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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio (where the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was created) was a landmark year for the news reporting that climate change is by far the most important issue humans are facing. Widely seen news has been reporting scientists’ warnings about the existential threat of our overpopulation and fossil fuel since then, and in the last 30 years the media has been reporting on it more and more every year.

    falls onto a handful (or so) of very large corporations

    Those companies are not burning the planet for the hell of it - they do it because billions of people choose to buy their biosphere destroying products and services.

    While we should vote for Greens who’ll make laws where anyone using more than 2.1 tonnes of CO2e per person per year is jailed, instead of for people and parties who subsidize overpopulation and fossil fuel use - in the short term that usually doesn’t do anything unless a threshold is passed. Individual action (reducing our communities’ fertility rate by 2 orders of magnitude for several decades, not flying, not driving, not living in unsustainable places, …) while vanishingly small, does actually make a measurable difference.






  • 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.


  • 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.






  • Saudi Foreign Ministry called on Sweden to "stop all actions that directly contradict international efforts seeking to spread the values of tolerance, "

    Tolerance. They keep using that word. I do not think it means what they think it means.

    How about tolerating freedom of speech against a death-cult?

    “moderation and rejection of extremism”

    The Saudi Foreign Ministry. That’s like a fossil-fuel power-station asking a windmill not to release greenhouse gases.