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Linus Blomqvist
@linusblomqvist
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"Fair to say that on almost every one of these issues, time has proven and a small group of fellow travelers correct. So correct, that it's easy to forget how controversial those claims were."
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Who gets to decide about a global moratorium? How would developing nations, who earn income from ag, ever agree to this? Would local farmers have a say, and would they be compensated? Really serious risks with a proposal like this.
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"Vi måste se bortom det strikta ekologiska jordbruket och satsa på det jordbruk som faktiskt levererar de största fördelarna för både miljön och ekonomin."
Skriver och i
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Ekomodernisterna svarar i :
"Vi måste se bortom det strikta ekologiska jordbruket och satsa på det jordbruk som faktiskt levererar de största fördelarna för både miljön och ekonomin."
Av och
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So if you can choose between a railway and a road, a railway likely has far lower impacts than a road. (4)
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Railways, on the other hand, don't have that many spur lines, so nothing really happens to deforestation along long stretches of the railway. Much less of a fishbone pattern. (3)
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That's because roads often create a fishbone pattern with lots of side-roads that penetrate forests and other habitats and lead to clearing all along the road. (2)
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This article notes that there can be a fair bit of wildlife collisions on railways (in this case in Brazil). But what it doesn't note is that railways are likely to be far better for the environment than roads. (1)
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ICYMI: a thread and associated essay on overpopulation, overconsumption, why both are problematic, and the way forward.
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Today, @jenn_bernstein and I published a new piece arguing that we must move beyond the tired population vs. consumption dichotomy. linusblomqvist.substack.com/p/beyond-the-p
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Linus and Jenn’s piece is especially useful for two reasons: a) it argues that family planning is a human right of women, full stop, not as an instrument for other purposes; and b) it argues that population and consumption are not as easily disentangled as Green et al believe.
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V. useful piece from and kicking back against an eye-popping piece of neo-malthusianism that appeared last month in Biological Conservation, perhaps the most influential journal in the field of conservation biology.
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co-authored with
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Weary of the "overpopulation" vs. "overconsumption" either/or arguments? Turn to @linusblomqvist's wise and helpful essay
linusblomqvist.substack.com/p/beyond-the-p
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Sad this needs saying, but Linus says it pretty well
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Today, @jenn_bernstein and I published a new piece arguing that we must move beyond the tired population vs. consumption dichotomy. linusblomqvist.substack.com/p/beyond-the-p
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Replying to
I’ve had so many battles over this issue for so long, that i had to do several threads with resources & research, but still had to deal with tons of people attacking me. Whew.
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The very term “overpopulation” implies that there is an ideal population. That is not a substantive concept. We create the world we want, and that includes population. It’s about choices, not hard limits.
We wrote something. Let's go.
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Absolutely right and see rest of thread.
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Drop overpopulation, value women's rights for their own sake, recognize the limits of consumption reductions, support developing countries in achieving high living standards, and invest heavily in environmentally-friendly technologies.
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Thread on the frankly appalling scientistic authoritarianism embedded in "overpopulation" research and discourse.
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Cafaro states that "My own view is that every competent adult couple that is willing to take on the burdens of raising a child should be able to do so, as a basic human right. However, that right should be limited to one child." researchgate.net/publication/34
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Drop overpopulation, value women's rights for their own sake, recognize the limits of consumption reductions, support developing countries in achieving high living standards, and invest heavily in environmentally-friendly technologies.
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So let's move beyond the population vs. consumption dichotomy.
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Given that we will have a large and increasingly wealthy population for a long time to come, we need to deal with it, and technology must be part of that.
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Another reason the idea of overconsumption needs to reckon with a large economy is that population and consumption are tightly coupled. In most cases, slowing population growth has only been achieved in tandem with economic growth.
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. noted that if the income of everyone in the world was at the US poverty line — that is, rich countries go down to this level, developing countries go up — the world economy would double in size. What then?
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The US poverty line for one person is $35/day.
If we would apply the US poverty line for the world – and we would perfectly redistribute the world’s incomes, so that everyone has the average – the world economy would need to more than double to end global poverty. twitter.com/MaxCRoser/stat…
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However, how far will voluntary and relatively modest policies like this go? Will they lead to the drastic cuts in consumption that degrowth advocates envision? If not, what comes next — and can it avoid being coercive or against the wishes of large swathes of the population?
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Some policies perceived as furthering degrowth are perfectly sensible, like public transit and bike infrastructure investments, which reduce material inputs and greenhouse gas emissions.
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There is a reason why, according to one observer, "So far, calls for degrowth have been limited to activists and academics rather than policymakers in countries suffering most from climate change."
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There is no question: consumption and the associated resource extraction, distribution, consumption, and disposal, have adverse effects on wildlife populations. However, as with overpopulation and carrying capacity, the concept of overconsumption is fraught with problems.
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The most common retort for those aware of the problematic nature of the term overpopulation is to instead lay the blame on consumption for its role in biodiversity loss. This is what Green et al. do in their response to Cafaro et al.
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This amounts to saying that poor people should stay in their poor countries so that rich countries can remain, within their geographical borders, "sustainable." (Ironically, immigration to higher-income countries would reduce birth rates.)
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"Reducing immigration in order to stabilize or reduce populations thus can help EU nations create ecologically sustainable societies, while increasing immigration will tend to move them further away from this goal."
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Overpopulation, according to Cafaro et al., also motivates anti-immigration policies. whp-journals.co.uk/JPS/article/do
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We need to stop treating women’s rights as a means to an end, with those rights contingent on the particular end imagined by population control advocates.
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This is part of why fertility rates are higher in the wealthiest countries, especially those with a generous welfare state, like Scandinavian countries and France. This is inconvenient for the overpopulation folks, to say the least.
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An example of this is their opposition to pro-natalist policies. These can indeed be coercive. But some countries like Sweden have had essentially pro-natalist policies like subsidized childcare for many decades.
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Cafaro et al. are, at least on paper, for women's rights, but only when it serves the population control agenda. They argue that women’s rights without a population component are not in women’s best interest. Seriously? overpopulation-project.com/wp-content/upl
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This is a chilling statement, for reasons that should be obvious. Who decides who is “competent”? Is there an application and a committee evaluating “competency”?
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Cafaro states that "My own view is that every competent adult couple that is willing to take on the burdens of raising a child should be able to do so, as a basic human right. However, that right should be limited to one child."
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