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We face so many challenges that the task of choosing which ones to emphasize and which can be edited out for the sake of brevity is nearly impossible. So many injustices afflict our fellow human beings that, of those that make the shortlist to be attacked and redressed, determining an order of priority is best left unattempted even by — especially by — those with the best intentions. (Yet we must and we shall. This process is called “politics.”)
One matter, however, is so self-evidently far ahead of the rest that calling it an “issue” doesn’t come close to doing it justice: the environment. Without a clean, healthy planet to live on, nothing else matters. Human extinction or, failing that, the collapse of civilization, as has been predicted by 2050, renders all debate on all other issues and policies moot.
Without a planet that sustains life, college affordability is irrelevant. If you are starving and there isn’t enough food, access to free health care cannot save you. A nuclear war would not be as devastating or as final as environmental collapse.
Because it somewhat granularizes the daunting magnitude of ecocide, it feels easier to focus on various aspects of environmental degradation: global warming/climate change, water pollution, smog, drought, species extinctions, food insecurity. There’s nothing wrong with that — we need our best and brightest experts on each facet of the environment. If ever there has been a phenomenon that requires holistic analysis by society as a whole, however, it’s ecocide. You can’t separate drought from rising temperatures. These problems are so intricately and inexorably intertwined and intimately interdependent that it’s nonsensical to discuss them discretely on a political level, lest we get lost in the dying weeds. There is one issue, the biggest issue ever: Humanity is killing its habitat and so is imperiling our survival as a species.
Healthy soil, a basic necessity for life on earth and agriculture, is composed of at least 3% to 6% organic matter. But 40% of the earth’s dirt has so few nutrients that it is completely degraded. By 2050, an additional area the size of South America will be depleted. And that will be with a global population of over 9 billion. Even if we abolish rapacious capitalism on a close to global scale in order to prioritize feeding the hungry over profits — an essential move toward saving ourselves — there won’t be enough decent soil to grow enough food to feed everyone.
Thirty percent of the world’s commercially fished waters are overfished. Not only does this mean less to eat, fish-free waters are under-oxygenated and have become dead zones for other life. Oceans absorb a third of carbon dioxide emissions — or they did, before ocean acidification and seas of plastics destroyed it.
So it goes, on and on and on. Air pollution kills millions of people a year. Ninety percent of humans breathe air containing sky-high levels of toxic particulate. Within five years, the world will be down to 10% of its forests; they’ll all be gone by 2100. Populations of mammals, fish, birds, reptiles and amphibians plunged an average of 68% between 1970 and 2016. Plenty were lost before and since. Oceans are boiling, hurricanes are more powerful than ever, sea levels are rising, hundreds of thousands of species of animals and plants are going extinct. Even among scientists, few are aware of what we’ve lost before industrialization.
“It’s a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era,” Julia Pongratz of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology says. “Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth’s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture.” Pongratz was referring to her work on the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Central Asia and Eastern Europe. Genghis Khan’s empire chomped its way east, with a massive impact on what are now grassland steppes. Native Americans subjected North America to mass deforestation. Likewise, ancient Romans cut down so many trees that they contributed to global warming.
A recent survey of successful prognosticators found that the average forecaster believes there is a 6% chance that humanity will go extinct by 2100, and a 10% chance that a catastrophic environmental event or series of events could kill 10% of the global population. (World War II killed under 4%.) Considering that we’ve been around for hundreds of thousands of years, those are high odds.
Many climate experts say the climate crisis poses a relatively low risk of human extinction. Others disagree. Calling the existential threat “dangerously unexplored,” a 2022 statement in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences warned: “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.”
Dr. Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis, explained: “Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.” Cyclones might destroy infrastructure needed to cool them during a heatwave. Crops could fail. Countries might go to war over geoengineering.
A relatively low risk of catastrophe should be weighted more heavily than a higher risk of problems with lower consequences. If there was a 6% probability that an asteroid impact might wipe out the human race, no sane astrophysicist would advise us not to worry about it. Logic suggests that stopping that asteroid would become the world’s top priority, with massive resources directed toward averting the catastrophe as lesser threats were put on hold. Six percent is too high to cross your fingers and hope for the best. It follows logically that we should do the same now when it comes to the environment.
The U.S. and other nations — but we’re Americans, so let’s us do us and hope other countries join us after we set an example — should adopt a prime directive into our constitutions that puts the planet first. It should read something like this:
In any situation where there is a conflict between a policy or law or regulation that would benefit the environment and a competing concern, including but not limited to the economy, the natural environment shall take precedence.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
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The fact is that for white western racists, those who are not white are not their equals, and they classify them as non-humans in order to kill them with 5000-pound bombs while they are children in their schools and thus speed up the process of extermination as much as possible.
And the most curious thing is that they consider it as the most normal thing in the world and as a religious duty.
I’m not worried. In a few years I’ll be living on Mars at “Elon’s Happy Red Planet Condos.” Problem solved.
We all have to be careful.
