Sometimes it’s easy to start thinking that since even breathing is part of the CO2 cycle, I’d do a better job of fighting climate change if I were in the grave, and that everyone better forget about having kids.
But the entire point of wanting to fix climate change is to preserve life. Annihilating the planet just to save it would be majorly missing the point. Yeah, yeah, it’s more than just human life that’s at stake, and it’d be worse if all animals died than if “only” humans died, but ideally we do want people to get to live their best lives. (Or their horrific awful life, if Ligotti is right about the human condition. Either way is fine by me.)
That’s not to say that I disagree with all of the malthusian perspectives. Rampant, unsustainable “growth” can wreck a buggy system, and market capitalism has a couple of severe memory-leaking bugs.
That’s the entire point of sustainability. To nurture something without neither drowning it nor burning it.
Some people give to the future by planting a seed, hoping it’ll grow
to a plant.
Others take from the future by tearing up a big mine and plundering everything that was in there.
Take a penny, leave a penny. Fun fun fun.♥︎
Both of these things is called “investment” for some dumb reason.
Conclusion: leave the fossil fuels in the ground!
This post came about because I mentioned on Libera.Chat an article about something else that tangentially used the word “carbon-sucking” and someone replied:
if you’re against “carbon sucking” then you should want more poor starving people
poor people use less resources on account of having none
people really need to re-evaluate their allegiances to groupthink tribes
fundamentally, negative utilitarianism is anti-life
be FOR something
While that’s maybe bit reductive since I am for a couple of things, although admittedly most of the things I am for is putting the kibosh on the many, many more things I am against. I’m for leaving it in the ground and living sustainably.
While phrasing an opinion as a negative, like “against labor exploitation”, does have plenty of disadvantages compared to phrasing it positively, like “for workers’ rights”, it’s also important to be able to try to have a clear-headed view of actual problems as problems. As I’ve said many times, the left is good at straight-forwardly and unflinchingly looking at very real problems but not so good at solutions, while the right often prefer to think of problems as if they were not problems. (Not saying the people I was talking to in this specific discussion were right-wing or that they didn’t have their own analyses of the best path forward; just trying to connect to a larger reason for why discussing problems straight-forwardly can be a valuable step towards improvement.)