As a biologist, working in paleontology, having been an environmentalist for over three decades, I do not believe in the promise of "renewable energy", not one iota.
Hydro electricity in Quebec was claimed to be renewable, meanwhile, the winter water circulation brought about by those northern reservoirs/dams may be the greatest contrib…
As a biologist, working in paleontology, having been an environmentalist for over three decades, I do not believe in the promise of "renewable energy", not one iota.
Hydro electricity in Quebec was claimed to be renewable, meanwhile, the winter water circulation brought about by those northern reservoirs/dams may be the greatest contributor to the decimation of the oceanic conveyor belt. It could be that our hydroelectricity contributes just as much to warming as our other human activities.
Big tech is always the problem.
It's a form of hubris that the machinations of a few narcisistic minds can outperform millions of years of evolution. We need to downsize, and if we don't voluntarily downsize, it will eventually hit us like a tons of bricks.
Me I like hot weather, and animals couldn't care less.
But when India, Irak, the Emirates, Pakistan, and a few other high density countries become uninhabitable, Canada is where they will all come to, and Canada will no longer be green. And since Russia and Canada are the only truly green places left on Earth, well goodbye, that's the end of any quality of life.
There can be no tech answer to this. Hubris must end. Gods don't exist, but pretending we are gods is no better.
I'm talking nuclear power more than hydro (fusion ideally), but the cat is out of the bag as far as modernity goes. Nobody is going to willingly go back to ye olden times before electricity, which means the power grid has to be supplied somehow.
Fusion ain't happening, that's a pipe dream. Many poor communities are becoming nuclear waste dumps. Fun :(
And no, we can't put the cat back in the bag.
The only solution is VOLUNTARY population reduction. I had my tubes tied 25 years ago. Coupla years ago, standing at the farmer's market (bleh) I was in a chatty circle with 5 guys. They all had vasectomies.
WAY TO GO!! woohoo! The transition will be difficult to manage, downsizing is hard, but we need to downsize the numbers, not the tech. Keep it all in balance.
That's what everyone said about aircraft until the Wright brothers came along. Until then, I'm a big fan of rocketing the fission waste into space.
Good luck getting developing countries to agree to voluntary population reduction. Even if population declines in Canada, it will keep growing globally because of Asia and Africa.
Well, there's a reason pop growth is still so high in those places, because the boss policies come from us, because as long as they grow, it provides our cheap labour.
So I agree, any kind of solution is in the far distance.
But in the meantime, the growth policies have to change.
And that means the attitudes of the Canadian "left" must change.
Humans are told every single day by media, peers, TV, that adding a human to the planet is "the greatest thing one can do", that "family values are of the utmost importance"
Apes don't overpopulate
Wolves don't overpopulate
Because Homo sapiens treats sexuality like a pig farm, maximised reproduction, death has become illegal, more, more, more, it's all part of the same narrative.
Biologically speaking, pre-modernity, women only menstruated 3-4 times a year, "couples" didn't exist (one-to-one-lifelong-pairings are not the Homo sapiens way), and the men and women in the Northern Hemisphere only spent rare time together, in communal sleeping arrangements, where "fatherhood" was not a concept.
So absolutely, we need to recognise that the way humans have been doing things the past 5-7000 years has been anti-biology.
Now we can absolutely debate what new objectives we want in society, but the silencing and censorship of biology must end.
We can't have a proper pros and cons discussion without including biological facts.
Evolution happens over multi-millennial cycles.
The hubris of humans to think we can just maximise things ALL the time makes no rational sense.
In essence, we're still behaving religiously, we've simply replaced sky daddies with our own hubris. Sad really.
Apes and wolves will certainly overbreed; they'll just have high death rates if the ecosystem can't sustain those population numbers. Humans have found all sorts of innovative ways to artificially lower death rates, and thus continue population growth well beyond what's sustainable. As David Frum put it:
"Nature wants 5 of your 7 children dead. It wants you dead by 50. Everything better than that is brought to you by science & technology"
I've heard that harems are the homo sapiens way, where like lions and elephant seals, a small number of hyper-dominant males monopolize breeding with large numbers of females. Naturally speaking, 80%+ of men are incels.
High numbers of incels leads to high levels of violence; monogamy was invented largely to pacify raging males. So....if we truly went au naturel, society would get very violent very quickly (sort of like how life for lions tends to be short and brutal). For men it's kill or be killed; for women it's being treated as a resource and guarded/hoarded accordingly, like how prey-hunting territory is guarded against intruders.
All this to reiterate, the cat is out of the bag as far as modernity goes. We have to work with the reality that nobody wants to move back to the African savannah and live as hunter-gatherers. We can either innovate to make our way of life less destructive, or watch those death rates finally rubber-band back to where they otherwise would have been all along.
