Be afraid! Be very afraid! A “startling” “new” “scientific” report that “totally confirms” all of The Club of Rome’s fearmongering over The Limits to Growth! . . . But does it really confirm what it’s reported to confirm? And what are the limits to growth, anyway? Join James for the longest and most in-depth edition of Questions For Corbett yet as he does a deeeeeeep dive on The Club of Rome’s infamous reports, its celebrated “vindication,” the truth about overpopulation, and the future of life on earth.
Watch on Archive / BitChute / Minds.com / Odysee / YouTube or Download the mp4
TRANSCRIPT:
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome back to The Corbett Report. I’m your host, James Corbett of corbettreport.com, and you are tuned into Questions For Corbett.
This week, we’re going to answer a number of questions that have come in over the months and years that I’ve been doing The Corbett Report. They often come in different flavors and varieties but swirl around broadly the same topic. Let’s take a couple of examples from the mailbox.
One from Orrin, who wrote:
I greatly appreciate all of your insight and sanity into our current times. One thing that I’ve been challenged to reconcile in my mind is the population question. I know that you have said that it is a myth that the world is overpopulated. I’m having trouble understanding this in the current context. Can you either point me to existing resources or address this question? Thank you.
Or, for example, I think a related question, if not intentionally or consciously so, but I think a related question from Eric, who wrote:
I followed your work for years but have never sent anything your way. This website is not one I would ever recommend as reputable, therefore I doubt it is one in your normal feed. However, this article tipped off all my “wtf hairs” and made me wonder how far this study can be traced.
And he includes a link to: “MIT Predicted in 1972 That Society Will Collapse This Century. New Research Shows We’re on Schedule.”
And this is coming from vice.com, which, if you saw my recent edition of #SolutionsWatch, you will know, yes, I do not consider this a reputable news source either, and it is not part of my daily normal feed. But it is good to know what the propagandists are attempting to shove down the public’s throat and in what way they are attempting to do so.
So, reading from the introduction to that particular linked vice.com report, it starts by noting:
A remarkable new study by a director at one of the largest accounting firms in the world has found that a famous, decades-old warning from MIT about the risk of industrial civilization collapsing appears to be accurate based on new empirical data.
As the world looks forward to a rebound in economic growth following the devastation wrought by the pandemic, the research raises urgent questions about the risks of attempting to simply return to the pre-pandemic “normal.”
In 1972, a team of MIT scientists got together to study the risks of civilizational collapse. Their system dynamics model published by The Club of Rome identified impending “Limits to Growth” (LtG) that meant industrial civilization was on track to collapse sometime within the 21st century, due to overexploitation of planetary resources.
The controversial MIT analysis generated heated debate and was widely derided at the time by pundits who misrepresented its findings and methods. But the analysis has now received stunning vindication from a study written by a senior director at professional services giant KPMG, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms as measured by global revenue.
Alright. You can continue reading that VICE article if you want. But I think we get the bare bones of this stunning new report that’s actually several months old.
But anyway, wow, okay, so this is all about The Club of Rome and The Limits to Growth and the MIT team that was creating a report for them that was talking about how industrial society is going to collapse. And there’s a new report saying how this is all on track. And of course this does swirl around that initial question raised by Orrin about overpopulation. Isn’t overpopulation this pressing problem that is facing humanity?
In order to answer the Pandora’s box of questions that these Questions For Corbett opens, let’s start by refamiliarizing ourselves with The Limits to Growth, which was released as a book in 1972 that became an international bestseller—I believe tens of millions of copies sold and translated into many languages—that was itself based on a report that was delivered to The Club of Rome by a prestigious team of researchers from the prestigious Ivy League institution of MIT, which does have a lot of US deep state connections, I’m sure. You would understand that if you are a regular of The Corbett Report. There is that cookie crumb trail to follow.
But anyway, this MIT team of researchers had this World One computer model that they used as the basis for delivering their report, which was then summarized in book form by The Club of Rome in their publication, The Limits to Growth. And of course, I’ll put in a link to the actual PDF version of The Limits to Growth itself.
