It amazes me people obsess about this topic.

What it comes down to is: people are a virus of destruction on this planet, without which the Amazon jungle would expand, wild animals would return in numbers, and Adam and Eve could get on and play with a snake, and maybe we could all start again.

PS:
And what's wrong with Michael Moore?
Michael Moore is a fat (bleep) who needs to go on a diet, and stop living on fast food full of fat and sugar. Get his diabetes under control. Stop looking over neighbors fences!

Dan

Moore is very fat, so I look forward to his documentary on diet.

For a long time it was climate, climate, climate. Then, to relieve the monotony, it was China virus, China virus, China virus. Now that the virus has waned, it's back to climate, climate, climate. Nobody has any imagination these days. Boring, boring, boring.

And the view of the world when the inmates have taken over and are running the asylum.

And typically lock our economic well being to ever and always, increasing population numbers.

Imagine how wealthy we'd be when we've got it down to standing room only?

Cannot envision an economic model dependant only on removing and remediating poverty in all its forms and guises as a vastly superior alternative, that makes us all as a collective cohort, so much wealthier than before/ever!

Understand they claim, that every western-style economy rests solely on just two economic pillars, energy and capital. The latter never cheaper, the former never ever dearer! And a source of endemic generational poverty!

Automation is and must replace people in the workplace and at repetitive routine tasks! As the cost of labour is forced higher and higher by the cost of price gouged energy, professional parasite supporting and also price gouged housing and the energy dependant, staples of life,i.e., all of them!

And the economic equivalent of shooting yourself in the foot!

And all of the above could be so different if the inmates are returned t their proper places and the sane returned to positions of control.

We'd then lift the insane self-imposed prohibition on walk away safe nuclear energy, i.e., MSR thorium.

On the understanding that everything we create or do has an energy component that cascades up through the economic food chain.

And that being so, that just 8 grams of thorium which costs around 100 USD to mine and refine, contains enough releasable energy to power your house and car for 100 years as well as supply all your manufactured of processed needs!

And that my friends is just a dollar a year or even less if this available now, technology is retasked, and it can be, with burning up the mountains of nuclear waste and can do so in complete and proven, walk away safety! TBC
Alan B.

Great article, Eric

I hope that you send it to George Monbiot.

In a way, ttbn has a point, although I do accept the science on climate change. Our numbers and our impact are impinging on a number of our planet's life support systems. Climate change is just one aspect of this, and maybe not even the most serious.

https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

The people in the poor countries don't emit a lot of greenhouse gases on a per capita basis, but they have plenty to do with such things as species extinctions, deforestation, land degradation, and pumping aquifers dry. By almost exclusively focusing on climate change, for which the rich countries have historically had a lot of responsibility, the environmentalists on the Left can maintain their narrative that poor brown people can do no wrong, and if they do, it is really our fault.

Even with climate change, these environmentalists will not deal with the issue of immigration from poor countries into rich countries, even though the migrants will massively increase their consumption, and their children will consume like anyone else in the host society, which is now bigger and consuming more. How can you ask people to make huge sacrifices, give up their cars, give up air travel, switch to a vegan diet, etc., when anything that they do will be wiped out by "their" government's immigration program?

>Which raises the question: Does George want these black, brown and every other coloured people to continue to get richer, or does he want them to stay poor.

This is a Tu quoque fallacy.

That aside, you can make living standards more equitable but the METRIC you need to use is sustainability or it's pointless.

The missing bit on all of your argument is the biosphere will be unlivable if we continue as it is. Listen to any lecture by Professor Will Steffen or Professor Kevin Anderson in this on YT if you are genuinely interested.

https://imgur.com/sggT2XO