To make progress on climate change, we must move past doomsday scenarios

Just by the fact alone that we assume the human population is growing, and that everyone should have at least the standard of living of their predecessors, we assume economic growth will occur. Of course this cannot happen forever I recommend reading this tidbit (https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...).

What decades are you referring to with Japan? https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?end=2... . Japan's GDP slowed down for sure but it has certainly been growing. I think you are confusing the value of Japan's stock market which was overvalued drastically at one time.

I think it has happened long enough ~150 years to prove it's not short term. Every single major immigration event in north america has benefitted us greatly.

New orleans and french culture is still there from 1700s immigration

1850 famines brought tons of irish to the east coast producing places like notre dame. Germans went to midwest producing the auto industry and general huge success of detroit.

filipino and jewish immigrants practically built the west coast in the 1930-1950s.

That's kind of the thing. In the short term the new immigrants are often living in poverty and are hated, but long term immigration is super beneficial.

In fact the arab spring was intentionally done to drive arabic immigrants to the developed world. We need them for the 2030 worker shortage.

>"Multi-Culturalism" is pretty new (and accompanied by increasingly out of control immigration quotas) and seems to be aimed at pandering to multiple ethnic enclaves.

Oh yes, north america has very bad identity politics since Obama. It has gone beyond pandering and leading into civil war for the usa. It's far worse in Canada because we actually removed our freedom of speech in place of 'hate speech'. So every politician now is a racist etc. Every single conservative leader has been called a racist or worse.

Though there's also a more hidden agenda of mitigating our 2030 worker shortage issue. Canada is essentially bringing in a province worth of people every year in an attempt to mitigate. This has to be done from countries that were affected by WW1 but not WW2.

>I mean not that long ago wasn't the official policy to discriminate against anyone not deemed Canadian enough (the French or Natives for instance)?

~10% of Canada's GDP is going toward building expensive housing. One of the highest in the world. Housing prices are skyrocketing because mortgages are being issued in illegitimate basis, but also because we're adding a province worth of people every year. That's a ton of housing being built.

The saying you said is specifically about economic and GDP. Fair enough though if you didn't mean it.

>apitalism may be the only viable model for a world with serious scarcity, as I expect ours is to become in the mid to near term.

This is a pretty depthy subject. The failure of communism in 1989 has left many people, most of which who haven't lived under communism, to be quite upset. Many of these folks are now proposing some mixed system. This will ultimately fail as well. Capitalism is just the system in which works the best even despite its many drawbacks.

I think fundamentally when the gold standard was dropped. What everyone is yearning for is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit It's a right-wing economic system but I bet with a ton of work we could make it work. The left wing often call this UBI.

>When adjusted for externalities, there's a possibility that GDP per capita in the OECD has been negative for multiple decades.

Debt adjust it as well and I bet it's in some serious trouble in many countries. Such is the debt cycle. Which is what social credit is designed around. Debt = money. It inherently is going to be managed in social credit.

This is a strange way of saying "Yes, you make a lot of good points I can't argue against, and you should feel bad for doing that." followed by a no true scottsman fallacy.

Yes, the green movement is not perfectly homogeneous and of course they are not all the radical bomb throwing types, but they protect and defend those radical groups and don't police their own movement to try to deradicalize it or to make it more scientific.

You don't see is greens condemning other greens for being too radical or insufficiently scientific. The condemnation only goes in one direction -- not being radical enough and not supporting unscientific agendas (anti-nuclear, anti-logging, pro-recycling, plastic straw bans, etc).

Interestingly, this was already known in the 1990s, and the NYTimes science writer, John Tierney, wrote an article about how recycling is actually harmful for many of the items recycled, and that this has taken on a type of upper middle class religious ritual (https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-gar...). No science article ever published by the times received so many death threats and angry letters as that article.

But things have gotten much worse since then, as demands for recycling increased and city budgets began to be eaten by the costs of subsidizing this. See https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/04/opinion/sunday/the-reign-... for an update in 2015.

Then when China stopped accepting US trash, cities around the country began dumping recycling into landfills as they could no longer afford it. (https://fee.org/articles/america-finally-admits-recycling-do...).

See also:

https://www.manhattan-institute.org/as-city-budgets-shrink-i...

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/16/business/local-recycling-...

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/17/plastic-...

China is doing the same now with Taiwan. Try calling Taiwan a country as a movie star -> forced apology. Bodies like the IOC already falted. No guarantee that sometime someone tries, or feels forced to try for whatever reason, to push it. If the West doesn't react to that, well, then all the others will push the limits as well.

Cuban mistake crisis happened because Kennedy was perceived as weak willed. The generals behind him were not and pushed him hard toward stronger response. Was close to an American revolt.

So, you're not wrong, but also omitting a significant actual current threat.

Maybe a couple of islands and a bit of India. Then a break for a few years. Repeat now and then.

Old people want to be engaged and do something meaningful and influential as long as they can. I imagine the majority of them would agree in principle that younger people should have more of a role. Just that someone other than them should be the person to step aside and make way.