And I will also direct you to The Club of Rome official write-up on The Limits to Growth and its significance, where they say:
In the summer of 1970, an international team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology began a study of the implications of continued worldwide growth. They examined the five basic factors that determine and, in their interactions, ultimately limit growth on this planet—population increase, agricultural production, nonrenewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation.
The MIT team fed data on these five factors into a global computer model and then tested the behavior of the model under several sets of assumptions to determine alternative patterns for mankind’s future. The Limits to Growth is the nontechnical report of their findings.
The book contains a message of hope as well: Man can create a society in which he can live indefinitely on earth if he imposes limits on himself and his production of material goods to achieve a state of global equilibrium with population and production in carefully selected balance.
Now, I’m sure my more astute and informed listeners will already understand what this report is really saying, what it is aiming at, what solutions it is going to ultimately propose to this problem of the growing human population. Not only population control, of course, that is always there as one of the key solutions, but also it implies, of course, there will be selected limits to certain resources and our ability to use them.
“Production of material goods.” We will have to impose controls—not just controls on the growth of the human population, but controls on what the human population does, where it goes, how it uses resources, what it can and cannot consume.
And it’s a “carefully selected balance.” Hmm, I wonder who is going to be selecting that balance for us? I sure hope it’s the wise technocratic overlords at institutions like MIT and, more importantly, The Club of Rome.
The Club of Rome itself is an important institution that I have referred to in the past, founded in 1968 in Italy. Co-founders included Aurelio Peccei, who, you will remember from the recent presentation on the World Economic Forum, “Meet the World Economic Forum,” was one of the key speakers at one of the first Davos conferences. He delivered a keynote address at the same conference where the Davos Manifesto was being laid out—an interesting tidbit you can check back in the archives for more on.
The Club of Rome itself is an interesting institution. But let’s look more closely at this particular report—and, more importantly, at the totally scientific basis for that report, which was put together by the technical experts at MIT with their highly scientific computer model that had precisely technical and detailed findings that exactly laid out where the human population and where the state of the world itself was going.
Did I mention “science”? Let’s take a look more closely at the “science” supposedly underlying The Limits to Growth. We’ll do so by way of an interesting little time capsule that surfaced on YouTube in the last few years, courtesy of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), which had a 1973 report detailing the computer model behind The Limits to Growth: “Computer predicts the end of civilisation.”
But more importantly, I think, the thrust of the report was an interview that included Club of Rome co-founders Aurelio Peccei and Alexander King.
[Pulsing ’70s electronic music.]
ABC NARRATOR: It’s not some science fantasy effect from 2001. This electronic display emanating from Australia’s largest computer is a picture of the condition past, present and future of planet Earth. The program was originally devised by a scientist working from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jay Forrester. It was developed under the auspices of The Club of Rome by an MIT research team to present a complex model of the world and what we humans are doing to it.
The program, called World One, doesn’t pretend to be a precise forecast. What it does for the first time in man’s history on the planet is to look at the world as one system. It shows that earth cannot sustain present population and industrial growth for much more than a few decades. It shows that simply cleaning up our car exhausts and making some small effort to limit our families simply isn’t enough.
[Corbett pops his head out from under his desk and oozes sarcasm when he says:] Yeah, that’s the stuff. I f***ing love “science.” Hey, ABC, you got any more of that awesome computer modeling stuff, you know, with all the letters and characters and stuff floating around the screen like a matrix? You got any more of that?
No? Well, how about misleading rhetoric and empty characterizations and stealth editorialization? You got any of that?
ABC NARRATOR: Well, this is the printed version of what we’ve just seen on the television screen. What looks at first to be just a maze of computer characteristics is really a system of very simple graphs which project what’s going to happen to the planet over the next 150 years if we don’t do something drastic to stop it.
Yes, note a couple of things about that little passage, one of which is the presenter’s little tell there: “150 years.” Even he doesn’t believe what he’s saying. “Oh yes, this computer graph, these characters on this page represent what is going to happen to the planet ‘over the next 150 years.'” Yeah, sure, we know what the world’s going to look like in the year 2120—or whatever it was at the time this report was filed. Sure.
