Humanity has wiped out 60% of animals since 1970, major report finds

> All of the fixes being proposed are, if we are honest, some form of rationing or another. That will necessarily reduce the quality of life of a large group of people, and they won't accept that no matter how strongly bureaucrats insist they should.

I'm not sure this is true. It used to be socially acceptable to smoke in offices and inside, but attitudes changed. Now fewer and fewer people smoke tobacco in the UK at least. Even drinking is seen as uncool, with around 20% of 18-24 year olds saying they don't drink at all IIRC. I think a similar change in attitude could occur so people make ecologically-minded decisions.

A few ideas I've heard that I agree with are also:

* The Earth and ecosystem should have legal rights and be legally represented & defended in courts to oppose industries like e.g. fracking/mining/deforestation, etc., not as an after thought, but in terms that the Earth is its own legal entity and therefore ultimately owns itself and major industry would require approval from a group of trustees acting on behalf of the Earth.

* Companies should be legally responsible for putting the environment before shareholder profits (i.e. not be run for the benefit of shareholder, but for the benefit of the environment)

* Governments should pay people to keep trees on their land - not just landowners, but people who would fell the land. Maybe this would be some combination based on land ownership/licencing rights (e.g. tenancy) and universal basic income. This would probably need to be an international effort because e.g. we all benefit from the South American rainforests, not just people who live in close proximity to them.

It won't be simple to decide how to implement the above ideas, but we need to value the environment far more instead of just unsustainably stripping resources so a few people can make a fast buck. The idea that just because you own some land (or it's the commons) that you can do whatever you want with it needs to end. But whatever we decide, it is clear we need widespread, dramatic, global changes in our behaviour now.

It's clear that this rate of growth is not sustainable. Everyone knows that, though not everyone acknowledges it. Population growth must top out somewhere. The most likely mechanism is the same one that's driven birth rate decline in developed nations: affluence. The end of huge scale population growth doesn't mean human extinction or even significant population decline, though it may mean financial crisis and a major re-invention of modern finance around models that do not depend on eternal massive GDP growth.

Wars of course will happen. People fight wars. Modern wars don't have body counts like they used to. A war between the USA and Russia or the USA and China would -- unless nukes come out in force -- be largely fought by machines with body counts far lower than WWI and WWII. (USxChina would be a full-on cyberpunk mech battle.) Wars also tend to be followed by periods of expansion, so don't pin your "hope" on war to reduce human population or environmental effects in the long term.

I've simply come to terms with the fact that we have entered the Anthropocene. The holocene geological epoch has ended.

If you want to slap a date on the anthropocene, I'd go with July 16th, 1945, the date of the Trinity atomic test. That was the point at which the evolutionary ratchet clicked and regression to a pre-industrial state became game-theoretically impossible. Subsequent atomic testing also furnishes a nice neat line in geological strata that will be clearly visible to any geologists of the far distant future.

We are in the early anthropocene, which seems characterized by increased CO2 and methane concentrations, increased temperatures, and plummeting biodiversity. The latter is a common characteristic of geological boundary events. The fact that this one was caused by the emergence of large scale industrialized intelligence instead of a meteorite or volcanism doesn't much matter. When the environment drastically changes a lot of species die off.

What happens next is debatable. It's likely that intelligence will soon figure out massively scalable renewable energy (it's close) and/or fusion. That combined with depletion of fossil fuels will mean CO2 emissions will probably fall off a cliff by mid-century. The big CO2 pump is probably a H-A (Holocene-Anthropocene) boundary event like the line of radioisotopes from early atomic testing. CO2 has a long half-life in the atmosphere but we don't know what biology is going to do as the planet warms and all that CO2 is hanging around. There could be a huge burst in photosynthesis. The Cretaceous period, the last epoch with similarly high CO2 concentrations, also had about 150% today's oxygen concentration in the atmosphere. Maybe that will happen by a few hundred years from now. I'm thinking the Anthropocene is going to look a bit like the Cretaceous.

The loss of biodiversity here on Earth is depressing, but on the positive side it's likely that the Anthropocene will see the spread of organic life from Earth to its Moon, Mars, and possibly other locations in the solar system. It may also see the birth of self-replicating machine intelligences, an entirely new offshoot of life adapted for large-scale growth beyond the planet's biosphere. A moderate number of humans and associated symbiotic plants and animals might colonize other worlds, but I'd predict that post-biological life will make the big leap from atmosphere to space (analogous to the leap from the oceans to land). Us with our clunky space suits are like lungfish.

Basically stop eating beef and using internal-combustion cars, and the situation is vastly improved. Not impossible. A bunch of tax law changes would do it.

And that's a lot more passable than killing a bunch of people.

I don't doubt that bug populations are dropping.

The idea of lamenting climate change by having nostalgia for the days when piling into a car and driving across the countryside would guarantee a handful of smashed insects on the windscreen is funny to me.

Huh. I've heard carrying capacity estimates range from 10 to 150 billion.

http://outsideinradio.org/shows/2018/10/11/so-over-populatio...

Maybe population theorists are wrong and you are right it's more like 5, or whatever your number is.

It's just hard to know, since Malthusianism has such a terrible track record, adamantly predicting apocalypse for two hundred years. They continue to make failing predictions:

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/12/31/258687278/a-be...

There are real challenges to confront about the environment, but I do worry about maintaining credibility while endorsing some of the more tenuous extrapolations.