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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

> We will be extinct a large number of species on the planet at this rate, likely 50% or more

99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do. Every species eventually goes extinct, species going extinct isn't much of a motivator to go around making humans suffer. We can't stop species going extinct but we can make people comfortable.

And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.

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This is an absolutely unhinged take. We're facing civilizational collapse because we couldn't be arsed to stop burning fossil fuels, not because we didn't have other options. We've known how to do solar, wind, and nuclear for decades, we've known about anthropogenic climate change for decades, we've known the risks, and we've done absolutely nothing about it. This is a problem of will, not capacity.

Edit, because I'm guessing the "civilizational collapse" line's going to catch the response, instead of the "will, not capacity" part:

Pick any one of:

* Sea levels rise by 2-3ft

* The jet stream breaks down

* The north atlantic current breaks down

* Large swaths of the globe between, say, +/-33deg off the equator experience heat waves sufficient to make being outside more than ~30 or so minutes unprotected a life threatening event for normally healthy individuals multiple times per year (note these areas of the planet contain several billion people, and not the rich ones).

* Climates change sufficient to move productive agricultural zones substantially outside of where they've been for roughly the entire industrial area, causing regular crop failures and unpredictable food prices

* Large scale droughts and flooding become a regular event

* Category 5 becomes the low side of what we'd expect a hurricane to hit

And walk through the political, economic, and social ramifications of it, and then realize we're looking at all of them - and we're already seeing the beginnings of them _today_.

It's not clear to me how any of these lead to civilizational collapse. That's equally unhinged doom fetishization. There is an incredible amount of resiliency baked into our society, and resourcefulness baked into our biology. Pick any one of those and explain the steps to, and what exactly is meant by, "collapse."

I'm not arguing against environmentalism. I'm arguing for humanity and against doom prophesies. We are the descendants of the survivors of the last cataclysmic instant-hellfire-and-brimstone extinction event, and we've only gotten more robust since.

The biggest impact to consider is the disruption to food production.

Predictable climate is key to keeping everyone fed. Random droughts, freezes, and unlivable temps will have pretty notable impacts on our ability to produce food.

Will we continue to be able to produce enough food for the world? Who knows. But that's the thing that has me most concerned. If there's a doomsday related to climate it will be that.

Disruption to food production makes it more expensive. We use ~all the land to produce food not because we need to, but because that's the cheapest way.

Greenhouses can produce several orders of magnitude more food per acre than dryland mechanized farming does. (Greenhouses are just one example, there are lots of other ways to produce food more expensively). If we lose ~half of US food production capacity due to climate change we don't halve food production, we switch to more expensive production methods.

Increased food prices might collapse poor societies, but you're going to need a lot more than that to collapse rich societies.

And how long does it take to do that? What do our reserves look like? Where are those new greenhouses? Who pays for the food? How do we adjust our food system around that? How long does _that_ take? How many restaurants, shops, farmers go out of business? What happens to them? How does the economy shift around this? We already have people starving today, how many more do we add in this scenario?

Yes, it'll be horrible. But "collapse of civilization" is a pretty high bar.

Ok, now make two tweaks to your mental model:

First, think “the fall of Rome” when you hear “civilization collapse.”

Second, consider that this isn’t just affecting the US, but every major populated country.

And then consider you’ll be living through it, not reading about it in a book.

Fall of Rome took hundreds of years, up to 1000 depending on how you measure it.

And fall of Rome isn't anywhere close to collapse of civilization. Collapse of Rome scenarios I'll accept as plausible. Collapse of civilization, no.

I might ask you to tweak your model as well..."collapse of civilization" is such an extreme, dramatic, far-reaching term, people are always going to latch onto that. It's sensationalism. I would describe what you're talking about as "widespread suffering and hardship" more akin to a world war.

What do you define as “civilization”? Is it culture, norms, practices, a lifestyle, an economy, basic assumptions about the availability of goods and services and health care and medicine, basic assumptions about government, and norms and standards thereof? Is it literally every part of your life that you live every day?

It's more about the definition of collapse. By your definition civilization collapsed during World War 2.

