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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • 117.7 tonnes of Co2e per kid per parent per year in the USA (58.6 tonnes average when including all the poorer countries).Wynes et al. 2017

    A conservative estimate is that we need to emit less than 2.1 tonnes in total per person per year to try to prevent catastrophic Anthropogenic climate change. Girod et al. 2013 (life expectancy/2050).

    117.7 > 2.1

    We need a fertility rate of about 0.01 for several decades.

    Human overpopulation is not only the biggest contributor to push us into a climate-change tipping-points cascade, it’s also the root cause of almost all its other causes. It’s also the root cause of unsustainable habitat loss and pollution. It’s also the root cause of factory farming and industrial fishing, which causes more pain and suffering every year than all other atrocities ever committed combined.

    As for corporations, they’re not burning the planet for shits and giggles - they’re psychopaths doing it because billions of people are choosing to buy their goods and services, which they want but don’t actually need.


  • “On oil and gas companies who have spent decades burning fossil fuels - ramping up the world’s carbon emissions - Mehta said the law couldn’t go back in time and punish past activities.”

    Since we gave people the death penalty at the Nuremberg trials ex post facto, we can do the same with anthropogenic climate change. I would support such death penalties now already, tho I suspect more than a hundred million people would have to die directly from unambiguous climate change events within a short period like a week, before more people would agree. The problem is that the climate-change tipping-points will cascade, which means that the 1st one may cause other tipping points to be triggered, at which point billions of people will die unnecessarily in a Mad Max world.


  • This whataboutism may not be saying that what the Saudis are doing is excusable, but instead pointing out the hypocrisy and saying that if you’re going to complain about the psychotic Saudi regime, you have to admit that the voters who elected Bush and then re-elected him after his invasion of Iraq, are vastly worse than the Saudis. It’s important to know if we are the baddies, especially if we are vastly worse and propping up the Saudis.

    I think it’s important to criticize and boycott the psychotic Saudi regime, but also to keep in perspective that there are worse people out there: people who are orders-of-magnitude worse.

    Iraqi deaths in the Iraq war in the 8 years from 2003 to 2011 = approximately 461 000 (PLOS Medicine 2013) to 655 000 (Lancet 2006 (PDF)).

    That’s currently even worse than the psychotic Russian invasion of Ukraine:

    I’m not sure about the Saudi/Kuwait/UAE/Egypt/Morocco/Jordan/Sudan/Senegal/Bahrain/Blackwater (supported by US/UK/France) coalition’s actions in the war in Yemen since 2015.

    Edit: I’m also not sure how many the Saudis have killed in the Iran-Saudi proxy wars, so maybe the Saudis do actually have more direct blood on their hands than the western powers in the last 50 years or so.


  • Editors in Vice’s news division actively welcomed the piece, Lubbock said, as it fitted with the outlet’s track record of reporting on LGBTQ+ rights, autocratic regimes and the Middle East.

    Bad bot. The sentences before and after this are needed to understand the quoted sentence:

    “Their reporting claimed the Saudi state is helping families to harass and threaten transgender Saudis based overseas.”

    […]

    “However, publication of the article was repeatedly postponed and then cancelled at the last minute. Multiple sources at Vice said it was pulled after a high-level intervention by senior Vice managers, who said its publication could pose a threat to the safety of the company’s staff working in Saudi Arabia.”


  • No they’re not - having a kid in an overpopulated world is 2 orders of magnitude worse in the USA.

    • 2.4 tonnes of CO2e released per driver per year with the average fossil-fuel powered car.
    • 1.2 tonnes of CO2e released for electric car users in most countries.
    • 117.7 tonnes per kid per parent per year. Wynes et al. 2017

    Human overpopulation is not only the biggest contributor to push us over climate-change tipping-points, it’s also the root cause of almost all other causes. It’s also the root cause of unsustainable habitat loss and pollution. It’s also the root cause of factory farming and industrial fishing, which causes more pain and suffering every year than all other atrocities ever committed in all of history combined.