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

Divergence, the immigration is making the rich countries poorer.
They are bringing the reasons they were poor with them.
Look at the difficulties Sweden is having with its social services.

If you would look after the environment!? You do not do it pouring record amounts of pollutants and carbon into the biosphere.

Nor with designed obsolescence, along with deliberate price gouged energy prices that make any recycling, both uneconomic/profit free and therefore, virtually impossible.

If the world's cheapest safest most reliable energy is also carbon-free! Therefore, the prime reason to prohibit its development!?

Must we remain slaves to a fundamentally flawed economic model?

Where the rich always get richer and richer, the gap between the haves and the have nots widens and the pockets of poverty grow ever wider!

And the troglobites in (the bubble, the ivory towers) charge ignore any real solution or actual reform, just tinker a the edges, transfer the tax burden from those with the most, to those with the least as they demand greater and greater productivity outcomes!

Refuse to fair and square, share the wealth with those whose hands and minds create all of it!

Jockey for positions that protect the business as usual status quo and the current energy policies/format!

And only a pandemic makes them aware we are but one community and that our collective wealth cannot forever be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands!TBC.
Alan B.

They are bringing the reasons they were poor with them.
Bazz,
dead right !

You are right, Bazz, but the environmental problems from the extra consumption and greater numbers would remain, even if every one of them was a model citizen.

Reasons for poverty. First is the cost to them of energy, second, is the cost of clean potable water, cheap enough to make broad-scale irrigation, cost-effective.

We pat ourselves on the back every time we send a few food parcels to the needy without ever understanding the causative factors, just whine when they want to change and come here to share our huge abundance!

Poor folk live on the margins, with hand to mouth survival in villages where good rains mean survival and drought, overflowing refugee camps.

What can we do you ask?

We cannot make it rain!

Conversely, we could with retasked and current foreign aid, provide the world's cheapest, safest, most reliable energy as MSR thorium, as mass-produced here in our factories, SMR's! And lend-lease to all comers.

Then produce many modules as also produced here in our factories, deionisation dialysis desalination modules, washing machines, refrigerators and electric stoves, all available to all comers with cash and carry or long term lend-lease options.

As these products allow those processing them to produce more tha they need. Reduce the repetitive work, provide more free time for other life-changing productive tasks and study. Those households, communities will grow more and more prosperous and better educated in just a couple of decades, able to stop logging forests for firewood and replace hunting with agriculture and domesticated animals

Enable more holistic lifestyles, where there's fish farms and rice paddies etc. that enable those on the land to stay there and gradually prosper. As they do become totally self-sufficient, more and more valued trading partners.

We need to give hand-ups, not handouts for personal feelgood outcomes!

Nor is anyone assisted by the usual, I'm alright Jacks, bitching about poor people being poor! As they tuck their thumbs into the braces and contemplate a growing personal profit sheet!

Then hop into the Bently, as they head for the racetrack or the next cocktail party.

Climate change!? Balderdash! Poverty? Where? I don't see any, just a lot of lazy bludgers who wouldn't work in an iron lung!
Alan B.

Author - I note you state -

>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.

"I respond - we are all human, and what do you assert?

Please free to debate me your issues of "colour"!

Please free to debate me your issues of "colour"!
SAINTS,
My worst experiences re connivery, criminal behaviour, uncivilised mentality have thus far been with white Australians (many, mostly Bureaucrats), African American (1), mixed race Aust indigenous (5).
All of them from more privileged employment & social background than I.

Mr Opinion

I sill don't get your comment?

So sorry

I now refer to Mr Individual - and not Mr Opinion (apologies)

Mr Individual - would you like to discuss further your comment.

I welcome a "chat".

Mr Individual

Don't hide behind your previous comment - please chat.

Your thoughts and issues may be brought to light now and in this forum, this is a chance for you to speak.

We are all friends here - so please join us for a "friendly" chat - we are listening.