David Frum is one of my least favourite people in the world, because he's one of those biology deniers. No nature does not "want 5 of your 7 children dead", that is 19th century Frum bs ;)
If a woman only menstruates 3-4 times an year, and only has sex with a male a couple of times a year, she IS NOT having 7 children!
Furthermore, before civilisation turned women into pig farms, exclusive breast-feeding vastly reduced fertility, and women before stupid sky daddy dictates breast-fed til the second dentition came in.
As a biologist, I'm going to stick to evolutionary concepts. No example from mysogynistic societies has any sway against the biological discussion.
We are apes.
Except we prefer to live like ants/termites
Incels are a social construct. Their idiot religious parents told them marriage was the only way, and that no matter how shitty a person they are, they still deserve to own their own sow ;)
Marriage is a social construct for Homo sapiens. It is anti-biology.
yes, I "agree the cat is out of the bag", that doesn't mean we can't prevent anti-scientific narratives.
This is 2022. It's time debaters included actual science in debates, instead of wishful thinking and insistence on perpetrating social trends which are toxic.
"If a woman only menstruates 3-4 times an year, and only has sex with a male a couple of times a year, she IS NOT having 7 children!"
I mean, female gorillas and chimpanzees average 2-6 babies over their lifetimes, so 7 isn't a huge stretch. And the point with the incel thing is there are basically 2 options for mate distribution.
Either something approximating monogamy, or else the males all fight each other and the biggest meanest dude gets to make all the babies (like silverback gorillas). I've also heard wild stories about male chimps beating the shit out of females in order to mate with them, so point being, women being mistreated is unlikely to have begun with the agricultural revolution. Hunter gatherer society wasn't some feminist utopia before modernity came in and fucked it all up. That's also why I brought up lions, where lionesses regularly have their babies killed by new dominant males to push them back into heat.
Just saying, there's lots of reasons not to want to wind the clock back too far on modernity.
Edit: I mentioned Frum because at the end of the day, I think overpopulation isn't driven by high birth rates, it's driven by long life spans and low death rates. Rabbits have bred like, well, rabbits, for a very long time without massively overpopulating the earth, because they have high mortality rates to offset all the new births.
A few highly developed countries have started to see birth rate dropoff, which is good, but less developed countries still, for both cultural and economic reasons, keep pumping out babies. We can't make them stop, so we have to figure out a way to innovate our technology to accommodate even more people around than we have already, without triggering a mass-extinction event.
As a biologist, working in paleontology, having been an environmentalist for over three decades, I do not believe in the promise of "renewable energy", not one iota.
Hydro electricity in Quebec was claimed to be renewable, meanwhile, the winter water circulation brought about by those northern reservoirs/dams may be the greatest contributor to the decimation of the oceanic conveyor belt. It could be that our hydroelectricity contributes just as much to warming as our other human activities.
Big tech is always the problem.
It's a form of hubris that the machinations of a few narcisistic minds can outperform millions of years of evolution. We need to downsize, and if we don't voluntarily downsize, it will eventually hit us like a tons of bricks.
Me I like hot weather, and animals couldn't care less.
But when India, Irak, the Emirates, Pakistan, and a few other high density countries become uninhabitable, Canada is where they will all come to, and Canada will no longer be green. And since Russia and Canada are the only truly green places left on Earth, well goodbye, that's the end of any quality of life.
There can be no tech answer to this. Hubris must end. Gods don't exist, but pretending we are gods is no better.
I'm talking nuclear power more than hydro (fusion ideally), but the cat is out of the bag as far as modernity goes. Nobody is going to willingly go back to ye olden times before electricity, which means the power grid has to be supplied somehow.
Fusion ain't happening, that's a pipe dream. Many poor communities are becoming nuclear waste dumps. Fun :(
And no, we can't put the cat back in the bag.
The only solution is VOLUNTARY population reduction. I had my tubes tied 25 years ago. Coupla years ago, standing at the farmer's market (bleh) I was in a chatty circle with 5 guys. They all had vasectomies.
WAY TO GO!! woohoo! The transition will be difficult to manage, downsizing is hard, but we need to downsize the numbers, not the tech. Keep it all in balance.
"Fusion ain't happening, that's a pipe dream."
That's what everyone said about aircraft until the Wright brothers came along. Until then, I'm a big fan of rocketing the fission waste into space.
Good luck getting developing countries to agree to voluntary population reduction. Even if population declines in Canada, it will keep growing globally because of Asia and Africa.
Well, there's a reason pop growth is still so high in those places, because the boss policies come from us, because as long as they grow, it provides our cheap labour.
So I agree, any kind of solution is in the far distance.
But in the meantime, the growth policies have to change.
And that means the attitudes of the Canadian "left" must change.
