Not to reverse current climate change, but we aren’t living in the Mad Max reality just yet.

But the technologies needed to seriously limit climate change and achieve Paris agreement commitments do exist. It’s really just employing solar, wind, and batteries at scale, electrifying what we can, and using biofuels for the rest.

And the IPCC plans don’t require people to give up having families for a generation.

Well I’ll keep in mind that cures for cancer in mice should be proof against despair should anyone I know or love come down with it.

Yes, if your loved one comes down with a cancer that can be cured by applying existing technologies, not ones that have been tested in mice, but ones that are currently being used successfully to treat patients you should not despair!

Worry? Stress? Generally be concerned? Fucking riot if the government starts limiting/preventing access to that treatment? Yeah sure, that would be a healthy response. But despair? No way!

You said it was unconscionable to have children, so by your metric no-one should have children. If you’d like to walk that back and concede you were being hyperbolic feel free to so!

Again, I agree with you, I agree that a smaller population would be a Good Thing. But the shock to society/civilisation of even a 50% reduction in birthrate could be just as savage as the impacts of climate change. We’d be back to encouraging elders to commit suicide rather than being a burden on society.

I also think that there’s not a lot of point to civilisation if we aren’t aiming for people to be happy and fulfilled, and for a lot of people raising a family is the biggest contributor to their happiness and fulfillment. You dismissing that of hand and judging those people for wanting what makes them happy seems pretty mean and uncaring.

The existence of theoretical solutions is very different from the probable solutions given the various complex competing interests and short-sighted myopia dominating the majority of decision makers.

Again, I agree! But I do think that the existing technical solutions should be proof against the despair that you are peddling.

Nonsense! The IPCC reports include perfectly reasonable science based action plans to address climate change and prevent the Mad Max future.

It’s politics that supports the current plan of emitting as much as possible as fast as possible. It’s people like you who have given up and embraced doomer pessimism that make it so hard to build the political captial needed for change.

You understand the problem. You should know that it’s solvable. Don’t give up before the fight is over!

I think we agree on the state of the world, and even that civilisation is worthy of continuation. So the question is, which is more likely to end civilisation, an entirely preventable apocalypse that we already have all the tools needed to perfect against without even materially losing quality of life?

Or no children ever being born again? Because I was responding to people suggesting that this was the only reasonable option.

It’s pretty arrogant to assume that your pessimistic outlook on the future is the only valid or reasonable one. Human quality of life, on average, has pretty consistently improved since the industrial revolution.

I’m hopeful that as a greater proportion of people aren’t scrambling to survive day to day more of us can turn to the issues of environmental protection and remediation.

Me choosing to hope for a Star Trek future is no less valid than your belief in the inevitability of the Mad Max future.

Thanks for posting the sauce, that was a great read!

It’s possible to hold both of these beliefs simultaneously:

• The constitution conferring special rights and privileges on the royal family and their delegates is a bad idea.
• The constitution conferring special rights and privileges to a subset of people within the country based on race is a bad idea.