[pmx]

> “ghastly future of mass extinction, declining health and climate-disruption upheavals” that threaten human survival because of ignorance and inaction

The pandemic has taught me that humans will roundly ignore even the most glaring evidence to avoid accepting bad things are happening. I can't see how we're ever going to be able to avert climate disaster when we can't even get everyone to take basic precautions against a global pandemic.

[oakpond]

Some nations are handling the pandemic a lot more effectively than others. Evidently it's possible to do something right. Also, these guys are arguing that population growth and high levels of consumption in wealthy nations are the key factors. Not even everybody has to do something.

[robbyking]

I agree; I wouldn’t say “humans” are the problem, but “cultures that value capitalism more than human life.”

[listenallyall]

> the most glaring evidence

what evidence? "in 1968, Ehrlich warned of imminent population explosion and hundreds of millions of people starving to death"

Wrong, wrong, wrong. Food has never been more abundant, plentiful and inexpensive https://www.wfdd.org/story/food-growing-more-plentiful-so-wh...

Pardon me for ignoring what this fear monger and crackpot has to say.

[ridewinter]

I believe that species loss is inversely proportional to wealth. The poorer the country the faster its loss.

And due to advances in agricultural technology, since the Population Bomb book was published, global population has doubled while hunger has greatly diminished.

So wouldn’t the answer be more technology & wealth, not less?

[listenallyall]

> more technology & wealth

the exact things Ehrlich and his colleagues would like to prevent

EDIT- from the horse's mouth:

- If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000

- giving society cheap, abundant energy at this point would be the moral equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun

- Too many rich people in the world is a major threat to the human future

- Technology does nothing to solve problems of biodiversity or living space or arable cropland

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Paul_R._Ehrlich

[ncmncm]

Things changed in direct response to the warning. That is exactly how it is supposed to go.

People who don't know insist too that Y2K was a big nothing, but it was nothing only because of $billions spent to ensure that it would be.

People who don't know say the same about whales, acid rain and stratospheric ozone. Same thing: global effort, crisis reduced, although further effort needed.

2038 still looms, but much has been done already.

[stolenmerch]

I'm very skeptical that increases in agricultural productivity and political stability, two leading preventers of famine, were a direct result of a single book. The Population Bomb was controversial and had many detractors at the time. It seems much more likely that he was simply wrong in his predictions (which he insists were simply possible scenarios). Otherwise, you'd have much more evidence of the book being cited in public policy and industrial investment strategies.

[alexgmcm]

It doesn't need to be just because of that book - e.g. companies can see impending food scarcity and invest in agricultural research etc. to avoid it and profit by meeting the growing demand.

The thing is although we now we can often figure out solutions when the problems become more apparent, we can't guarantee it - so it makes sense to start working on solutions as soon as possible.

[ncmncm]

The Green Revolution and improvements in political stability were each the result of huge amounts of hard work by people who recognized crippling problems ahead, and acted to avert them. If you were to tell them they were wrong to perceive a problem and invest the effort, they would be well justified in punching you in the nose.

[listenallyall]

"Things changed in direct response to the warning. That is exactly how it is supposed to go".replace('the warning', 'profit motive')

fixed it for you

[kristopolous]

It's a culture thing.

Some cultures, as it turns out, are better than others at dealing with stresses like this.

Changing culture is a big project. We can try though because we don't actually have any other option.

[gmuslera]

Changing culture runs on money, and the most efficient use for it is to put a feedback loop: you put money, and you get even more money in the short term to put even more on it.

And in this you are competing with a few donations without a feedback loop against the oil industry that have plenty of money and that kind of feedback loops, for just one culture that need to be changed.

And to make things even more unfair, they can use all the dirty tricks they want (plain lies, exploiting bias, pushing disinformation, bribing politicians, etc), while you can only use the, sometimes hard to get for the uneducated, truth.

[smitty1e]

> Changing culture is a big project

For my buy-in, change agents are encouraged to:

- begin with absolute truth

- develop an unambiguous, existentially complete solution

- let that solution sell itself through its inarguable superiority

--

Anything less than that risks coming off as so much bullying.

[michaelbrave]

Some places are handling the pandemic ok, I've felt like the larger problems have been: politicizing the problem, those living in denial and propaganda that minimized the threat. Regrettably climate change faces those same issues.

[freebear]

Are you saying that the ones who take this pandemic serious also take the "ghastly future of mass extinction" serious?

I oppose this 100%, I take the "ghastly future of mass extinction" very serious and my solution would be to introduce a close to zero birthrate of the extremely overpopulated species of Homo Sapiens. I do not however take this pandemic serious at all and it is NOTHING compared to what is and will happen in the "ghastly future".

We are living in a planetary wide human farm, they told us this was gonna happen! And it will happen again and again until we have devoured the planet.

[jhanschoo]

Zero fertility would introduce an aging crisis.

[toomuchtodo]

Which is preferable to a resource exhaustion crisis. Can’t kick the can forever.

Most of the world is at or below a total fertility rate replacement rate (2.1). The trend simply needs to continue for ~10-15 years to lock in the population decline.

[User23]

But Subsaharan Africa will more than pick up the slack[1][2].

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

[2] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/DemographicProfiles/Lin...

[toomuchtodo]

Agree that more work needs to be done for women's rights in that part of the world (empowerment, education, easy access to family planning resources, etc).

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

[ncmncm]

We must hope civilization doesn't collapse before then.

If it does, population will decline faster, but much less comfortably.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25745549

[ojhughes]

Zero population growth would be a terrifying dystopia. Have you read /watched the Handmaid's Tale or Children of Men?

[o-__-o]

Similarly one could take “election fraud” seriously but not the pandemic or climate change.