The environmental left’s real problem is the same one as the “Remains” had in the Brexit vote: their message expresses no hope for the future, and instead enumerates only consequences and punishments.
Whatever their actual message, when most people are exposed to the enviro-left’s messaging what they hear is a litany of how we’ll all be living in 8×8 featureless concrete boxes where we eat tasteless vegan gruel twice a day, where there is no air conditioning and no individuation of any kind because anything that smacks of desires or aspirations — well, that all emits too much carbon.
Honestly, most people would rather be dead than live in the world on the other side of the enviro-left’s perceived preferred societal alterations.
Why is the left in general so terrible at messaging, at propaganda?
Nearly any approach would be better than what the enviro-left actually does, because any tack that makes people think of mortality only nudges them towards conservatism and orthodoxy.
That the left should have been concentrating on population reduction and control but could not for political reasons is the real failure in my opinion.
If the left had been concentrating on population reduction, the mainstream culture would imagine, instead of living in 8×8 featureless concrete boxes, imagine getting neutered or something.
As you may know, there’s been a certain amount of nationalist entryism into both green and population-hawk circles as certain anti-immigrant and even nationalist groups have been starting to frame immigration as a population issue (while piggybacking on the existing tendency of green and/or populationist people to see their pet issues as related). Those greens who want no part of this have come up with two defense tactics, which unfortunately work against each other. One consists of pointing out that moving the existing human population between countries doesn’t change the total human population, therefore immigration is not a population issue. The other faction at least partially de-links population from environment, reasoning that if it takes (say) four earths worth of natural resources to support the world population at the American population’s level of affluenza, and the American population is a lot less than a quarter of the world population, then the carrying capacity of the earth, at some survivable level of consumption, is probably larger than the current earth population. But of course that gets back to the concrete boxes (although I’ve heard that concrete is considered to be one of the more carbon-expensive products out there, so “Terrafoam” or something, right?). The real weakness of the carrying capacity argument against the nativist entryism is that someone relocating to America from anywhere (let alone a developing country) will almost certainly have a dramatically higher carbon footprint after the move than before. I want to believe that that will be at least partially (or better, more than) canceled out by the likelihood that they will have fewer grandchildren or great-grandchildren as Americans than had they not moved. Thing is, I don’t know whether that’s the case. At this point in history, the Middle East and Africa are the only world regions that still have human fertility rates substantially above replacement level, so I suppose an immigrant from Latin America or Asia will produce the same number of descendants as otherwise but a hella more carbon dioxide. There’s also the matter of water. Population carrying capacity of the clean water supply is probably a little less negotiable, so world population is the main number to get down, but American-level affluenza probably also consumes more water than the world average by multiple orders of magnitude.
Concentrating on population control and reduction I agree is difficult for political reasons. And it works against our evolutionary imperatives.
I don’t agree that over the long term that population will by culturally-caused reasons stabilize at a certain level, UN DESA projections aside. Religious groups that do not believe in population limitation or birth control will over time tend to out-reproduce those who do allow such “impieties.” Population that appears to be decreasing its rate of expansion over such a short time as most of the 20th and so far 21st centuries is just too short of a timeframe to draw any conclusions or to have anything other than a wishful thinking-based model.
Paul Ehrlich was the worst kind of right, which was being right too early. Water availability, topsoil depletion, phosphate limitations and all the problems exacerbated by climate change are all hard limitations. Unless we begin uploading our minds into machines (which I don’t see happening for at least a thousand years, if ever) then these are just hard limits. There is no techno-fix for these, at least in enough time.
I do agree that human population will decline due to famine, war (likely nuclear) and resource scarcities of other sorts. Not a very good sort of population control, but probably given human proclivities the inevitable one.
About American-level affluenza, everyone alive could live like Americans if there were only 500 million people alive at any one time.
About deliberate and ordered population control, though, you’re probably right: a non-starter without a near-apocalypse having already occurred.
Even China’s one child policy was seen as the greatest evil of all time by some, despite the fact that China’s carbon emissions with the 1.8 billion people it’d currently have sans that policy would’ve been just staggering. So it was a gift to the world that no one is thankful for.
In conclusion (harrumph), suspect we are doomed but speaking from my nihilistic side, at least I’ll be dead before the worst of it.