Due to the fact that I am only allowed 4 post per article. If I don't respond to you tonight ….. I will certainly respond to you tomorrow.

Don't hide behind your previous comment - please chat.
SAINTS,
What do you mean by hide ? What is in my post that you find needs further explanation ?

George Monbiot implies that people from rich countries who suggest that population growth has a role to play in reducing global environmental degradation:
1) Don't really want to reduce their own population growth in rich countries or reduce their own impacts on the world's environment. A) Nothing like this ever gets said in the movie and B) Environmental groups that favour population stabilisation such as the Sustainable Australia Party are trying to get their own rich country governments to reduce population growth

George also implies:
2) There is no sense in asking poorer countries to reduce their population growth because they don’t have much impact on the planet’s environment. – This just isn’t true. The upper middle income countries are already producing more greenhouse gases than the high income countries. The word limit guideline on Online Opinion articles prevented me from detailing how these countries are also making other kinds of environmental impacts. For example, most of the plastic waste that ends up in the world’s oceans comes from “poor” countries.

George also implies that people from rich countries who suggest that population growth has a role to play in reducing global environmental degradation:
3) are really racists who want to stop black and brown people from having children while continuing to increase the “White” population and that we shouldn’t ask any country with black and brown people in it to reduce population growth because those countries are not doing anything to damage the environment anyway. A) Nothing like this ever gets said in the movie. B) The data shows that there are plenty of countries with lots of black and brown people already having a significant impact on the world’s quantity of greenhouse gases generated, and C) If we want these “poor” countries to succeed, dig themselves out of poverty, get good health care, education, fair justice systems and generally get richer; then it is essentially certain that they will make even bigger impacts on the world’s environment in the future.

I’m assuming that George Monbiot wants these “poor” countries to succeed and that means that greenhouse gas generation per person will increase. I’m also assuming that George wants to slow down climate change and that means less greenhouse gases have to be generated in the future. If George really wants both of these things to be true and reduce all the other environmental impacts all over the world then "we really have got to start dealing with the issue of population."

I don't know why people can't just accept the fact that every single human being has a racist streak ! Sop waffling on about it !
Anyone claiming they're not at some stage is a hypocrite !

When one views the world through the prism of an ideology bubble, they think inside a limited circle of ideas. typically into victim-blaming/race superiority claims for their particular race.

Can not get past the inculcated tribalism and brainwashing that makes it so.

Unable therefore, to think logically and apply well thought out solutions to ever-increasing, but solvable problems.

Can't get past the usual point-scoring or denials that there are problems, Problems that we need to deal with where they are now, lest we be overwhelmed by a tsunami of drought or climate change refugees.

Think, we used to have a car industry that we've lost!

And for, among many reasons, the energy bill became higher than the 16% averaged, wages bill.

That we sold it along with most of our industrial capacity to foreigners.

And never built all of the vehicles from a single site but all over the country!

Here a motor manufacturing, there a gearbox manufacturer, there a body assembly etc.

Each one adding a profit component, a tax component and a transport component etc, as these cascade up through the delivery chain, adding entirely unnecessary cost factors into the final price.

Instead, add in a single site, maximised automation, the world's cheapest energy and cooperative,[ profit sharing,] capitalism and we have tested, road ready, vehicles we can sell direct,( eliminate the profit demanding middlemen) to the world! And create hundreds of thousands of jobs here at home!

To the point where we may well have to reopen our borders to guest labour?

Should that ever become our new normal, it'll mean we have overfull employment for every able-bodied Aussie who wants a job!

Most of which will be high tech high wage jobs!

And as an industrialised nation. take the above (earlier post) paradigm of, cash and carry, or lend-lease to an energy-starved/water starved world to end poverty forever by attacking the causes rather than results!

And as we do that, create right here, unprecedented prosperity, retire all debt and become a creditor nation into the bargain!

That'd be a terrible outcome, wouldn't it?
Alan B.

A large portion of human consumption is only for the purpose of mitigating the effects of overpopulation.