Too much TRUTH
makes them go crazy 🤣…
“Imagine, all the people, living life in peace”
A brotherhood of man. I wonder if you can.
Prai$e be. And, they are forgiven …
Who said that humans can only handle so
much reality? Was it the big guy ?
As boomer Ted Rall should remember, it was not ‘global warming’ but ‘Ice age coming!’, that was the official scare of ‘scientists’ when he was young … A 1979 TV commercial with Leonard Nimoy, Mr Spock of Star Trek, warned us how hundreds of millions could freeze to death before too long:
Video Link
Good on ya Ted. Nuclear power stations are particularly risky behaviour. Let’s say an asteroid happened which led to the abandonment of constantly maintaining them. Every day we roll the dice. Every day we expect to win at dice – but it’s a gamble. Speaking of the USA – you guys are rigged to blow, and if a natural disaster causes the above we are all screwed. Also the loss of our atmosphere – electrical in nature would kill everything. So why must we constantly juice it with harmful frequencies. Why Ted? Rising oceans seems like a fairly simple one. Terra forming or taking rocks out of the ocean would drop ocean levels. Simplicity is often overlooked. Thanks Ted. The war against global warming also known as the war against carbon has to be a scam. Are we not carbon ourselves? Solutions right. Plant cannabis on deforested land – it regenerates the soil plus more. And why Ted does the human body have an endocannabinoid system? When god said I give you every seed bearing herb for meat – did he mean cannabis, it contains all 20 amino acids btw, just like actual meat.
Eco Doomerism is another form of insanity.
The mind of the insane leftist (no hate to leftism, I view myself as a bit of a leftist) must be explained, to understand the true mindset of the eco-doomer.
The insane leftist notices the phenomenon of bullying, competition, contempt, and….social Darwinism, so to speak. They notice that the loser males are absolutely hated by the winners. They notice how the winners are given a crack-cocaine-like HIGH from dominating. They see how the winners/dominators are willing to hold down, oppress, underpay, overwork, etc. other humans to get their high. Notice that Ted Rall also has written an article about sportsball-related bullying: this is not a coincidence, it is actually a feature of this worldview. People of this worldview also might see how the winners/dominators hold success as the highest, and most absolute, value, something that overrides all values. And they see how this causes incredible misery in the “losers.”
This is unacceptable, isn’t it? It surely seems so. But is it really? In fact, the world survives just fine, generation over generation, in conditions of Social Darwinism. From the point of view of many people, this is exactly how things should be. Many people would insist that “losers” deserve their fate, that the world is better off letting them lose. Take Ed Dutton, who insists that we greatly need to clean the gene pool. Or, take the harsh mentality of the archetypal Puritan, who would view the losers as lazy people who deserve punishment. Or, take the archetypal Nazi or aggressive Chinese person, who would plan for the losers to not breed, so as to force the population to evolve, with the end goal of domination of the planet. Or, take the mentality that is more mundane: that the misery of the losers is just built-in to human life, and some people will be miserable no matter what you do, so there is no point in wasting resources in comforting them in some way.
This is hard to accept. It drives many people to insanity. People like Ted Rall. But the problem is…..it’s hard to make a counterargument to them!
Wouldn’t it be convenient, it would seem…..if the greed of the Winners/Dominators led to some kind of catastrophe? Wouldn’t it be convenient if there was some law of nature that insists that Empathy is the only way to survive, such that being a Winner/Dominator is simply impossible, such that society can FORCE the Winners/Dominators to quit their domination addiction? And, induct into history, an epoch where all people are made to be empathetic?
Enter, Eco-Doomerism. Under eco-doomerism, humans are always, constantly, potentially driving some animal to extinction, or throwing a supposedly-fragile world into an unstable state. With this being the case, we induct a social norm where humans begin to view themselves as harmful and dangerous actors. The greedy arch-capitalists, especially, are stripped of dignity, as they were the primary causers of the eco-catastrophe. This is one of the 2 main reasons for Eco-Doomerism: to get revenge against the Arch-Winners/Dominators. We will then enter an era of sensitivity, fear of harming others, and holding others responsible for the harm they cause. It would be an era where people check and balance their own behavior constantly, with the ever-present justification being environmentalism. Under this culture of sensitivity, where the Addiction of Greed is completely illegitimated, the populace would develop a sense of empathy, and that would lead to the disallowing other forms of bullying. This is the second main reason of Eco-Doomerism.
So, Eco-Doomerism is one-part revenge against the Winners/Dominators, and one part 4-D chess to create the leftist solution to human misery.
Indeed. But. You ignore the elephant in the room, which is massive population growth enabled/forced by globalist plutocrats like Elon Musk and their intellectual whores like Milton Friedman and Julian Simon.
Until recently, Canada was allowed to have a modest population and vast resources. The average Canadian had a very high standard of living, but the impact of Canada on the environment was negligible. I mean just look at the place, the air is clean, the water runs pure. Man in harmony with nature.