Do you honestly think that when you are the same age, you will be willing to end your role as a productive member of society for the sake of the "younger generation"? Even if you don't have enough to retire and maintain your current lifestyle? What will you do with your remaining time after that?

We are talking about adopting policies that promote human flourishing, and I guarantee you that rising fertilizer prices and fuel prices will kill many more people than rising sea levels. It's just that the people who die of rising fertilizer prices live in Africa and India, not NYC, LA, or Miami.

In other words, have that replacement in place and available before you start messing with the price of fossil fuels.

I really want to push against this neoliberal "carbon credit" mentality where we think market solutions will somehow provide replacements as needed. If you want to shut down a coal plant, fine first build the nuclear plant, and then switch over to the coal plant. If you want solar and are convinced batteries will work, then fine, build the batteries first and then switch over. Don't just rely on "the market" to allow you to shut something down and assume replacements will just appear.

Nobody is arguing that there aren’t potential benefits to the oppressed side. Slaves in the colonial days were also kept alive, housed, and fed.

But, since you’re talking about the knowledge and industrial revolutions, do consider that the former is a mutual exchange of ideas which has benefited all (not purely from the developed to the developing) and for the latter, it’s mostly the developing manufacturing for the developed, to this day!

Asia and Africa both had very advanced medical tools, machine, and philosophical and societal structures, which the West adopted innumerable ideas from. The developing countries have had civilisations that benefited their populace, and have had others that resulted in violence and death (just like the West).

I think the main problem with your viewpoint, like the other commenter said, is the false dichotomy you present between colonial oppression and no-contact outcomes.

Moreover, your understanding of world history reeks of “white saviour” principle. Hope you educate yourself one day!

Take a look here at life expectancy and when exactly it started to rise above 40.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/AFR/africa/life-expect...

Take a look at the correlation between post colonialism and death from violence, in one example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

This isn't a case of 'what have the Romans ever done for us', and few will accept that it's not oppression in a net sense.

Colonialism covers a wide array of things, but it also includes robbing the people of its narrative. And that is precisely what happened to the two Koreas. Our country was occupied by fascist Imperial Japan in the first half of the 20th century, Korean culture and political participation were severely oppressed, and economic exploitation of the people (to fuel their war economy) was rampant. In this oppressive atmosphere an strange thing happened: Marxists (the far left) and the nationalists (the liberals), finding their common enemy, were able to resolve their differences and cooperate with each other to fight for independence. And after Japan's loss and subsequent independence, most of these two were willing to reconcile their positions through democratic means, and people were generally excited for a new independent democratic nation to be established. Instead, the Soviet influence from the North deliberately gave support to Kim Il-sung and its constituents to push Soviet-style dictator communism in the North, while the US from the South gave overwhelming political and military support for Syngman Ryee and his followers (who was "voted" to become president via manipulated elections) to create an equivalent capitalist dictatorship. After that the rest is history, communist dictatorship hellhole in the North, capitalist dictatorship hellhole in the South. It's only been about 30 years since our country was regarded as a liberal democracy, but even then I question if the country is really a democracy now when the whole system blocks ordinary people from actually participating and having a stake in political issues.

So our history is a fable of crushed potential narratives, the inevitability of both Western authoritarian communism and Western authoritarian capitalism imposed on us with guns and bombs. Maybe without foreign intervention, our place could have been an experimental testbed for a new kind of Asian democratic socialism? Maybe we would have succeeded in creating a more enriching egalitarian nation, or maybe we would have failed, who knows? But regardless of what the outcome would have hypothetically been, this was all robbed of its possibility by Western superpower interests. And being robbed from the people of their self-organization is a dehumanizing experience that I'm sure many colonized countries will empathize with.

Ok. Will you please return the money paid for conservation then?

You really ought to look at what France is currently doing in Africa. If you want to disagree with the parent that Africans or those in the developing world are intentionally oppressed, just because millions are no longer slaughtered is no mitigation of their point.

Your work is enabled by the innumerable underdeveloped countrymen that slave away producing everything for you. This is quite obvious if you think hard enough, just actively ignored by most.

> Are people from under developed countries to stupid for democracy? To incompetent to elect good leaders?

Please read more (1)(2) and learn to have some empathy for the developing people that you indirectly exploit everyday, before making such strong accusations.

(1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banana_republic (2) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...

And failing in a single prediction does not invalidate magically all the other models. Ecological problems are complex and chaotic problems by nature. Much more complex that building an app. Being wrong is totally normal, and even necessary to understand and improve the model.

So this would be like discarding an entire program of millions of lines because, gasp, one bug was found. Bugs are expected and even welcomed. They are tests that allow us to improve much faster

If the problem is what was said by <"politician"> from <"random color"> that you dislike, you are attacking the problem in all the wrong ways.

(Topic starts at 9:30)

It's either that, or he allowed someone to take over his social media channels and does not check on content.

Also being a psychologist does not make you a philosopher, anthropologist, sociologist, political analyst and so on.

[1] citation needed

Even more so when people try to sound authoritative or portray themselves as role models for others.