But more importantly, of course: “unless we do something drastic to stop it.” The conclusion is already baked into the cake. There is an implied value judgment about things that we should or should not be doing in order to achieve certain goals. What goals? Who are the people setting these goals? What goals are they [setting] for the planet?
But beyond that, there is such certainty about this hard-hitting data. Look at the characters printed on this piece of paper. See? It shows that we have to do something drastic to stop this from happening. Please note that the viewer’s entire spectrum of allowable thought on this subject has been drastically narrowed down to a point by this objective news presenter, who’s just presenting us news, right? Wrong, of course.
And then the report goes on to talk to Alexander King and Aurelio Peccei and another person associated with The Club of Rome about their predictions. The question is posed to Alexander King—a very specific question. Let’s listen to this news presenter presenting this hard-hitting question to this incredibly important figure.
ABC NARRATOR: Dr. King, now you’re describing the world as a closed system, where all these things are interrelated, and yet the government, the control of the system, is by individual nation-states. Now, how do you convince them to cooperate?
How do you convince them to cooperate? How do you convince them to cooperate? (I’ll just put this out as a rhetorical question. Please answer it for yourself in your own way.)
But is this a journalistic question? Is this a question that a journalist would be asking to someone in a position of power and influence about an agenda they’re attempting to promote? How would you convince them to cooperate with your agenda?—despite the fact there is presumably massive resistance and pushback against that agenda, as implied by the question itself.
But no, don’t ask about that. Don’t push back on this person and the agenda they’re attempting to promote. No. Lob them the easiest softball imaginable so they can have an open platform without pushback, without any sort of question, to simply promote what they are attempting to push.
That is not journalism. But it gets even worse. I’m sure you’ll never be able to guess what the esteemed Dr. Alexander King’s answer to that question might be.
DR. ALEXANDER KING: So I don’t think one can envisage an idealistic of jumping to a world federalism or anything of that sort. But the building up probably in the next decade in a number of particularly sensitive fields like energy, raw materials, the use of the oceans, space and so on, of a number of what people are tending to call regimes, which will not be ordinary United Nations type of organizations, but semi-management organizations. There will be a great deal of consent in them.
“Semi-management organizations.” Hmm. That some people will call “regimes,” sort of mini-United Nations, but with actual teeth to them. Hmm.
Oh, I think there is a word for that. Technocracy! Yes, of course, Technocracy. And in fact, if you watch this full report, you will see that in many different instances it aligns very well with what is being promoted and pushed today by the World Economic Forum—which, as I have repeatedly stressed, is not the be-all-on-end-all. It is just the latest packaging of a very old agenda that is being pushed and has been pushed, demonstrably so, for at least half-a-century, going back to The Club of Rome and its 1972 report on The Limits to Growth.
They were talking about all of these same concepts fifty years ago, whether that be “stakeholder capitalism” . . . although they didn’t refer to it as such. They’re explicitly referring to the concept behind that in this interview and how everything will be . . . “Don’t worry, there will be broad consent to these mini-regimes that will be placed over the stewarding of various resources. So, you can trust in these wonderful technocrats. You will trust in these wonderful technocrats to decide for you and your family, right?”
And guess how this report ends!
ABC NARRATOR: To the Club of Rome, the status symbols of the year 2000 will be the inverse of today’s. Prestige will stem from low consumption. That personal consumption will have to be less is plain enough. But for that privation to be seen as prestigious would seem to indicate some radical rethinking, at least for the fat cats of the planet.
[Corbett face palms.] Yeah, so let me get this straight. The ABC is trying to convince the public that the fat cats behind The Club of Rome—the Alexander Kings and Aurelio Pecceis—are the good fat cats who are trying to convince those evil fat cats to go along with the idea that privation is going to be prestigious.
Make feudalism great again, guys. It’ll be so great when you’re scrabbling to eke out a meager subsistence living from the dirt like your great-great-great-great-grandparents did. Won’t it be great when we can institute that again? And you will, of course, be ruled over by the very fat cats of The Club of Rome and their ilk. But let’s not delve too deeply into that side of the equation, right, ABC?
