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Doomer Eternal?

Youtuber Sarah Z talks about the Doomers, those who despair of the world. I am not trying to criticize Sarah Z's take since it is remarkably similar to mine, but I will dump my thoughts below anyway. [1]

~ ~ ~

The media has broadcast nothing but wall-to-wall doom-and-gloom for a-hundred years and then some.

If things feel more hopeless now it's because so much of that media is social media generated by us, so that we are sharing the doom-and-gloom meme with each other AS WELL AS getting it from the mainstream media.

Human life is in less peril than ever before (barring the possibility of WW3 between China & Russia v. NATO & SEATO) as economic development makes comfortable civilized living more and more accessible to more and more people every year, and the carbon intensity of every unit of GDP is continually declining.

CO2 emissions could plausibly lead to specific calamities with identifiable bodycounts in the near future, and preventing CO2 emissions by the one plausible method actually available (shutting down power stations) would almost certainly kill the vast majority of people alive today, not to mention end civilization, so I don't recommend that. Sure, the pace of phasing out CO2-belching power-sources is slow, and will remain so, but it is proceeding and it will be complemented in future decades by carbon sequestration, so AGW, while deserving of our alarm and attention, is not something to despair over

Not to mention that, on the human scale, the pollution from a hearth in a tribal or agrarian society is associated with greater mortality than asbestos insulation, so in terms of human health agrarian and nomadic societies actually suffer more from their own pollution than industrial societies suffer from industrial pollution.


[1] Rise of the Doomer: Why So Many People Are Giving Up, Sarah Z Youtube channel, retrieved June 22nd 2020
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2YptT8l3jM

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