It is 2035. You are in charge. As President of the New World Order (a position only available to you because you’re also Supreme Chancellor of the Illuminati), you have a decision to make.
Global warming is out of control. Past efforts were insufficient, as the population now stands at 9 billion. If something drastic isn’t done, all the world’s ice sheets and glaciers will melt, raising sea levels 250 feet, disrupting the European heat convector, and generally making the planet substantially less habitable.
The science and observations prove it. The only way to avert this catastrophe is to reduce the global population by 1/3, immediately, so as to curb greenhouse emissions enough to allow the nuclear-powered carbon seqeusters to have an effect. You might argue for cutting off the power and blocking the roads to prevent carbon emissions- good one! Only in crowded 2035, that’s the same thing as killing people. If that’s your method, well it is your world…
That’s the dilemma. Either you reduce the world’s population by 1/3 yourself (and the ice doesn’t melt after all), or global warming does it for you. Maybe worse, you don’t know for sure since it has never happened, though the science is sure that there will be at least some survivors. In a ruined, hotter world that is.
For the sake of this example, people who are so poor they can hardly afford firewood don’t count as global warming contributors. So- the 1/3 poorest people in the world are strictly off-limits in terms of population reduction. Larger contributors can be considered to ‘count’ extra.
Does the planet have a priority over the people who inhabit it? Should you try to save it? Or would you rather face the future without blood on your hands?
You must decide right away. There isn’t any more time!!!
Well, just for drill and simply taking your assumptions for granted, I’d say…figure out a way to set off one super volcano. End of problem. Large numbers of people starve (thus cutting down the population) and we get a massive global cooling effect, which takes care of the whole warming thingy.
If that doesn’t appeal (it doesn’t really appeal much to me), I’d say…just live with the global warming. Adapt, as we have as a species for hundreds of thousands of years. We have all this technology stuff now, so in theory we SHOULD be able to figure something out. Find ways to mitigate it or to live with it, move threatened populations to higher ground, create a rapid reaction type force for dealing with emergencies, unleash the magic ponies…and then pay the costs that will be associated with the change (flooding, shifting areas of food production, etc). With the resources of The World™ I’m pretty sure the majority of people could be saved and fed…especially two decades from now when we should (again, in theory) have even more technology at our disposal.
Oh yeah…and if I’m God Emperor, then I want skimpily clad love muffins to peel me grapes and fan me with those big palm frond thingies I’m always seeing in the movies…
The planet doesn’t need saved.
The planet will be fine.
You, me, your neighbors, my neighbors, yeah, we might die. The planet will keep chuggin’ along.
As to what I’d do in a hotter, higher-water level world which need a vast supply of food?
Well, I guess people better start getting used to living on barges and eating Algea cake… all 9 billion of them.
Reminds me of Al Gore in Futurama: “If we don’t go back there and make that event happen, the entire universe will be destroyed… and as an environmentalist, I’m against that.”
If an already overpopulated planet is rendered “substantially less habitable”, you’re going to get your anthrocial massacre whether you like it or not.
Why wait until 2035? If I was Emperor of the World I’d happily reduce the population by at least a third right now. The Optimum Population Trust estimates that we can only sustainably support a maximum of 5.1 billion:
So in 2035 we’ll be looking at at least a 44% reduction and maybe more.
It’s not the planet we’re saving it’s the species. The planet will recover once we’re gone.
In order to give the survivors quality of life then some would have to go. Perfectly logical.
Besides, if there were only 2.7 billion we could all drive around in Range Rovers.
Doesn’t matter. Whatever you do, the Epoch will end, and the downside of a real operating system is that machines that actually matter will still be running Unix by that time.
Seriously, though. I’ll go ahead and treat this as if it wasn’t a false dilemma, which it of course is. Firstly, I believe there is really very little humans can do that would seriously jeopardize the ability of the planet to sustain life. Secondly, I decline to kill off a third of the population just so genocidal monsters such as myself can continue to drive Range Rovers, as another poster so succinctly put it. I’ll take my chances with the whole drowning thing.
nod As the philosopher Carlin said, “The planet is fine. The *people *are fucked.”
So, as Supreme Honcho, I decide to do nothing about it. However, much funding (funneled from the Judeo-Communist conspiracy, of course) will go towards building a sustainable Arcology for me, my family, and my fellow illuminatis if I can’t find a way to backstab those sumbitches at some point. Possibly on Mars, for the classicism of it. But the bottom of the ocean would work too.
@**Ludovic **: that joke must already have been made a zillion times, but what the hey : so, 2038 is an Epoch fail ?
I wasn’t quite thinking God Emperor, but close enough. You can take all that other stuff for granted- it’s the perks of the job. Pretty much everyone else has bigger problems than you in this scenario.
That’s the point. Global warming will kill as many or more than you need to kill to prevent it. Only if you take action the world avoids the climate catastrophe, and then it is Congratulations Evil Dictator!
Just out of curiousity, do you actually believe that this scenario is even remotely plausible?
You do know that the worst-case scenarios for warming from reputable scientific sources predict very little warming by 2035, and only the worst of the worst-case scenarios from the IPCC has warming between 2.4 and 6.4 degrees C, with corresponding sea level rises between 10 and 23 inches by the year 2100?
I think that the only correct response in hypotheticals like this is to reject the hypothetical. There are ways to cut carbon emissions by a third without cutting population by a third, for instance-- Some of them would be a bit drastic to implement on an immediate time scale, but then, we’re comparing to three billion acts of murder: There’s a lot we can do that’s considerably less drastic than that. What if I just tell the people that electricity will be turned off for eight hours each day, and suck it up and deal with it?
So, are you volunteering to be first in line? It’s easy to be cavalier about other people’s lives.
And besides, the scenarios aren’t going to work that way. It isn’t like if we halved CO2 emissions tomorrow then, hey climate change averted. We’ve dumped a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere over the last 100 years, just lowering the current rate of CO2 emissions isn’t going to erase the CO2 already emitted.
If we’re facing the Antarctic ice sheet melting then even reducing CO2 emissions to zero isn’t going to help. We’d need some sort of geoengineering project to stop it.
The other annoying part of the scenario is the postulate that there’s nothing we can do to change carbon emissions except reduce population. As if every person in the world emits exactly the same amount of carbon, and there’s no way to change that number. Except that’s not true in the real world. You can change carbon emissions simply by putting a steep tax on carbon. If you’re head of the Illuminati this is easy to do across the globe. Lower sales taxes or value added taxes and replace them with carbon taxes. Make the carbon taxes steep enough to replace the revenue generated through reduction in sales taxes and you’ll see drastic changes in the carbon budget. Make the carbon taxes really really high and you’ll cut carbon emissions like crazy, the only problem is that you won’t be generating much revenue from carbon taxes because no one will be emitting any.
Or just ban coal mining. There, problem solved. It was easy!
I would urge all Western Malthusian environmentalists to take their principles to their logical conclusion, and commit mass suicide.
If they’re right about where the world is heading, they’ll have made the world a better place. If they’re wrong, well, we survivors won’t have to listen to their drivel any more.