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Advice to WMO on COP29 Planetary Albedo Discussion (9/3/2024 3:41:26 PM robertgchris@gmail.com)
Don't worry about future generations, they'll be fine. Once the human population has returned to about 1 billion, things will naturally sort themselves out. It'll be a bit messy until the population stabilises and the age pyramid has been restored to its normal right (as opposed to inverted) pyramid. But that's the nature of a correction!
If you want a light read, try John Gray's Straw Dogs here in the UK
or here in the US. He called it in 2002.
BTW, you needn't feel bad about anyone not yet conceived being harmed by our policy failures. Derek Parfit convincingly explains that those born in the future would only be born because of the policy choices we make. They can't be worse off having been born than they would have been had they not been born, so it's hard to see how they'll be any worse off as a consequence of our failures to which they owe their very existence. Likewise, those not conceived by virtue of our policy choices clearly won't be any worse off than had we made different choices unless you claim that all the possible people not yet conceived have a right to exist and are harmed by our effective denial of that right. But given the infinite number of possible humans, that seems a bit extreme! It's called the Non-Identity Problem. My couple of sentences hardly do it justice, but hopefully, you'll get the idea.
We need to chill. Humans have fucked up before and will do so again. We might be on the threshold of the mother of all fuck ups to date, but it's really unlikely that even on this occasion we're about to extinguish all life on Earth. Life is beautiful and resilient. It'll cope and rebound. Humans will have their deserved place in that future. There's no rush.
Ironically, I might not be being ironic! I'll leave it to you to decide.
Regards
Robert
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