So, that was the type of propaganda that the public was being subjected to as this was first being rolled out in the 1970s. Plus ça change.
And, of course, this was when all of this “reduction to zero” and “zero carbon”—which is becoming absolute zero—and other types of ideas were being rolled out.
The culmination of this very Malthusian ideology is starting to reach its crescendo now, fifty years later. It was just a twinkle in their eye way back when. They had to sell it to the public pretty hard. As you can imagine, The Club of Rome and The Limits to Growth did not enter into the public discourse without a bit of pushback. There were a lot of people saying, “What’s going on here? What is this really about? Is this really science? Should we trust the science?”
And, well, if you really want to get into that back and forth, there has now been fifty years of it to familiarize yourself with.
I will just introduce you to some of the main treatises that have been written on this over the decades.
You can start by going back not just to The Limits to Growth book, but also to “Dynamics of Growth in a Finite World,” which was the 600-plus-page technical report of the World3 model that, as you know, was the basis for The Limits to Growth report.
But they didn’t finish the actual technical report of that model until after they published the summary of the report. Hey, it kind of reminds me of the summary for policymakers with the IPCC.
You can read the actual technical report itself. And you can read Models of Doom: A Critique of The Limits to Growth, published in the UK as Thinking about the future: a critique of The Limits to Growth. It was a 1973 critique of the World3 model, actually released slightly before the final technical report had been released. Some details had already been released. But that was released by an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Sussex University’s Science Policy Research Unit. Take that, MIT. Well, we have credentialed people who can argue against your credentialed people. So I guess it just cancels each other out—matter and antimatter, right?
Of course, the MIT team did respond to that critique with “A response to Sussex,” which you can then read.
You could read the Global 2000 Report to the President —in that case, President Carter—that was issued in 1980. It was not directly related to The Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth but was definitely in that same ilk, warning that by the year 2000, the environment will have lost important life-supporting capabilities. So, pack it in, guys. It was done twenty years ago. There’s nothing we could do now, right?
You could, of course, also read “The Resourceful Earth : A Response to Global 2000,” by Herman Kahn and Julian Simon—more on whom later.
You could then read “Revisiting The Limits to Growth: Could The Club of Rome Have Been Correct, After All?” which was a 2000 essay by peak-oiler Matthew R. Simmons. So you might imagine the thrust of his argument.
And then you can read the third update to the World3 model original Limits to Growth report, “Limits to Growth, The 30-Year Update (Synopsis),” which was presented at a 2004 symposium on the 30th anniversary of . . . the report? Well, the report came out in 1973. So I guess it was the 30th anniversary of the World3 technical report? Anyway, some 30th anniversary in 2004 they had the 30-year update, which was the latest of the updates of that model, saying, “We were right. We were right all along, guys.” Hell in a handbasket.
You could then read a 2008 article, “A comparison of The Limits to Growth with 30 years of reality,” published in the Journal of Global Environmental Change. You’ll never guess what they conclude.
You could read a very interesting article from the American Scientist, from the May/June 2012 edition, “Computation and the Human Predicament: The Limits to Growth and the limits to computer modeling.” Definitely worth your time. I think it’s an interesting read. And it does go into some of the technical details about the World3 model.
“Remember MIT’s ‘Club of Rome’ Report (1972–2018)” by Robert Bradley Jr., which was published at masterresource.org in 2018.
Even just a couple of months ago, back in June, the Financial Post ran “Clubs of Doom and the Limits to Models,” talking again about The Club of Rome and The Limits to Growth.
And it goes on and on and on and on, on, on, on, and on, and on. Entire books, as I’m pointing out here, entire books have been written about The Limits to Growth and critiques of it and defenses of it. A small publishing industry has been created around the various critiques and responses to The Limits to Growth.
I have only just scratched the surface. I did a lot of reading in preparation for this presentation, and I have only just scratched the surface of the literally thousands upon thousands upon thousands of pages that have been written about this.
