You really have no ability to think in terms of degrees, do you? It's "we have to have unrestrained growth or go back to living in caves" in your mind.
Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Has Begun According to Scientists
- Thread starter hanselthecaretaker
- Start date
Recommended Videos
There aren't really degrees in growth long term. Consistent 1% growth and consistent 10% growth are both exponential growth. The only options are exponential growth, stagnation, or regression.
It is the scientific consensus. The preponderance of projections points in that direction. Even your own first link only provides sources that support that conclusion.
This makes so little sense, it's tough to know where to start.
After you purposefully dismissed the sources that don't.
You don't have to do math if you don't want to.
The point of "consensus" is that evidence points in different directions, but that the majority of it points much harder in one direction than the others.
The question then becomes are sources representative of the whole. At least some sources will disagree, but to put too much weight on them is ultimately a form of intellectual fraud.
You provided no sources that don't. Even the sources cited by your own link, to support the sentence you quoted, uniformly contradict you.
*sigh*
OK, let's look, then. To support the idea that there "aren't degrees in growth long-term", you've pointed out that both consistent 1% and consistent 10% growth are exponential.
Firstly: even if we accept the idea of two economies growing exponentially and consistently, there would still be degrees. Because 1% consistent growth is still less than 10% consistent growth. An economy growing by 1% would consistently find itself behind one growing by 10%.
Secondly: You've added that word 'consistent'. But growth is never uniform, never fully consistent. Say it grows by 5% for 20 years, then regresses for 2 years, then stagnates for 10. It doesn't matter that growth was "exponential" for those 20 years. That made growth reach a higher level. Allowed it to reach a higher degree of success. And then, because nothing lasts forever, it regresses and stagnates... again affecting the overall degree of success by the end. Degrees.
Thirdly: You'll notice that countries do not fit uniformly into one of your three categories for very long. They pop from one to the other, most of the time, given enough years. So those aren't the only options; they're myriad.
None of this answers the original concern: again, I remind, this argument started with the claim that using nuclear isn't good because it enables humanity to continue growing. That is not a fear that cares about degrees, hence my answer does not care about degrees. I have said that the population looks to leveling off independent of any issues caused by overpopulation, it doesn't appear population growth is exponential forever, but saying that gets me dismissed as ignoring problems and pretending they don't exist, so now here I am acknowledging the argument as it exists and getting badgered for doing so.
I appreciate the nuance. Silvanus said " universal scientific consensus ".
"Badgered"? Diddums.
When you explicitly said "there aren't degrees", I thought you were representing your own position, rather than just mirroring what someone else thought quite a few pages ago... particularly since you said that as a counter-argument to someone who didn't adopt that position in the first place. How odd.
Very sorry. "Overwhelming consensus", then.
It's not odd. An argument within a premise doesn't lose that premise because somebody said something else.
Somebody said something else... in an entirely different chain of responses, outside of any premises established by other people in separate discussions.
So, if you're arguing with one person, and then you start arguing with someone else entirely about something else, you'll.... adopt the premises of the first opponent and... present them as your position? For... rhetorical purposes?
OK. So long as we both agree that there are indeed degrees in growth, then I don't really care about all the scrambling backtracking.
Degrees that are meaningless in the argument about whether human population growth is itself something to be avoided. It's still inevitably saying that human population growth is bad and ought to be avoided. Like, if this was about whether theft is good or evil, and someone said "there are degrees of theft", they're saying that theft is bad but sometimes justifiable. Saying there are degrees to population growth is much the same, it's someone who believes it's a bad thing in and of itself but that can be situationally justified.
I cannot answer for "Kwak" but the way i see it is that JUST building nuclear power plants isn't the solution. Not that it cannot be part of the solution. And there I agree; it's like taking an aspirin when you have a brain tumor. You are just addressing the symptoms (well ok, on the short term if you replace coal and gas powerplants it is actively part of the solution but everyone knows that won't solve all our environmental woes)
And you say population growth isn't exponential forever, sure. But our planet is already heavily suffering (and we are too) with the current population. And since population is still expected to grow and we all want people who currently live in (extreme) poverty not to stay in that situation forever energy demands are expected to rise beyond the problematic point it already is at. And not only energy demand, "demand" in general. So pollution will keep on rising. You just have the insane luxury not to live face to face with the problems we already have caused because they have been exported far away. Would you think the same if every pond and river in your state were filled with plastic? Would you think the same if prairies were looking like this ? https://i0.wp.com/www.fashionrevolution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/256395774_214664300746064_3846990949116389834_n.jpg?resize=640,360&ssl=1 Or maybe they need to have some more E-waste in your state? https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR92t7nFFikJS0YgyqA1mgOeonqv1hWzJxaBw&usqp=CAU
But the situation affects an enormous amount-- available resources, available living space, climate impact. Population growth of 1% over 10 years, when all these factors aren't in the danger zone, is fine. Population growth of 20% over 2 years when these factors are in the danger zone isn't fine. And the degree obviously matters there. It changes what is sustainable over a given period of time.
I would also argue that if your hope is for us to come up with solutions before things get truly out of hand a more controlled growth will give us more time to come up with those solutions.
That's not the argument that was made though. The argument is that nuclear power is a bad idea BECAUSE it is clean and plentiful. And plentiful clean energy will enable society to grow further. It's like this:
Person A: Humanity is a plague on the planet, we need to destroy industrial society.
Person B: Or we could use clean alternatives...
Person A: No, that'd be even worse, because then we'd become an even bigger plague. We just need to destroy industrialized society.
This is what I referred to as the most dangerous perspective in modern politics. The one that thinks human civilization is a plague on the earth and the only solution is to destroy it, and alternatives that mitigate environmental impacts are bad because they impede the movement toward doing so. It's essentially environmental accelerationism, let environmental problems get worse so that the who thing collapses faster.
Plentiful to be sure, and something we should pursue. However, clean? Not by my reading of this page on the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission website. All forms of energy production creates waste; we eat food, we take a shit. We burn coal, we create smog etc.
So yeah, I'm all for nuclear power, but it is not energy to be taken or deployed lightly.
No, to CHANGE the model on which that civilisation lives. Not this current economic growth over everything model.
I'm pretty sure that was in my initial response, not "we must all die".
Well, except that Person A never said that, and you've been busy constructing an enormous strawman because you can't handle being proven wrong or having your multitude of incorrect arguments pointed out.
I'm pretty confident you didn't (and might still not) appreciate the full ramifications of your argument. You' argued against nuclear power because it would enable humanity to "out-breed all other life on the planet".
There will be a point in the future where you think back to this thread and go "crap, that's what he was talking about". I understand that I'm positioned as the opponent to most of this board and you all instinctively reject whatever I say, but when you're somewhere else in life, you're going to see someone else casually arguing for the end of human civilization and think "that's kinda nuts".