Generally a large structure that has collapsed is hopelessly, irreparably broken - capable of performing near 0% of its function. It can't recover, it's not limping along in some form, it is "totaled" and you have to clean up the pieces and start completely over.

> Greenhouses can produce several orders of magnitude more food per acre than dryland mechanized farming does.

If we climate control them and light them. Then yes. It also depends on the crop being grown. That takes electricity.

There are many crops that simply aren't well suited to greenhouses. Primarily because they are nutrient thin. Those are popular crops that people and livestock eat.

And, importantly, we don't have those greenhouses built yet. Not even a fraction of a percentage of our food comes from them today. It's possible that we can make the switchover, but that will take decades of build out.

The other thing to consider is we won't really have much warning before we need these greenhouses. About the only thing that will trigger action here with the way society is structured is famine. Importantly, capitalism will work against wanting to produce these greenhouses as famine will kick up prices and traditional farming will remain the cheapest way to produce food. Plenty of large corporate farmers will be happy to just continue raising prices rather than build out.

Greenhouse is the extreme. There are many intermediate options farmers have to increase yields that they currently don't use because they are too expensive.

Using greenhouses to prevent famine is a nice idea in theory, but in practise the world has had many famines since the introduction of greenhouses.

Realistically, it's a problem with food distribution whereby the richest countries can attempt to purchase food from alternate supplies and the poorest countries simply starve.

> Greenhouses can produce several orders of magnitude more food

Got any sources for that?

I don't belive a greenhouse can produce even 3x wheat or corn compared to normal farming.

2-3 seasons instead of one, less losses to pests and diseases. All while it’s far cleaner from heavy metals, uses less water, less fertiliser, doesn’t pollute environment.

Crazy we don’t do this already. It’s a bit of like ICE vs EV.

Fresh water is what I think will do it. Most countries are depleting their ground water rapidly and suffering from increasing droughts.

Ok, let's say US Agricultural production drops in half - I don't mean prices double, I mean for every two tons of produce we produce today, we produce one ton in this scenario. What do you think that looks like for our country? How do you think we adjust to that? Do you think it looks like the same place that it does today? Note too that this is not an uncorrelated change - there's no "somewhere else" to get food here.

Let's say that India faces the same problem - that's a nuclear armed state. How does that play out?

Remember the power outage in Texas? By and large, that was because Texas didn't have its grid hooked up to the rest of the country - but how many different areas do you think need to be facing the same conditions before we knock out the power across a region we can't laugh at for a substantial amount of time? What happens if we have to deal with that on a regular basis?

People think "civilizational collapse" is "we're now hunter-gatherers" - typically, it means "the existing state apparatus falls apart, the wealth and health of the people diminishes significantly, and what was a previously recognizable culture and lifestyle is no more. Think "Roman Empire circa 450CE" - that's what we're facing. Yes, there will be humans in 100 years - pending that India question, of course - but that's not the victory condition here.

> I mean for every two tons of produce we produce today, we produce one ton in this scenario. What do you think that looks like for our country?

Well, the ~33% of food that gets wasted in the US would probably need to be handled a lot more carefully. Probably the obese people would need to eat less. And the strategy of growing the population every year through migration might need to be rethought if more farmland can't be found. Plus maybe there'd need to be more fertiliser produced. That involves fossil fuels.

The US has an explicit strategy of growing the population every year. That is a strategy that eventually leads to famine. Pointing out that global warning might lead to famine is less scary than pointing out that business as usual certainly leads to one - the poulation of the US doubled since 1950 and that is equivalent to halving the food production per person. In fact, letting natural population decline take hold would solve both problems and let the smaller population enjoy higher living standards.

> Let's say that India faces the same problem - that's a nuclear armed state. How does that play out?

They're switching over to industrial farming as far as I'm aware, they're probably going to be fine. Eg, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agriculture_in_India looks like a 50% reduction in farmland would knock them back to 90s levels of production efficiency, and they were mostly ok in the 90s. That is value not calories though, doing a precise estimate is probably more than I can manage for a comment.

> Remember the power outage in Texas?

Civilisation in Texas didn't get anywhere near to a collapse. I'm no expert on 450CE Rome, but from what I do know it looked nothing like modern Texas. I wish I could trade for problems like that and enjoy Texan electricity prices. I don't mind having to be ready for an emergency, that is already something that I need to do. Texas got a good deal on that one.

---

I want to stress here that I'm on board with the idea that these are all catastrophic risks that could end badly. But that is business as usual for humanity, we ignore a lot of catastrophic risks on an average day. These are all things we've faced before and faced anyway without the climate changing at all. Cheap energy is the best bet to manage those risks and turning away from it is madness.

I mean, I was asking you to supply the "what happens then" part. That's my point, most doom prophecies seem to take the form of:

1. Scary event 2. ??? 3. Collapse

I think it does just kind of come down to an innate optimism vs. pessimism. Nobody really knows how any given scenario plays out, it's too complex to predict and could hinge on some tiny little detail or singular event. I look at the Texas thing, or Covid, as evidence of, no big deal, we kept on truckin, pretty much business as usual.

What was the cause of the agricultural issues? How do we know there isn't a solution? We do rationing, we curb new births, we find alternate ways to produce, we optimize the system that was lazy when there was excess, we mobilize everything we have to solve the problem. Yeah it becomes kind of a wartime effort, things aren't exactly 100% as they were, but cultural expectations normalize and adapt and go in new directions. Sometimes it just feels like a fear of change, of the unknown, if you ask anyone today yeah they would not choose to give this and that up but when necessity calls for it you adapt pretty quickly. I still don't see how we get from "food is more scarce right now" to "state apparatus falls apart."

And just to be clear, I am all for efforts to prevent these outcomes. I'm not saying fuck it who cares. I'm just saying fear is the mind-killer.

There is no 2. There is: 1. Scary events (plural) 2. Collapse

> What was the cause of the agricultural issues?

Weather. Possibly weather + water.

> How do we know there isn't a solution?

There is, we can't afford it: Hurricane-proof greenhouses for all crops everywhere.

> We do rationing, we curb new births,

How? Like managing COVID, only for food and sex this time? OMG! You'll have civil war in every city, town and village, which will cripple production even further => faster collapse.

> we find alternate ways to produce

Yeah, it's called subsistence agriculture [1] after 99% of the population dies of famine and crime (killed for their food).

> we optimize the system [...]

What system? There is no system anymore.

> we mobilize everything we have to solve the problem

Guns, we mobilize lots of guns. Those damned farmers won't work hard enough! We'll make them work!

Let me paint a more clear picture:

Adverse weather events => lots of crops destroyed => news inflated scary, as they usually are => huge price increase even before harvest time (of what remains) => hoarding => less food to buy, even higher prices => more news => desperate hoarding => even less food to buy => crime for food from warehouses/stores => even less food to buy => crime for hoarded food => people killed => more scary news (for real this time) => cities run out of food => mass migration from cities to farm country => pillaging of remaining crops, harvest by non-farmers in destructive/wasteful ways => even less food => even more desperate crime for food => mass death

Somewhere in that chain, the army intervenes, which hoard food for themselves first, are unable to manage efficient distribution of food to everyone, kill and get killed by hungry mobs => more death and news.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsistence_agriculture

I do appreciate this.

There is, we can't afford it: Hurricane-proof greenhouses for all crops everywhere.

We can definitely afford it. We can cut out the livestock trophic level for a huge reduction in need. We're eating a lot of basic hardy crops. Are we talking about a scenario where this happened suddenly? If it's just climate change we will have so much time, we're not just going to wake up and be in an inferno. Will we be underprepared, will there be unfortunate decisions and conflicts, yes, but I think Covid was evidence that a lot of people are willing to come together for humanity and that was't ever an existential threat, deaths were low and largely already immunocompromised people. We proactively manufactured a crisis to avoid the real crisis.

How? Like managing COVID, only for food and sex this time? OMG! You'll have civil war in every city, town and village, which will cripple production even further => faster collapse.

This is where it's like...I can't prove you wrong, but what evidence is there of that? The evidence we have from Covid and previous epidemics and wars, is that people didn't descend into chaos. You can point to brutal savagery in all cases but by and large society pitches in for society and manages to triumph over bad actors. "What happens if it's worse," sure, but there's just not a lot of basis to assume this asymptotic anomaly that doesn't have any true priors (have parts of civilization broken down or gone backwards or gone through tragic periods? 100%).