I don't think humans need to be told to make babies any more than rabbits do. We're not panda bears.
Humans are told every single day by media, peers, TV, that adding a human to the planet is "the greatest thing one can do", that "family values are of the utmost importance"
Apes don't overpopulate
Wolves don't overpopulate
Because Homo sapiens treats sexuality like a pig farm, maximised reproduction, death has become illegal, more, more, more, it's all part of the same narrative.
Biologically speaking, pre-modernity, women only menstruated 3-4 times a year, "couples" didn't exist (one-to-one-lifelong-pairings are not the Homo sapiens way), and the men and women in the Northern Hemisphere only spent rare time together, in communal sleeping arrangements, where "fatherhood" was not a concept.
So absolutely, we need to recognise that the way humans have been doing things the past 5-7000 years has been anti-biology.
Now we can absolutely debate what new objectives we want in society, but the silencing and censorship of biology must end.
We can't have a proper pros and cons discussion without including biological facts.
Evolution happens over multi-millennial cycles.
The hubris of humans to think we can just maximise things ALL the time makes no rational sense.
In essence, we're still behaving religiously, we've simply replaced sky daddies with our own hubris. Sad really.
Apes and wolves will certainly overbreed; they'll just have high death rates if the ecosystem can't sustain those population numbers. Humans have found all sorts of innovative ways to artificially lower death rates, and thus continue population growth well beyond what's sustainable. As David Frum put it:
"Nature wants 5 of your 7 children dead. It wants you dead by 50. Everything better than that is brought to you by science & technology"
I've heard that harems are the homo sapiens way, where like lions and elephant seals, a small number of hyper-dominant males monopolize breeding with large numbers of females. Naturally speaking, 80%+ of men are incels.
High numbers of incels leads to high levels of violence; monogamy was invented largely to pacify raging males. So....if we truly went au naturel, society would get very violent very quickly (sort of like how life for lions tends to be short and brutal). For men it's kill or be killed; for women it's being treated as a resource and guarded/hoarded accordingly, like how prey-hunting territory is guarded against intruders.
All this to reiterate, the cat is out of the bag as far as modernity goes. We have to work with the reality that nobody wants to move back to the African savannah and live as hunter-gatherers. We can either innovate to make our way of life less destructive, or watch those death rates finally rubber-band back to where they otherwise would have been all along.
David Frum is one of my least favourite people in the world, because he's one of those biology deniers. No nature does not "want 5 of your 7 children dead", that is 19th century Frum bs ;)
If a woman only menstruates 3-4 times an year, and only has sex with a male a couple of times a year, she IS NOT having 7 children!
Furthermore, before civilisation turned women into pig farms, exclusive breast-feeding vastly reduced fertility, and women before stupid sky daddy dictates breast-fed til the second dentition came in.
As a biologist, I'm going to stick to evolutionary concepts. No example from mysogynistic societies has any sway against the biological discussion.
We are apes.
Except we prefer to live like ants/termites
Incels are a social construct. Their idiot religious parents told them marriage was the only way, and that no matter how shitty a person they are, they still deserve to own their own sow ;)
Marriage is a social construct for Homo sapiens. It is anti-biology.
yes, I "agree the cat is out of the bag", that doesn't mean we can't prevent anti-scientific narratives.
This is 2022. It's time debaters included actual science in debates, instead of wishful thinking and insistence on perpetrating social trends which are toxic.
"If a woman only menstruates 3-4 times an year, and only has sex with a male a couple of times a year, she IS NOT having 7 children!"
I mean, female gorillas and chimpanzees average 2-6 babies over their lifetimes, so 7 isn't a huge stretch. And the point with the incel thing is there are basically 2 options for mate distribution.
Either something approximating monogamy, or else the males all fight each other and the biggest meanest dude gets to make all the babies (like silverback gorillas). I've also heard wild stories about male chimps beating the shit out of females in order to mate with them, so point being, women being mistreated is unlikely to have begun with the agricultural revolution. Hunter gatherer society wasn't some feminist utopia before modernity came in and fucked it all up. That's also why I brought up lions, where lionesses regularly have their babies killed by new dominant males to push them back into heat.
Just saying, there's lots of reasons not to want to wind the clock back too far on modernity.
Edit: I mentioned Frum because at the end of the day, I think overpopulation isn't driven by high birth rates, it's driven by long life spans and low death rates. Rabbits have bred like, well, rabbits, for a very long time without massively overpopulating the earth, because they have high mortality rates to offset all the new births.
A few highly developed countries have started to see birth rate dropoff, which is good, but less developed countries still, for both cultural and economic reasons, keep pumping out babies. We can't make them stop, so we have to figure out a way to innovate our technology to accommodate even more people around than we have already, without triggering a mass-extinction event.