Not really too concerned with his agenda...maybe a few folks need to lose their healthcare before they will wake the fuck up...I would rather that no one suffered or was injured or faces extra hardships under Trump and the GOP, but I don't see how that is possible given our current path we are on...so I will hope for the best long term outcome while the BS hopefully passes without too much permanent damage done.
Not really too concerned with his agenda...maybe a few folks need to lose their healthcare before they will wake the fuck up...I would rather that no one suffered or was injured or faces extra hardships under Trump and the GOP, but I don't see how that is possible given our current path we are on...so I will hope for the best long term outcome while the BS hopefully passes without too much permanent damage done.
It’s easily more than rent or mortgages for many people.
Absolutely.
What are your personal thoughts on this?
It’s Time to Discuss the Ethics of
Subjecting New Humans to the Climate Change Era
It’s time for us to have a serious conversation about the ethics of bringing new humans into the world at the end of its relative habitability.
I keep seeing in my news feeds celebratory posts from happy young couples getting pregnant and having babies.
But I can’t help but feel severe pain for these new children, because of the future that they are going to have to endure.
I worked on climate policy and sustainable development at the United Nations, during the Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, then a few years later on prep for UN-Habitat’s New Urban Agenda.
These summits convened the world’s top experts on climate science, economics, human rights, anthropology, defense, and human behavior, and the picture they painted about our future was actually quite bleak.
In fact, during one panel of top scientists and economists addressing the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank and IMF), they said a quote that is seared into my memory forever: “Now is the time to go to your homes and bring your families close,” because from this point forward, they said, things will only continue to fall apart.
This was in 2012.
And look how things have gone just since then.
The reality is, by 2050, the UN projects that 66 percent of the world’s 9.3 billion people will be crammed into cities and sprawling megalopolis areas. (For perspective, in 1950, only 30 percent of earth’s 2.5 billion people lived in cities, and only nine years ago, in 2008, when the population was 6.7 billion, did that ratio hit 50 percent.)
Not only do these figures pose fundamental questions about how we are going to feed, water, clothe, and power these new urbanites, these challenges are compounded when you consider that climate change will make mid-latitudes increasingly too hot to sustain life, resulting in mass migration in the tens of millions, at least, toward the poles, while breadbaskets and aquifers desertify, pollinators – who provide all our fruits, veggies, and natural textiles – die off en masse, and, despite having the technology to have a completely renewable power grid, entrenched interests in certain countries like the United States are using their considerable political influence to block clean power and continue investment and construction of dirty power infrastructure (which looks also to get a major boost in the Republican’s current tax proposal.)
This is not a picture of a world where life will be happy, fun, easy, clean, safe, stable, prosperous, or for that matter, free, at least as we have known it and come to take for granted since the end of the Second World War.
And these are just the scientifically measurable outcomes of the climate reality.
The less knowable but still predictable impacts on governance, liberty, order, and respect for human rights and dignity are equally unnerving.
Under a still relatively status quoglobal situation, an illiberal adversary was successful at manipulating our democratic process to install a hostile authoritarian at the top of the U.S. government.
Now just imagine how American voters and leadership – and adversaries worldwide – will react when everywhere from Peru and Colombia to Mexico to Arizona and Texas is too hot for people to live in, resulting in millions of climate refugees necessarily fleeing to the United States and Canada, which by then will barely be able to provide basic food and water to its own people.
It’s also wise to examine the future viability of the United States as a functioning nation-state under the pressures climate change will subject it to, when we have a Republic with a governing structure who not only refuses to acknowledge it as a security risk, but who is also actively suppressing official discussion about climate change and its effects.
(At the American Planning Association’s national conference this spring in New York, we heard from professionals with U.S. government agencies who said they now have to use terms like “projected future needs” and “necessary resilience proposals,” since using terms like “climate change adaptation” will result in research papers and master plans being denied funding.)
If this is the situation in 2017, what do you think things will be like in 2030, or 2050, or in 2100?
I hazard to guess that America’s emergency climate governance will probably either skew severely fascist, or will break the back of the federal government, resulting in the nationwide devolution of sovereignty to among the many states or yet undetermined new regions (holla Cascadia!)
(Solutions to this potential crisis, like the implementation of democratic confederalism in devolved municipalities, is the subject for future articles.)
Is this a world you want your kids growing up in?
Ethical and philosophical schools have long sought the solution to relieving suffering.
Buddhism’s primary focus is escaping the cycle of death and rebirth, which exacerbates the clinging-to of desire, which Buddhists believe is the source of suffering.
The Hippocratic Oath which all medical doctors since antiquity have sworn to uphold, states that doctors shall “do no harm.”
Christianity’s basic premise is that we are all to simply love one another, without qualification or condition, as a means of alleviating the pain and struggle inevitable in life.
Therefore, considering all of this, we now have to ask ourselves: is having children in the climate change era anything but the pinnacle of selfishness and cruelty?
The idea that having a child because they might have a chance at being the person who resolves our crises is fallacy.
We know the necessary solutions and the steps to take – the biggest problem we face today is finding the political will and capital to act.
So it’s not like your kid is going to be the one to magically restore us to ecological balance and unending prosperity.
In fact, having children is the single worst thing you can do for the environment, as human offspring continue the cycle of consumption and its inherent emissions of greenhouse gases.
Not to mention the fact that they will have to experience, bear witness to, fight, and perhaps even assume leadership roles during the most tumultuous period in the history of geopolitics and anthropology.
I was born in the 1980s.
By 2050, I will be in my spritely young mid-60s (and my grandfather, who recently passed, made it to age 94).
Children born today will be only in their young adulthood or early middle age by the middle of the century, and will be settling into “retirement” by the end of the century, when science predicts much of the world will be more like Venus than Earth.
So, I think considering all of this, the most ethical course is that if you love children – which I wholeheartedly do – then the answer is to consciously not have them, and to spare them the pain of watching the whole beloved system fall into absolute pieces.
It’s basic mercy.
It’s compassion.
Hell, it’s even harm reduction.
So, get your tubes tied, ladies, snip-snip, gentlemen, and enjoy the rest of the world while we’ve still got it, without having to wake up every day worried and guilty about the anguish your offspring would otherwise have to endure.
Arguably history really did not begin until it could be recorded and preserved, kinda the definition of history. Fleeing a possible world wide calamity is both irresponsible and impractical. The climate is changing and in may go into a rapid change in the near future. It is quite possible that human society can mitigate those effects if the owners of the world economy can be convinced to convince the sheep who follow them to change their tune.
It was in reference to the post above it for a judicial nominee questioning:
