No worries
A high-end hotel in the liberal Texan enclave of Austin is playing host to a conference whose theme is boosting global birth rates, but which will in fact feature racist and eugenicist internet personalities and far-right media figures.
Boosting global birth rates – brilliant. That’s like throwing bottles of gasoline onto a house fire.
The Natal conference – whose website warns that “by the end of the century, nearly every country on earth will have a shrinking population, and economic systems dependent on reliable growth will collapse” – is scheduled to be held on 1 December at the Line Hotel.
Somebody should tell them about the other systems that are going to collapse, long before the end of the century.
Heidi Beirich, the co-founder of the Global Project on Hate and Extremism, said the meeting will cement links between the far right and influential rightwing opinion-makers. “It’s not surprising to see far-right folks, eugenicist types and white nationalists joining forces at a conference like this. They have become bedfellows,” she said.
She added: “The far right has long fretted about a demographic winter, and though they don’t necessarily say it openly, what they are referring to most often is a fall in white birthrates.”
If only they knew they can just stop fretting because global warming is going to make their concerns irrelevant.
I’ve been predicting this conference for a long time, even wrote a book on this premise. But it isn’t just far right. A lot of the people I know on the left are concerned. They’ve convinced themselves that worrying about birth rates is imperialist, colonialist, and eugenicist, and it’s just a short step from there to pro-natalism. I have gotten yelled at more on the left than on the right for advocating a reduction in population. People jump from saying “reduce birth rates” to “kill people so we can reduce population”.
Well maybe they should have tought of that, hmmm? Aren’t there other economic systems not reliable on “reliable growth?” “Supply and demand” isn’t nearly as robust a law as “You can’t eat if there is no supply. Or drink. Or breathe.” You’d think we’d have a bit more sense than a mat of bacteria in a Petri dish that thinks it’s got a limitless supply of growth medium at their disposal. Or not.
Our current economic regime represents a tiny fraction of the time that humans have been on Earth. We’ve never had it so good; we’ve never made it so bad. We haven’t yet realized that these two are cause and effect. It doesn’t have to be this way. We could do fine with less stuff; better still if there were fewer of us putting pressure on the planet. There’s a bare minimum required to sustain our numbers, but our impact goes way beyond that. How much of what we’ve done has been the result of industrialized liesure and entertainment, mechanized, motorized, mass-produced – and consumed- pleasure and distraction? Ophelia’s comments on cruise ships hit this on the head. Yet stopping this would be seen as a restriction on “freedom.” But our freedom to be irresponsible is costing the world. Shifting gears to change this would cut into too many profit margins for it to be permitted. So much easier, and cheaper, to continue with business as usual for as long as possible than to disrupt everything and retool how we do things to forestall disaster. Which will be a good deal more disruptive, but whatever. So the ones selling us the tickets will keep telling us that there is a free lunch, things are just fine, and that this rollercoaster will keep going up-up-up forever. As long as there is money yet to be made from the Cruise to Hell, they’ll keep offering passage and an all-yuo-can-eat buffet. Mustn’t alarm the
bacteriapaying customers, right?The population problem will solve itself.
William Rees on Overshoot.
Well, if we don’t work on the former, Nature will step in and look after the latter for us. Do we really want to delegate this task to it? Because that’s what inaction will result in, and Nature’s got several billion years more experience of brutally impartial, unforgivingly unsentimental ruthlessness than we do. Unlike many CEOs, it is not sociopathic or malicious, but it will fuck up your shareholder value, retirement package, and stock options, and kill you dead, in an instant and without a thought. But if you’re very unlucky, it will take its time doing it.
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Tool-making dates from around 3 million years ago in the Olduwan culture of Africa. One day, an Australopithecine ancestor of ours bent down, picked up a stone (maybe even one with a naturally sharp edge to it) and used it to shape a bit of wood; or whatever. From that point, it was downhill all the way to modernity, and on the way to here today Fourier and others formulated the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which says that the Universe is running down, order is giving way to disorder, and entropy is increasing.
Locally, some components appear to go the other way, as when green plants turn a low-energy collection of molecules (carbon dioxide and water) into the high energy combo of sugar plus oxygen.
But here is the catch: no matter how environmentalist, careful and frugal with non-renewable resources (eg iron ore, coal) we are, we are unavoidably spreading uniformity all over the world. The way to sustainability is not by going off into space looking for another planet to colonise, but by somehow ensuring that everything we use is part of a cycling-recycling process, that in the long-term has to be 100% watertight and completely efficient.
Beside that, the old alchemists’ quest for a way to turn base metals such as lead into gold is child’s play.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldowan#:~:text=This%20leads%20to%20current%20anthropological,earliest%20tool%2Dusing%20human%20ancestor.
Well let’s face it, the most efficient short-term solution to climate change is killing a whole shit ton of people (billions) all at once… and then keep birth rates down. Most people find that pretty unpalatable.
We just need to better find the Chinese labs. A more…effective…virus might solve the “problem”. Black Death 2?