And then look at India, sure the average person has less of an environmental impact than the average Canadian, but there are (were) like 50 times more of them, and on about one third of the land. The Indian people are now so miserably poor that they only have two kids each because they physically can’t have more than this – you can’t ‘conserve’ any more – but the rivers run with filth, the sky is choked with soot, and the groundwater is being sucked dry. But Elon Musk has vast new markets and unlimited cheap labor, so it’s all good.
Bottom line: modern technology is a not a magic trick. It can support a moderate number of people in comfort, or a huge number of people at miserable subsistence. There is no amount of conservation or poverty that will prevent us from stripping the land bare, if we continue to allow the rich to force/persuade/lie us into breeding to the maximum capacity that the land can support. Ignore this and we should just quit, nothing else we do can matter.
The National Academy of Sciences Study found many wild-mammal species are approaching extinction. Humans and their pets/livestock account for 96% of the Earth’s mammal biomass. Wild animals only account for 4%. We’ve destroyed 83% of the wild-mammal biomass and 50% of the wild-plant biomass across the world.
The NAS has found we are in the midst of a 6th mass extinction event. The Ordovician/Silurian Mass extinction event seems to be the template we are following. Like today, the era started out with warm temperatures. It was hot. The average ocean temperature shot up to 113 degrees F. The air temperatures were much hotter. This caused a thermal stratification of the oceans which lead to disruption of the ocean circulation. That’s what we are seeing today in the weakening of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) . That loss of circulation in the Ordovician led to glaciation. 85% of marine species died off in the low oxygen marine environments. Our 6th extinction event will cause a similar plunge in oxygen in marine environments, but the dangerous risk is if the atmospheric oxygen will fall. We can only survive in a narrow band 19.5%+ total oxygen composition of the atmosphere. If it goes to 16%, with the increase in CO2, humans will be toast.
Holman Jenkins of The War Street Journal has written multiple times that, inevitably, geo-engineering will be resorted to, to increase the earth’s albedo. I personally favor “misting yachts” because this measure would be empiric and reversible, compared to other technologies.
I am old enough to remember when half as many people were here in the U.S. Oh, what a time. My generation allowed this to change. I apologize.
The planet is fine —- the people are fucked!
The carrying capacity of the the planet is unknown, but we are going to find it one of these decades. Meanwhile, we are going to continue making, for each first world human, more or less, over their lifetime:
Places of residence
Cars for transport
Cell phones for communication
Computers
Washing Machines
Refrigerators and Freezers
Dryers
Cook Stoves
Microwave ovens
Clothing
Heating and cooling apparatus
Wooden, metal, and plastic furniture.
Those are some of the biggies, with perhaps only the places of residence, some clothing and some furniture not having to be replaced every 5-15 years.
We have evolved into a single use society, where part is consumed, and part is trash, examples include a bag of potato chips, an ink cartridge, a toaster. The accompanying packaging goes to the landfill. There are thousands of examples on the market today. Then at some point, the item (aside from food) that was contained in the package reaches the end of its useful life, and it goes there too.
You see where I’m going. Everything we have ever made in factories ultimately finds its way to the landfills. Recycling is a noble effort, but it isn’t having the intended effect just yet. How long can we maintain this unlimited candy store before it is realized we are drowning in our own waste? We originated in a biologically pure planet. We haven’t changed, but our environment has.
Air water food reproduction. In that order, to survive. We are seeing the beginnings of compromise in all these necessities, for some time now. We had our fun, but we will have to get serious. We learned not to poison our air by controlling car emissions, and got results. By continuing to improve all other sources (smokestacks, etc), and introduce less or nonpolluting means of transportation and production, we should be ok there.
Water is the next biggest source of concern. I think it is much worse than we are being led to believe, and we can see it is pretty bad without a smokescreen. The demand for clean water will only get worse,
meanwhile, runoff of land based pollution ends up in our oceans. The areas most populated, and affected, will be forced at some point to make amends, or the population will disperse.
Water and oxygen are essential to food production, as is fertile, arable land. This also goes for domestic farm animals. The alternative is synthetic unhealthy food made in factories, devoid of nutrition: witness America as the canary in the coal mine.
Lastly, we need to reproduce to keep the species going, but we have gotten too prolific. Controlling the population is an extremely unpopular subject when you are the subject of the proposed control. Who exactly, is going to say, OK, no children for me, and how many will say it? Not nearly enough. In my lifetime, I may witness the population of the Earth tripling (!!) should I get just a dozen more years.
Best of luck working that sticky wicket out without stepping on anyone’s toes.
Given all these problems (and many more not mentioned) it comes as no surprise that an elite group is trying to gain control of the world to take care of it their way. Whether the Jewish mafia, or the WEF (I may be repeating) succeed in wresting control, or if nuclear war breaks out, or if worldwide famine does the job, rest assured, some happenstance will get the problem resolved, but it won’t be voluntarily, or pleasant.
Boiling i tells ya… Boiling! ☮