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South Korea’s fertility rate sinks to record low despite $270bn in incentives
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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Falling birth rates are bad news for economies and billionaires, but good news for the planet.
Climate change is bad for humans. The planet doesn’t care, it can carry on without us.
This statement irks me unproportionally strongly compared to how banal it is. It's the equivalent of "it is what it is" in saying nothing, but with some edgy pedantic seasoning. What about if the atmosphere was stripped and the planet was left a barren rock? What about if something knocked it from out of the Solar system and it was sent reeling into the universe on its own? "The planet doesn’t care, it can carry on without us" -- and please, pretend I did the Spongebob random caps thing, because that's what I think of your banality.
While I get where you're coming from, I think there's another way to look at the comment:
People talk about environmental issues as protecting the planet and that gets a lot of people motivated to make changes, but for everyone else, there's just no urgency or attachment in that argument. People look at it as if killing the planet will mean we have different landscapes, certain animals stop existing, etc. There's this idea that humans will be fine, but it's all of that mother earth nonsense that's at stake, and some people just don't give a crap about that stuff.
We can be more blunt and selfish about things and get people to look at it instead as protecting themselves. Saving the whales doesn't motivate you? Fine. How about saving every human on the planet from famine? Because that's what we're really talking about here. You don't have to be a tree hugging hippy that loves mother earth to want to do something about this. Be a self important prick that only cares about themselves for all anyone cares - you have a personal stake in doing something about this too because ultimately we're saving ourselves, not some concept of "mother earth".
The point of comments like that aren't to say "it is what it is" and dismiss the problem, but rather to re-frame it to not be a touchy-feely "save the penguins" hippy concept that only resonates with a subset of individuals and instead bring it to the simple and universal matter of preservation of the species that will resonate with nearly all people. You don't have to want to "Save the Planet" to want to "Save Yourself"
That's also very different from some of the scenarios you shared, but putting climate issues on that extinction event level is exactly the point. If we knew an asteroid was coming at us and would impact, ending ending human life, we'd be SUPER motivated to fix that. Nations would spend unlimited money funding research and construction of solutions and it would start immediately with universal support. If people saw environmental issues as a similar extinction level catastrophe, maybe that would change.