In an attempt to give an idea of the scale of this debate and what sorts of things were being talked about, I’ll just read a couple of examples. One, again, from that “Computation and the Human Predicament” article from the American Scientist in 2012, which is worth reading in its entirety. As I say, it gets into some of the technical details., but it does say:
As for the mathematical model behind the book, I believe it is more a polemical tool than a scientific instrument. Forrester and the Limits group have frequently said that the graphs drawn by their computer programs should not be taken as predictions of the future, but only as indicating “dynamic tendencies” or “behavior modes.” But despite these disclaimers, Limits is full of blunt statements about the future: “If the present growth trends continue unchanged, . . . the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime in the next one hundred years.” And whether the models are supposed to be predictive or not, they are offered as an explicit guide to public policy. For example, in testimony before a congressional committee in the 1970s Forrester [who was one of the lead people behind this model] recommended curtailing investment in industrialization and food production as a way of slowing population growth.
Read that again. It needs to be read to be believed. In the 1970s Forrester recommended to a congressional committee to curtail not just investment in industrialization, which is crazy enough, but investment “in food production as a way of slowing population growth.”
If you’re not thinking Malthus right now, you are not thinking right.
But just to underline that point, we could turn to another example from the very voluminous literature of critique of The Limits to Growth.
The introductory essay to that aforementioned volume, Thinking about the future: a critique of The Limits to Growth, from that University of Sussex team was called “Malthus With a Computer,” and it was penned by Christopher Freeman. He wrote in some detail about the idea that is an old adage now in the world of computer modeling: “Garbage in, garbage out.” I’m sure you’ve heard it before. If you put garbage into this model, you’re going to get garbage out. It doesn’t matter how intricately and beautifully constructed the model is.
There’s plenty to say about the choices they make about the various model parameters. But again, it’s what data do you put in? What do you get out? Well, how about if you put Malthus in? You’re going to get Malthus out. In that essay, Freeman notes:
The assumptions and judgements made by the computer modellers depend no less than those of other social scientists on their mental models, on their information, their bias, their experience, their capacity and their values. Consequently, although it would be quite wrong to talk of “garbage” in the MIT model, there is a real point in the description: “Malthus in, Malthus out.” In fact, as we shall see, the MIT model is not strictly Malthusian. Many assumptions are made which have little to do with that country parson. But the expression: “Malthus in, Malthus out” does bring out the essential point that what is on the computer printout depends on the assumptions which are made about real-world relationships, and these assumptions in turn are heavily influenced by those contemporary social theories and values to which the computer modellers are exposed.
Therefore, the critique of a computer model is not just a question of looking at the structure or conducting mathematical tests. Far more important is the examination of the underlying assumptions. That is the reason for this chapter’s title. It is also the reason for devoting the second part of this critique to a discussion of the ideological background to the distinctive MIT approach to world forecasting. This may reasonably and precisely be described as a neo-Malthusian approach.
The MIT work is the most numerate, influential and clearly formulated statement of this position. Because of the prestige of the computer and of MIT, it is also frequently cited in other doomsday literature as an authoritative source for views which otherwise might be rather difficult to justify. Thus, for example, the Ecologist “Blueprint for Survival” cites Forrester’s work as justification for the view that economic growth in Britain must cease and the population decline to 30 million.
That 30 million—put in perspective of today’s numbers, would be over half of the population of Britain—would have to disappear somehow to satisfy these neo-Malthusians. “Oh, it’s the data, the science! The model tells us that tens of millions of people in Britain, let alone however many billions around the world, will somehow or other have to disappear for Mother Earth and Mother Nature to be protected. Look, our model says it. You can’t argue with the model, can you?”
Well, you certainly can’t even begin to argue with the model until you actually have studied the model and gone into it and learnt about the different assumptions that are embedded in there and looked at the complex mathematics that they’re using and what those relationships mean.
That’s why I suggest, for example, that the American Scientist article is one inroad into that. As I say, he gets into some of the technical details that are certainly over my head as a non-computer modeler. But he points out some of the assumptions that have to be made.
