install 10x as much solar and batteries right now. "Carbon capture" is also highly dubious. Direct air capture is the only realistic version and it'll take a significant portion of world GDP (8% to 20%) on an ongoing basis, which we are not spending. I'll keep you posted when that changes. Fusion is not coming online in our lifetimes.
We're not headed for +8C, but we're never going to see +1C or below again in our lifetimes. Maybe in the 2300s they'll have it under control.
Dude. Nuclear takes decades to build, and that’s IF you can even build it. There’s zero appetite for it in the US or even formerly nuclear happy Europe. We’re literally decommissioning more reactors than we build.
Carbon capture doesn’t work. Even if you did manage to capture it from a coal plant, that’s not enough. You have to suck it from the air, and a scalable technology doesn’t exist, and even if it did, we’d need massive amounts of power to do it, because you’re literally up against the second law of thermodynamics.
And even if you did have all that stuff today, you’d have to deploy it faster than exponential growth!
I’m aorry, but you can’t just yell, “SCIENCE!” and expect it work. It ain’t magic, and the clock has expired. If we listened 50 years ago, and started then, yeah, maybe we’d be in a fighting chance. It’s sure as hell like we didn’t know that check was coming due. Now acting like we can just reverse a century and a half of exponential growth in a weekend is naïve at best, and “thoughts and prayers” level of “fuck you” at worst.
You should do something that actually has a chance to work, rather than feel good about doing something that that doesn’t.
When your house is on fire, you don’t start shopping for sprinklers saying, “Good news everyone! The sprinkler system will be installed in three weeks!”, instead of calling the fire department
I mean that seems to be naturally happening anyway? All major economies are under replacement rate and China for example is on a large downward population trajectory.
Global overpopulation is absolutely a part of the equation, and everyone is deeply uncomfortable talking about it because there are no palatable solutions to that specific problem.
Humans, as a species, exhibit all the damaging properties of a cancerous growth, and our habitat can no longer support us. As George Carlin said: the planet will be fine, it’s the humans that are fucked!
Absolutely. Now all we need is politicians and their constituents around the globe to get on board with this.
Again with the George Carlin quotes though (watch the clip “it’s a big club”) most governments are not _that_ interested in a deeply educated general population, _or_ birth control. Where are we going to get all of our obedient little workers from?
That this is a solution remains to be seen. Does this result in net negative population growth? The evidence seems to suggest it does. Will it result in a sharp enough decline in total population numbers fast enough to mean anything? That seems unlikely.
This seems a bit out of date. I think you need to mention how you feel about below replacement TFR in most of the world to make this position understandable.
> As of 2020, the total fertility rate for the world is 2.3. The global TFR has declined rapidly since the 1960s, and some forecasters like Sanjeev Sanyal argue that the effective global fertility rate will fall below global replacement rate, estimated to be 2.3, in the 2020s. This would stabilize world population sometime during the period 2050–2070. The United Nations predicts that global fertility will continue to decline for the remainder of this century and reach a below-replacement level of 1.8 by 2100, and that world population will peak during the period 2084-2088.
Whilst there is obviously nuance here, even assuming that world population peaks well before 2088, that means we still have a lot of growth to support until that time, and then we have many generations to go before we see a decline to a point where this planet can reasonably be expected to sustain us. Do you believe, given the pace of change we are seeing in this environments’ systems, viewed in the context of the actual tangible change we are implementing to mitigate the negative impacts to us as a species, that there is enough time for that?
Correct. As per my edit in my other response in this thread, we would still be at 10+ billion in 2100. It isn’t like “oh, hey, don’t worry, it’s going down guys!” We should absolutely worry.
