Thank you for writing this. Its very important to squash the lies being foisted upon humanity from demented people having given themselves over to lies and distortions. At stake—humanity.
Prager U? I think I've actually seen that a few years back.
Carbon in greenhouses, in my understanding, is like Nitrogen to Big Ag. A "drug" that increase plant growth but lessens nutrient density. You get more to eat but you need to eat more to sustain health with the side effect of you get fat, thereby reducing health. Simplistic but gives you the just of the Catch 22 we are in with health today already. They are just building on the bad science.
The rest of the article on financial power is true. Bad theories of how to help the world by helping themselves. Prager U builds on the original bad theory that got us here. Todays oligarchs are building on the here and now. It is all religious "scientific" pomposity that needs to be exposed and discarded.
Thanks for the info. So much truth used to control natural economic evolution to control the power for the few. Not the many.
"These scientism theories have been proven wrong time and time again – with population control being the worst for the longest."
Could you have linked a worse article in this sentence? It focuses entirely on the views of one man on 60 Minutes while also refusing to go into much of anything itself, also citing another article that did so already, so the apparent rebuttal is twice-removed from this article. Meanwhile, it supports the exact scientism you claim to be against because it asserts "Human ingenuity, given the proper institutions which protect property and liberty, will continue to win out over environmental catastrophe." This is a belief in scientism—"science will find a way." If this is your belief, you also believe in scientism.
Taking a look at this twice-removed Shellenberger article—also fixated on Ehrlich, since I guess neither of them know about anyone else—which cites another article (now three times removed from this article) that says: "The IUCN has estimated that 0.8 percent of the 112,432 plant, animal, and insect species within its data have gone extinct since 1500. That’s a rate of fewer than two species lost every year, for an annual extinction rate of 0.001 percent." This is misleading at best, present discussion of extinction is focused on megafauna which have been going extinct since the end of the Pleistocene, not on insects (which apparently aren't animals) or plants. 96% of mammal biomass is humans or livestock, 4% is wild mammals. A population of hyenas numbered in the 40,000s is considered healthy, but apparently a population of humans numbered in the billions is not to be considered overpopulated nor is the obvious decrease of value in human life with the more of it there is to be acknowledged. The guardian of life cares about all life, not only human life, and human life comes at the expense of all other life.
Cue whining about tyranny—how absurd—as if humans haven't been the greatest tyrants ever since we invented the stone axe! The existence of humans is incompatible with the elimination of tyranny altogether and incompatible with any reality of species egalitarianism. Wherever humans have gone, other animals have been extinguished; just look at all the megafauna the Native Americans destroyed as soon as they stepped foot into the Americas. And as popular as it is to point out declining populations in industrial nations as a rebuttal to the human flood, this ignores the fact that they are the very worst in every metric that matters such as energy consumption per capita. Northern countries are by far the most overpopulated and only able to sustain their populations through the destruction nature of technology, the crime of international trade, and the plundering of the rest of the globe. If the Global South reaches Western levels of technological progress and adopts world-consuming Western lifestyles, no doubt it'll come to match the north.
Shellenberger writes "We broke down the six measures that comprise the Ecological Footprint and found that five of the six, including food and forestry, were either in balance or surplus." This is unsurprising and also meaningless, because the forestry industry is notoriously corrupt and will report a surplus no matter what is obvious to any naturalist or biologist who actually goes to forests or what is contradicted by satellite data, because that's how you get better prices on the market. Linkola wrote extensively on this. Much of the rest of Shellenberger's article is paywalled (apparently you think we should reasonably be digging within sources within sources within sources and paying to do so to check what data supports your own writing).
What shallow ecology, but of course deep ecology will never be paid attention. Shallow ecology suits both the masses and the elites much better.
"By decimating its woodlands, Finland has created the grounds for prosperity. We can now thank prosperity for bringing us—among other things—two million cars, millions of glowing, electronic entertainment boxes, and many unneeded buildings to cover the green earth. Surplus wealth has led to gambling in the marketplace and rampant social injustice, whereby 'the common people' end up contributing to the construction of golf courses, five-star hotels, and holiday resorts, while fattening Swiss bank accounts. Besides, the people of wealthy countries are the most frustrated, employed, unhappy, suicidal, sedentary, worthless and aimless people in history. What a miserable exchange."—Pentti Linkola
Kaczynski was right about the only solution being the complete destruction of the technological system altogether. All the facts suggest it, but it goes so against the instinct of most people and what they wish to be true, they can't stand it, and bicker over different forms of energy all severely flawed and environmentally destructive in different ways as Kaczynski himself wrote extensively on criticisng solar, wind, etc. Noncognitivist discourse at work! Advocates of scientism such as, it seems, the author of this article are really not only anti-life, but anti-human, because humanity either survives as a sparse and noble species in a post-technological world at the cost of the death of most living humans today, OR it develops more and more technology in order to survive at the expense of the biosphere, and humanity in this future will cease to be human in not very long as a result of transhumanism—genetic engineering, cybernetics, nanotechnology, and so on—assuming it's not replaced by intelligent machines. Whatever post-human creatures survive will NOT be human and will NOT be free.