For example, when you’re talking about these four factors all computed together to come up with some score for, say, health of the future environment in any given country, well, are those four variables additive or multiplicative?
Because if they’re additive and one of those factors goes down to zero—like pollution or whatever it is—then that’s simply going to be essentially a non-variable. It’s going to disappear from the equation and you figure out the rest.
If it’s multiplicative and one of those variables go to zero, then the whole thing goes to zero, right? And that’s one of those things where, as he points out in that essay, it’s not like there’s a right or wrong way of doing this per se. It’s just choices and assumptions. And you have to do it one way or another. And which one is going to be more or less wrong? Is this an accurate description of the world? How do you make those decisions? And that’s just one decision in a chain of decisions that add up to this entire model of the future of the world for the next 150 years.
Yeah, there are some serious problems with the idea that this is scientific in any meaningful sense. But, lo and behold, we don’t have to worry about it anymore because now we have, quote, “startling,” quote, “new,” quote, “scientific research” that, quote, “totally confirms” all of Limits to Growth’s fearmongering.
DAVID DOEL: A 1972 study out of MIT predicted that society will collapse within the 21st century. And a new analysis of that study shows us that we are right on schedule.
Now, this new analysis looked at data across ten key variables to arrive at this conclusion, including population, fertility rates, mortality rates, industrial output, food production, services, nonrenewable resources, persistent pollution, human welfare, and ecological footprint.
It’s important to note here that this does not mean that humanity itself will all die. What this does mean is that essentially capitalism will collapse. So more on this from the study. “Study author Gaya Herrington told Motherboard that in the MIT World3 models, “collapse does not mean that humanity will cease to exist,” but rather that “economic and industrial growth will stop, and then decline, which will hurt food production and standards of living. . . . In terms of timing, the BAU2 scenario shows a steep decline to set in around 2040.”
SOURCE: Societal Collapse ‘On Schedule’ According To 1972 MIT Study
Alright. So there you have it. I guess there’s some new study that confirms The Limits to Growth report and says we’re right on track for its worst case scenario predictions of industrial society collapsing or civilization collapsing in 2040. Wow.
And you can go and look at all the headlines that that generated and the commentary and people regurgitating this from the VICE article that seems to be the fount of it all, because this study was released back in December, but it wasn’t it all pointed out by anybody, noticed by anybody whatsoever until the VICE article in July [2021]. And then suddenly, all the media is reporting it and just taking that headline, “Civilization Collapse by 2040. The Club of Rome was right.”
And unfortunately, I know if you’re like most people, you’re going to read those headlines. You might take a look at sort of the synopsis of, oh, this scientist—question mark?—look at all these different variables and crunch the numbers and found that it’s exactly right and we’re right on track and kind of use that as your basis for understanding what this is about and what this might mean for the future.
But no. No. Do not take this at face value. Do not simply take the characterizations of the vice.com article writer about what this study is, what it says, what it finds, because . . . I have read it.
And I can tell you that even without specialist training or even without actually downloading the World3 model yourself and tinkering with it yourself—which, if there are any people in the audience who are capable and inclined to do so, I very much would appreciate hearing about that experience—I think you will see, as we will soon see, there are some serious problems with taking any of this at face value, as if this is telling us anything about the actual real world and what is really happening.
So, let’s roll up our sleeves, shall we? Let’s take a look at “Update to limits to growth: Comparing the World3model with empirical data” by Gaya Herrington.
There’s some preamble about The Limits to Growth and what it is and blah, blah, blah.
And it goes on to talk about how, in the original study, there were several different scenarios they used as their model runs, essentially. They assumed this and did a model run, and they assumed that and did a model run. And, depending on what they assume and how things are going to evolve over time, their guesses, well, it might be like this, it might be like that.
So, for example, it says that one of the main scenarios they used was the “business as usual” scenario: BAU. “BAU showed a halt in the hitherto continuous increase in welfare indicators around the present day [i.e., around 2020], and a sharp decline starting around 2030.
So, that was the business-as-usual scenario that was baked into the cake in the original Limits to Growth study back in 1972.
