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What specific baseline do you pick, and why? are there multiple variables involved in that "baseline"? have these variables changed over the 10k years preceding the Industrial Revolution? together or separately? what about these same variables over the last 200k years?

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Good questions. You also have to consider the variables that have changed since the Industrial Revolution. There are more people on earth to feed and provide a modern standard of living. We should work to reduce the costs on the planet for these things, but we can't eschew the progress we've made in order to return to some arbitrary baseline.

See: ecomodernism

Yes, one would most likely have followup questions once the baseline and its variables are made explicit.

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