Why Climate Change Is Wrong, Dangerous, and Anti-Human
Thank you for writing this. Its very important to squash the lies being foisted upon humanity from demented people having given themselves over to lies and distortions. At stake—humanity.
Prager U? I think I've actually seen that a few years back.
Carbon in greenhouses, in my understanding, is like Nitrogen to Big Ag. A "drug" that increase plant growth but lessens nutrient density. You get more to eat but you need to eat more to sustain health with the side effect of you get fat, thereby reducing health. Simplistic but gives you the just of the Catch 22 we are in with health today already. They are just building on the bad science.
The rest of the article on financial power is true. Bad theories of how to help the world by helping themselves. Prager U builds on the original bad theory that got us here. Todays oligarchs are building on the here and now. It is all religious "scientific" pomposity that needs to be exposed and discarded.
Thanks for the info. So much truth used to control natural economic evolution to control the power for the few. Not the many.
"These scientism theories have been proven wrong time and time again – with population control being the worst for the longest."
Could you have linked a worse article in this sentence? It focuses entirely on the views of one man on 60 Minutes while also refusing to go into much of anything itself, also citing another article that did so already, so the apparent rebuttal is twice-removed from this article. Meanwhile, it supports the exact scientism you claim to be against because it asserts "Human ingenuity, given the proper institutions which protect property and liberty, will continue to win out over environmental catastrophe." This is a belief in scientism—"science will find a way." If this is your belief, you also believe in scientism.
Taking a look at this twice-removed Shellenberger article—also fixated on Ehrlich, since I guess neither of them know about anyone else—which cites another article (now three times removed from this article) that says: "The IUCN has estimated that 0.8 percent of the 112,432 plant, animal, and insect species within its data have gone extinct since 1500. That’s a rate of fewer than two species lost every year, for an annual extinction rate of 0.001 percent." This is misleading at best, present discussion of extinction is focused on megafauna which have been going extinct since the end of the Pleistocene, not on insects (which apparently aren't animals) or plants. 96% of mammal biomass is humans or livestock, 4% is wild mammals. A population of hyenas numbered in the 40,000s is considered healthy, but apparently a population of humans numbered in the billions is not to be considered overpopulated nor is the obvious decrease of value in human life with the more of it there is to be acknowledged. The guardian of life cares about all life, not only human life, and human life comes at the expense of all other life.
Cue whining about tyranny—how absurd—as if humans haven't been the greatest tyrants ever since we invented the stone axe! The existence of humans is incompatible with the elimination of tyranny altogether and incompatible with any reality of species egalitarianism. Wherever humans have gone, other animals have been extinguished; just look at all the megafauna the Native Americans destroyed as soon as they stepped foot into the Americas. And as popular as it is to point out declining populations in industrial nations as a rebuttal to the human flood, this ignores the fact that they are the very worst in every metric that matters such as energy consumption per capita. Northern countries are by far the most overpopulated and only able to sustain their populations through the destruction nature of technology, the crime of international trade, and the plundering of the rest of the globe. If the Global South reaches Western levels of technological progress and adopts world-consuming Western lifestyles, no doubt it'll come to match the north.
Shellenberger writes "We broke down the six measures that comprise the Ecological Footprint and found that five of the six, including food and forestry, were either in balance or surplus." This is unsurprising and also meaningless, because the forestry industry is notoriously corrupt and will report a surplus no matter what is obvious to any naturalist or biologist who actually goes to forests or what is contradicted by satellite data, because that's how you get better prices on the market. Linkola wrote extensively on this. Much of the rest of Shellenberger's article is paywalled (apparently you think we should reasonably be digging within sources within sources within sources and paying to do so to check what data supports your own writing).
What shallow ecology, but of course deep ecology will never be paid attention. Shallow ecology suits both the masses and the elites much better.
"By decimating its woodlands, Finland has created the grounds for prosperity. We can now thank prosperity for bringing us—among other things—two million cars, millions of glowing, electronic entertainment boxes, and many unneeded buildings to cover the green earth. Surplus wealth has led to gambling in the marketplace and rampant social injustice, whereby 'the common people' end up contributing to the construction of golf courses, five-star hotels, and holiday resorts, while fattening Swiss bank accounts. Besides, the people of wealthy countries are the most frustrated, employed, unhappy, suicidal, sedentary, worthless and aimless people in history. What a miserable exchange."—Pentti Linkola
Kaczynski was right about the only solution being the complete destruction of the technological system altogether. All the facts suggest it, but it goes so against the instinct of most people and what they wish to be true, they can't stand it, and bicker over different forms of energy all severely flawed and environmentally destructive in different ways as Kaczynski himself wrote extensively on criticisng solar, wind, etc. Noncognitivist discourse at work! Advocates of scientism such as, it seems, the author of this article are really not only anti-life, but anti-human, because humanity either survives as a sparse and noble species in a post-technological world at the cost of the death of most living humans today, OR it develops more and more technology in order to survive at the expense of the biosphere, and humanity in this future will cease to be human in not very long as a result of transhumanism—genetic engineering, cybernetics, nanotechnology, and so on—assuming it's not replaced by intelligent machines. Whatever post-human creatures survive will NOT be human and will NOT be free.