Then they talked about how there were eleven other scenarios in the first book, including “comprehensive technology” (CT) and “stabilized world” (SW).
CT assumes a range of technological solutions, including reductions in pollution generation, increases in agricultural land yields, and resource efficiency improvements that are significantly above historic averages (Meadows et al., 1972, p. 147). The SW [stabilized world] scenario assumes that in addition to the technological solutions, global societal priorities changed from a certain year onwards (Meadows et al., 1972). A change in values and policies translates into, amongst other things, low desired family size, perfect birth control availability, and a deliberate choice to limit industrial output and prioritize health and education services. SW [stabilized world] was the only scenario in which declines were avoided.
So, the only way that The Limits to Growth, the original study, foresaw that we could possibly prevent this complete collapse that’s coming, whether that comes in the 2030s or in 2040 or sometime thereafter, it’s coming unless we stabilize the world with “low desired family size,” “perfect birth control availability,” “deliberate choice to limit industrial output,” “prioritize health and education services.”
Again, it’s baked into the cake—exactly the types of ideology they’re trying to promote. Lo and behold, what they find is the only way to avoid this crisis.
Alright. Here’s where it starts to get interesting. In section 1.5 here, they talk about . . . Limits to Growth author [Jørgen] Randers.
[Randers] “did admit that non-renewable resources [this was in 2000], particularly fossil fuels, had turned out to be more plentiful than assumed in the 1972 BAU [business as usual] scenario. He [Randers] therefore postulated that not resource scarcity, but pollution, especially from greenhouse gases, would cause the halt in growth. This aligns with the second scenario in the LtG books. This scenario has the same assumptions as the BAU, except that it assumes double the amount of non-renewable resources. I refer to this scenario as BAU2” [business as usual 2].
Okay, don’t gloss over that. That is extremely important. It’s incredible what is blithely admitted here. You might need to reread that for it to sink in.
Long story short: yes, one of the original authors [Randers] revisited the [1972] information in 2000 to see, “Is it holding up?” He discovered, you know what? After 30 years, it turns out that what we assumed was the total natural resources of the earth that we’re using these various proxy data for . . . turned out to be a little bit short.
How short? Well, let’s double it. And then we’re almost there.
So, somehow in 30 years, instead of this horrible resource depletion, which was the original scare, “limits to growth”—the limit was the natural resources that we’re running out of; that was the fundamental part of the argument back in the 1970s—they discovered that, actually, over those 30 years, we didn’t just lose resources, we actually doubled them. We have double the amount that we thought we had in 1972.
Which might make one stop to wonder: How does that happen? How does that happen? How do we double the amount of resources? Oops, we were wrong. We have wayyy more resources than we thought we did.
So, just right there, that is alarming in and of itself. But then, again, she [Herrington] blindly admits that he [Randers] therefore postulated that not resource scarcity, but pollution, especially from greenhouse gases, would cause the halt in growth.
So, the basis of their argument was that there are limits to growth, because we’re running out of resources, when actually we have wayyy more resources than we thought.
Okay, it’s not about resources. It’s about pollution! Greenhouse gases! Carbon dioxide! That’s what it’s about, guys! That will cause us to halt growth in the future. That’s the limit to our growth now.
Okay, whatever.
Anyway, let’s run it again. And this time, we’ll do the same business-as-usual scenario, but we’ll start with double the amount of resources. And that’ll take care of it, right? Right?
A huge, huge part of the puzzle right there, which shows you, again, this is not, this is not the be-all and end-all, the science—you know, this is it. This is telling us exactly what’s going to happen and giving us the timeline and exactly how it’s going to work.
It really isn’t. If you look, for example, at the graphs of these different scenarios, business as usual, which, you’ll note, starts with resources here. And, of course, they start to dwindle in the 2000s. And by the time of 2030—in that range—it’s definitely getting low. It hits a nadir in 2050 and inches back up a little in 2100.
But then, well, oh, oops, we were totally wrong about where our resources started. So let’s double them and we’ll show essentially the same type of decline. It’s just that actually at this point in the 2020s, we’re far, far above the entire total resources that we estimated in 1972. We’re wayyy above that point still. But don’t worry, trust us this time, it’s still going to go down on that downward slope.