I don't belive that government reserves anywhere in the world are enough for a really bad year if it ever happens globally. It doesn't have to be a global hurricane or meteor hit. It's enough for floods in some places, drought someplace else, plant pathogen somwhere else, etc. A combination of factors, just all in the same year.

Sure, some people come together in a crisis, but new generations are more "me first" than older people. I belive that somewhere there is threshold where people forget their altruism, the snowball starts rolling and then nothing can stop it.

99% of the population dies of famine and crime (killed for their food).

This is just irrational. What precedent or basis is there for this? There have been any number of disastrous crop seasons from ancient Egypt to the US Atlantic. Why didn't any of them result in 99% of the population dying?

Today our knowledge and capabilities around food production are astronomically better. Honestly any kind of major food shortage seems farfetched. As soon as there is any serious trouble, we'll be spinning up whatever we need to, wherever we need to. Our capacity for food production far outstrips our needs, even with our wasteful and luxurious ways. Early settlers in the US were just straight freezing and starving and dying en masse because they did not have the capacity to produce more food, and they managed to keep going and not kill each other.

Why didn't law and order meaningfully start breaking down during Covid? There were incidents of bad behavior here and there. But the vast majority of people took a stance no worse than "let's just get through this." The runaway chain reaction of violence is not supported.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1315%E2%80%931...

yay cannibalism!

also famine mixed with other stuff resulting in multi-civilizational collapse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRcu-ysocX4

food is not web-scale.

you people are not scared enough.

Even during the worst collapses, massive species extinctions took centuries or milleniums. Doing it in a couple of decades instead is unprecedented.

Species extinctions are insignificant if evolution and migration can allow other species to fill niches left behind. This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution. And while migration is significantly disrupted by infrastructure.

As to your second comment, solar is the cheapest energy.

Check out the Cretaceous-Paleogene. Pretty important one.

Phew, you made me feel more optimistic about the world. Our current extinction event is comparable to one where a literal huge asteroid hit the planet :-)))

I mean, I do actually find solace in the fact that extinction events in general can create new conditions for new forms of life, and that one in particular paved the way for mammals.

But, my comment was only responding to the assertion that "This is the first time extinctions are happening faster than evolution."

We have fossils of dinosaurs that existed 40,000 years after that one.

Yes, and some dinosaurs are still alive today. We call them birds. The environment of the earth was still radically altered in an instant, and our ancestors were the winners.

Those were fossils of non-avian dinosaurs.

Ok I'm really missing your point then. Can you restate it in a way that contradicts something I'm saying?

I'm saying that the current extinction event is considerably worse and faster than the Cretaceous-Paleogene one.

Based on the prediction that some significant percentage of life will be extinct decades from now?

I don't see how anything that has happened yet in our timeline compares in any way to a massive asteroid impact.

Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.

Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place. The current rate of extinction is hundreds of times higher than that, and leads to ecosystem collapse.

> Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place.

That is just a mathematical truism. If all species died tomorrow and only humans were left we'd still hit an equilibrium where species were going extinct at the same rate new ones were appearing. The system moves quickly to an equilibrium where usually extinctions = new species.

In practice ecosystems collapse fairly regularly. This stuff isn't planned and nature is messy. Every time something changes ecosystems might collapse.

> Billions of people have died in the past, but it would obviously be a catastrophic tragedy if billions of people died this year.

Sure. Most people would make a show of moral objection to that. But if we look at what the humans actually do - they typically kill everything in sight that is larger than dog, concrete over what is left and poison any insects that made it through the slaughter. I dunno if anyone is tracking how many species we've wiped out on the road to apex predator, but there are going to be quite a few already. Cities are great for humans and not much else. In fact, we purposefully cause ecosystem collapses because it suits us.

That argument is only going to get pushback from very argumentative people but it is actually unpersuasive in practice. A billion human deaths is a tragedy but extinct species seems like it would be acceptable for bettering the material comfort of humans. Humans have generally accepted that trade in the past and we're still purposefully trying to ... I dunno, specie-cide a few that we don't like.

