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Warpy

(111,255 posts)
5. You've misread me
Tue Jun 2, 2020, 12:41 PM
Jun 2020

because I know the planet will survive all this. That doesn't mean we will. In fact, the more plastic that enters the food chain, the more our own fate is sealed, along with that of most other animal life. Forget those 3 meals a day, we'll struggle to get enough nutrition to survive the night if we eat all day, every day, providing there is something to eat that won't kill us outright.

Nuclear power isn't the be all and end all, not even if they solve the fusion conundrum. For one thing, it requires water, a lot of it, and much of the world's population lives where water is in short supply. In addition, the objection to it is more empirical than you think. The potential for disaster had been known for a long time and now we have two major laboratories in which to study it: Chernobyl and Fukushima. People aren't objecting to it to save their windmills. They're objecting to the very real damage that is caused when nature sides with the hidden flaws, and there will always be hidden flaws.

Years from now, there will be environmental refugees. Will suburbanites give up their burgers in order to feed everyone on corn and soybeans? I sincerely doubt it. We can all be generous to people one at a time, but given a seething mass of starving humanity, we lose sight of individual suffering and see only the threat they pose. Humanity in general has a short attention span and a general predilection toward historical amnesia. We're reactive, not proactive, and reactions will generally be wrong.

See: Bronze Age collapse. There were multiple stable civilizations, fertile agricultural areas, well established trade routes, and it all collapsed suddenly and was obliterated within a decade and a half.

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