JubilantJaguar

Because relentless bad news breeds cynicism, which is demoralizing and self-defeating. In this community there's already plenty of that to go round. The full story is slightly more complex.

Do not click if you worry about your blood pressure. I hesitate to share this. Cynicism is corrosive and there's plenty of bad news elsewhere. But it's deeply relevant and it seems important that we at least know. My attempt at positive takeaways:

• This kind of thing once happened across the world. It shows that the only way we will protect birds (and all other lifeforms) is by first solving the problem of economic and human development.
• Non-commercial environmental reporting is a crucial part of the equation. We should support outlets like Mongabay if we can.

This was published a couple of weeks ago, but not yet posted in this community.

It's a much-needed skewering of the idea that low birth rates are an existential crisis and that somehow what we need is more human beings on our stressed planet. This crazymaking meme is quickly becoming received wisdom. As the article describes, it's being propagated by a bunch of disparate thought leaders:

• millenarianist billionnaires who are completely unexposed to our planet's ecological limits (Elon Musk, obviously)
• pronatalist religious types, both conservative (Ross Douthat) and progressive (Elizabeth Bruenig)
• liberals (Ezra Klein) and eccentric libertarians (Tyler Cowen) who apparently believe "abundance" is the only way to save democracy

Their talking points are pretty well recapitulated here. There's a legitimate argument to be had about the speed of any population decline (because of the stress on welfare systems). But the pronatalists are not talking about that, they're genuinely worried about human underpopulation. This article is full of stats and demonstrations that show that this concern is completely delusional and is helping to make our planet less liveable. We need to fight back by stating this fact more loudly.

[I]f 95 percent of today’s human beings were to evaporate overnight, we would still have a global population higher than 400 million. That’s more people than existed during Rome’s greatest territorial extent, a time after Homer, Herodotus, Pythagoras, Pericles, Socrates, Plato, Thucydides, Alexander, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Livy, Virgil, Jesus, and many other important figures had all made their contributions to the Western world. This population level, which amounts to five percent or one-twentieth that of today (at most), was hardly a threat to civilization, and much less to the human species.

A heartwarming tale about the red-tailed amazon, a beautiful and surprisingly hardy parrot.

Podcast episode associated with this op-ed available on Ezra Klein Show feed or here.

Packed with stats, well-written, pretty convincing.

PS: at the very least it may redress (by about 1%) the relentless stream of negative downer news posted by a certain other member of this community.

Honest question to mindless downvoters: what do YOU think this community is for? Is it for "Genuine news and discussion about China" (as it claims to be)? Or is it just to provide a daily quota of stories (almost all posted by one person) about oppression, environmental destruction, repressed Uighurs, suffering Tibetans, dangerous AI, perfidious spying, more Uighurs, more Tibetans, more oppression, and so on and on? Do you really think that there is literally nothing positive (or even neutral) to say about this country of 1.4 billion people? Have you even been to China? Did you even READ this article? (silly question). And what is the point of a "discussion" community monopolized by a single member who seems to have the same understanding of "discussion" as the editor of the Global Times?

So many questions, but I remain genuinely mystified.

But it now occurs to me that almost nobody is even reading this. People are not even clicking on the post before downvoting, let alone the article. A sad reflection of the state of social media.

Update: Mindless downvotes will be taken as evidence that degrowthers (of which I am one) are not capable of defending their ideas. What's the point of a community where one only sees things that confirm one's biases? I don't get it. Maybe this lazy tribal attitude helps explain why degrowth is so deeply unpopular.

This seems as good a presentation as we'll get of the case against degrowth. Namely that it's a political loser, the environment be damned. People in this community probably want to read things they already agree with (update - they sure do). I'd say we'd do better by first taking seriously the arguments of the other side. Which appear quite solid, to the point that it's hard to know how to go about countering them.

Some choice excerpts:

Most Americans care deeply about building wealth: Roughly 79 percent describe their money as “extremely” or “very” important to them. Eighty-four percent say there’s “nothing wrong” with trying to make as much money as possible [...]

In 2024 [...] Trump made major gains in large, immigrant-rich urban counties, where service-sector employment is dominant. [...] Why did these previously stalwart Democrats break for Trump? Because they are all upwardly mobile groups, for whom pocket-book issues are central. More than progressive pandering, they want the opportunity to participate in the American dream—and Trump seemed to promise that. [...]

To their credit, some liberals have tried to fill the void created by this anti-capitalist conservatism. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson and his co-author, Ezra Klein, have pushed for an “abundance” liberalism in their new book [...] [W]e now have two major parties infected by the gospel of no-wealth. Both parties embrace, in Klein and Thompson’s phrasing, a “scarcity” mindset rather than an “abundance” mindset.

Yes, the tone is a bit hyperventilatory and the author is not especially authoritative (on this subject), but the argument is really quite convincing.

The climate movement has been so focused on reducing emissions for so long, it’s lost all sight of the fact that there are other ways to bring carbon dioxide concentrations under control. [...]

Marine Carbon Dioxide Removal was always something we were going to have to do. In the new Trump era of not even pretending to try to curb emissions, the urgency to act is all the greater.

And, right now, seaweed might be our best hope.

SHANGHAI — After unusually warm weather descended on eastern China earlier this week, Shanghai residents dodged the sun’s rays by extending their annual sakura photo shoots well into the night.

The result was an almost-carnivalesque atmosphere that could be felt across the city.