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Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Part of the opposition to this is that there is a certain part of the environmental movement that more than wanting to solve global warming, wants to use it as a stick to go back to a more “natural” state for humanity. They not only oppose geo-engineering but many also oppose nuclear and even solar power installations.

Sorry, the natural state sucked. It was without antibiotics. A tooth infection could kill you. Women were abused by men since they were in general smaller and weaker in a system that placed a premium on physical prowess. Childbirth was painful with high infant and maternal mortality.

No thanks.

We need a massive amount of technology to support our population of hat we have now. And we have to innovate ourselves out of this situation.

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It’s basic conservatism.[1] It’s much less risky to put the breaks on so-called progress—maybe even so-called regress—as opposed to staying the course that we have now.

A small amount of prevention is worth a bigger quantity of cure. And crossing your fingers that geoengineering will solve that is risky.

[1] Conservatism now means crazy things like “neo-con” i.e. people who think that invading countries half-way across the world is conservative.

No, it doesn't mean neo-con or reactionaries, it's just that neocons and reactionaries like to call themselves conservatives, like neolibs/capitalist used to call themselves 'liberals', or ancap call themselves 'Libertarians'. At some point it replace the original meaning.

If you're a regular conservative, you should check out Baudrillard.

Jean Baudrillard?

Yes. For some context, he is considered 'postmodernist', which usually means Jack shit, but in his and Lyotard's cases, means they analyse postmodern society ('the postmodern condition') and try to find concepts to explain the changes to society, like the death of metanaratives.

Baudrillard (and to a lesser extent Lyotard) elaborate multiple concepts, but he is most known for his criticism of 'hyperreality', where he posit than in postmodern society, the signifiant detach themselves from signifier and become their own autonomous thing. Which is leftist (in the sense of anticapitalist) , yes, but also deeply conservative.

But this is 'mainstream' books. He wrote a lot of essays and I can tell you although he is assigned as a 'leftist' because of his anti-Us stances, read "The Conspiracy of Art" and you'll see thought out, articulated conservative talking points.

I wish there was a way to greatly reduce global population, without risking heinous means or outcomes.

It seems like the size of the human population drives so many of these problems.

1B rich people would have an impact on the earth very comparable to the impact of 1B rich people + 9B poor people.

Rich people expand to use all available resources. We've used virtually all of our arable land for farmland and cities not because we have to, but because that's the cheapest way to make food. If we reduced our population, we'd likely just eat more beef and still use all the land. We'd use less cars and more jets. And so on.

What relevance does that have? If you shrink the overall population you also shrink the wealthy part of it since there is less of the poor population to support the rich one.

The rich don't live off the backs of the poor so much as the rich are rich because they hog the resources. Most of the imports from Africa are capital intensive raw resources, they aren't products with significant labour value add. If the population shrunk the remaining one billion would be much richer unless you also took away the society's built resources at the same time.

Not to worry. Social media and ubiquitous porn are already reducing relationships and frequency of sex in the younger generations in the West. With the rise of AI "companions" I expect that trend to accelerate. We just need to distribute all this worldwide!

If you think that these are the reasons young people aren't choosing to have kids you clearly haven't actually talked to young people. The discussion starts and ends with being unable to afford what is considered the minimum lifestyle to raise a child. When you have to DINK to pay your housing costs and student loans what's even the point?

My partner and I make 3x what my firmly middle class parents did growing up and just the two of us live less lavishly than them despite them paying for private school my whole life.

Everything you say is true, but my point was on the declining frequency of sex, which is a prerequisite to having kids. People may very well be avoiding having kids due to the economic burden, but that doesn't explain the decrease in sex itself among the younger generation.

Well, good news / bad news ...

Good news is the people in the stratospheric pay grades agree, and have been working toward it.

Bad news is that the means and outcomes are indeed heinous.

Antibiotics are extremely overused and lead to chronic illness via gut dysbiosis. Geo-engineering won't work and will just cause more unintended consequences (drought in other regions, chronic illness from heavy metals in the atmosphere)

Cancer rates and chronic illness are rising and people are dying younger for the first time. The writing is on the wall.

These facts aren't revealed often because there's no corporation that benefits from marketing it, there's nothing to sell, only bad technologies to opt out of.

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