If all species besides humans went extinct tomorrow, humans would also quickly go extinct. The equilibrium would be 0 extinctions and 0 new species.

Maybe millions or billions of years years later that would increase to >0, but i think its fair to call that a total collapse of all life on Earth for those interim years.

> That is just a mathematical truism.

No it isn’t. Diversity rates have risen and fallen over the history of life, and it can take many millions of years for life to re-diversify after a mass extinction event (like the one we are causing now). Evolution by natural selection is not rapid when it comes to larger organisms.

During that time the number of new species will be approximately equal to the number dying out though. Otherwise the re-population would be rapid. The reason it takes millions of years in that case is because the two rates generally pretty similar. It is quite hard to get the two rates to stay far apart for any length of time. It is a truism that they match and they're going to return to matching whatever humans do. And them matching doesn't mean that the number of species isn't drifting radically over time.

I get that thejohnconway probably didn't literally mean it when he said "Species usually go extinct at a rate at which new diversity can take their place" in the sense of it always being true no matter how many species there are - but one of the major issues with the global warming debate is it is actually pretty hard to articulate what the problem is with a lot of species going extinct if people don't use vague language like that which sounds bad but doesn't actually have much of a point to it. People will generally not notice. Nobody notices all the things that have already gone extinct. The world will just be what they are used to for most people. Most species are threats, nuisances or domesticated and as safe as humans are.

Species is a concept that isn't particularly well defined, and certainly not in palaeontology. One can see, however, diverging body plans (disparity), distinct lineages (diversity). If we take our extinction further, it will probably be tens of millions of years before we see the kind of diversity and disparity we had until the last couple of centuries. Its the period of imbalance that causes the problem.

Anyway, congrats on not caring about nature. It's must feel very free.

The average person lives in a city where they don't interact with nature, aren't near nature and aren't particularly affected by nature. People aren't argumentative about it but their choices suggest that on balance, the normal response is not to care. There are more important things to worry about like the well-being of humans.

Anchoring against the cumulative number of species that have ever existed is a strange baseline, that's a metric that will emphasise "hey, life on earth is old" but makes it very hard to say if there's anything unusual or not about the current period.

The more common baseline I've come across is comparing the estimated rate of species extinction from the last century or so versus the baseline historical extinction rate.

To pick an arbitrary article about extinction rates with citations to published research:

> But this estimated [background extinction] rate is highly uncertain, ranging between 0.1 and 2.0 extinctions per million species-years. Whether we are now indeed in a sixth mass extinction depends to some extent on the true value of this rate. Otherwise, it’s difficult to compare Earth’s situation today with the past.

> In contrast to the the Big Five [mass extinction events], today’s species losses are driven by a mix of direct and indirect human activities, such as the destruction and fragmentation of habitats, direct exploitation like fishing and hunting, chemical pollution, invasive species, and human-caused global warming.

> If we use the same approach to estimate today’s extinctions per million species-years, we come up with a rate that is between ten and 10,000 times higher than the background rate.

https://theconversation.com/what-is-a-mass-extinction-and-ar...

This is an interesting analysis, but it does feel a bit apples-to-oranges. It is good to seek perspective on the impact we are having, but in terms of "are we in an extinction event" it feels woefully premature to me, perhaps even comically futile.

1. For all of the others, we are piecing together bits of evidence spanning eons. Can we really compare estimated background extinction rates over hundreds of millions of years to the by-comparison hyper-detailed and extensive data we have from the last 100?

2. This time it's different. Humans are categorically different from past drivers of extinction. I don't think there is a whole lot to extrapolate from. We can selectively preserve species we care about. We can run roughshod over others without even noticing. The impacts of our actions on the global ecosystem, from construction to medicine to pollution to deforestation, are unique. We could hold in a relative stasis where biodiversity continues declining but at too slow of a rate to really be considered a mass extinction. Or we could blow it all up tomorrow. Or we could unlock bioengineering and see an explosion unlike any before. By the criteria in the article it could be millions of years before we can say anything conclusively.

Upon some further reading, particularly this[1] page, I'm going to revise this stance and say that the evidence and consensus is pretty substantial. I do still think "it's different" but even starting from the late Pleistocene it's pretty clear that we're highly disruptive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction

> civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels. If we've got cheap energy then pretty much any problem is solveable and most of the cheap energy production is coming out of the country with the most fossil fuel plants.

Solar is cheaper now. Has been for awhile.

Article says they're using coal to power the data centres. I've not yet heard of anyone going with coal for ideological reasons. Maybe we've entered an exciting new age for that, but the solar people have a long history of basically lying about the cost/benefit ratio so I'm going to go with coal being the better option here.

Reference: https://archive.ph/C0F33

It is cheaper in this case because it's not a comparison of new solar versus new coal.

They're spinning back up dirty old coal plants that they previously shut down because alternatives were cheaper/better. This means the upfront cost is lower for the power company but the long term costs to the environment and health of the public are compromised to allow them to put off building new infrastructure that would provide cleaner AND cheaper power in the long term.

They're socializing the costs and privatizing the profits again.

> solar people have a long history of basically lying about the cost/benefit ratio

Are you sure that's the case and it's not that you are being lied to by the Republicans who take huge donations from the energy sector? Can you cite a study that isnt more than a decade old and hasn't been retracted?

There have been numerous studies to the contrary and having priced home solar myself recently I can tell you firsthand that costs have only gone down significantly every single year for the last decade. The cost for new solar has never been lower and for new construction it's been beating coal for at least years already. Coal is expensive, despite what the coal industry tells you.

If you read the linked article you'll note that even new solar and existing coal are competitive, despite it being an unfair comparison. If you add in storage costs it can leave renewables at a slight disadvantage, but in exchange people get to have healthy lungs and land that hasn't been permanently rendered unusable by strip mining and toxic runoff.

It baffles me that Republicans would rather keep power costs high AND making the environment worse than use the free and inexhaustible power the sun provides. Hell, it's red states that would benefit the most from upgrading the grid. I saw one estimate that installing solar would generate nearly a trillion dollars in jobs for red states over the next decade.

Our future should be solarpunk, not cyberpunk.

> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels

I don't understand the reasoning behind that. Obtaining fossil fuels, refining and delivering them to where they are needed all requires a substantial number of systems working together. Disruption to e.g. refineries will stop people from being able to use fossil fuels.

Meanwhile, alternate sources such as solar and wind are cheaper and require far less civilisation to make workable (e.g. setup your own solar cell and plug it into your isolated supply).

The record shows that civilizations collapse when they deplete their resources or otherwise live out of balance with their environment. Which civilizations collapsed because they did not use enough resources?

> And the experience has been that civilisational collapse is much more likely for the people who don't use fossil fuels.

There's a limited amount of fossil fuels on Earth. We definitely are going to stop using them as a major energy source at some point because of that, the question is if we get to get a choice as to how we reduce and stop using them or let the production curve peak and the economy collapse once that happens if nothing was anticipated. With additional climate change to deal with by that point.

This particular argument is a complete non-issue if we just do “nothing” and let the price mechanism work in the energy markets. There might be a long-term and permanent contraction that reflects the physical reality of energy becoming less available, but there will not be a proper collapse unless some well-meaning central planner tries to avoid it.

Except that by letting the market burn all available fossil fuels we'll get the worst possible case of climate change. And markets aren't known for thinking long-term; by the time we're going to be lacking fuels it will be a bit late to massively build nuclear power plants that takes years to build, massively install renewable and build / install massive storage, or adjust the entire world to less predictable electricity generation if using renewables without massive storage.

France has been doing well with electricity, thanks to central planning that pushed for nuclear. The problem is bad planning, regardless of whether it's public sector or private sector.

> 99.9% of species are already extinct, the fossil record is huge. I get that people don't like change, but species going extinct doesn't really move the needle much. That is what they do.

Ehhhhh this argument is hopeful at best. The problem is we're changing the temp faster than base keystone species' evolution can adapt.

Without them it's super super unpredictable what'll actually happen.

The worry being mass extinction because we lost plankton or similar. Huge amounts of oxygen production and co2 capacity disappears rapidly with that.

Isn’t the issue species going extinct that are critical parts of larger food chains?

And don't forget the pollinators - without them, agriculture changes drastically.

This is a horrifically dangerous attitude.

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