We’re not going to explain how we were so completely, terribly, unbelievably, by a factor of 100%, off on our initial estimate of the resources.
And we won’t reexamine it now that it’s been another twenty years, right? We’ll just start with double the amount of resources and assume essentially the same type of trend. Well, we know. Again, anyways, we know that it’s going down like this. So whatever. Good enough.
Pollution was just like this back in the original business as usual. Now it’s a huge, big, oh my God, hockey stick pollution, which is going to cause industrial output to start to decline.
Anyway, so you see, you can see . . . oh, let’s just add a new scenario run and we’ll call it BAU2. And it’ll basically play out similarly to the original one, at least in terms of where we start to see declines and what kind of declines. But it’s different because we had to double resources.
So again, as I say, that just gives you a sense of what’s going on here, the types of games that are being played.
But it gets worse and worse and worse and worse.
It goes on to talk about the way that this study actually determined the accuracy of the original limits to growth [LtG] scenarios. She [Herrington] said:
To quantify how closely the LtG scenarios compare with observed data, I used the same two measures as in Turner (2008):
1) the combination of
a. the value difference (between the model output and empirical data), and
b. the difference (between the model output and empirical data) in rate of change (ROC)
—both applied at the time point of the most recent empirical data,
2) the normalized root mean square difference (NRMSD).
These two measures do not provide the level of precision of some statistical tests. They are, when combined with visual inspection—[visual inspection of these types of graphs that get produced by the model. Keep that in mind. Again, what is it telling us about the real world? It’s telling us about the model itself]—and given World3’s global scope and aggregation, appropriate measures for the scenario’s accuracy. Precision does not always correspond to accuracy. The precision of linear regression and other econometric methods are based on assumptions of constancy like linearity, homoscedasticity, or normality, which cannot be assumed outside controlled experiments or other unusually stable environments (Branderhorst, 2018; Sterman, 1994). As such, they are inadequate for analyzing the dynamics of a system like our society (Forrester, 1971; Meadows, 2012). The accuracy measures are useful to determine World3’s merit, not for point predictions, but as an analysis tool for general global dynamics.
So again, admitting it’s not like we’re getting actual data here about “Oh, it’s going to be at this level at this time.” It’s just “We see a general trend. We see some sort of slope, and the slope starts to increase here, or it starts to go up there. And that’s what we can tell.”
But notice it’s a motte-and-bailey argument. Because, when pressed, they will retreat to this: “Oh, well, actually, all we really know is general global dynamic trends.” But of course, how does it then get presented to the public? Like “Civilizational collapse by 2040! We’re on track, guys.”
Again, wayyy overstating it.
And it gets into some of the actual statistics that they’re using here and how they’re calculating them. The uncertainty ranges blow my mind.
It was necessary to establish suitable uncertainty ranges for each of these measures [the NRMSD, etc.], given World3’s low precision and the error margins one can expect in the empirical data . . .
. . . i.e., we’re taking these proxies for the sum total of natural resources for the industrialized world and we’ll use this figure that we’re getting, you know, of copper and this amount of lead and we have this amount of whatever. So, anyway, take it for what it’s worth, which is not much. But then she says:
I chose uncertainty ranges of 20%, 50%, and 20% for the value difference, ROC [rate of change] and NRMSD, respectively. This recognizes that global data is unlikely to have higher than 10% accuracy due to measurement difficulties, and many variables are combinations of factors.
Yeah. Look at those error bars you’re getting. The uncertainty ranges: 20%, 50%, 20%. As long as it’s within 50%, then it’s probably accurate.
It’s unbelievable. Anyway, that’s then what she goes on to use. Talking about the data sources that she was using—again, garbage in, garbage out.
Some variables required proxies because the variable in World3 is not directly observable or quantifiable in the real world.
So, she’s admitting there are variables that go into this model that you can’t measure. The airy-fairy-ness factor. Well, let’s make that seven units of airy-fairy-ness. I’m only slightly joking.
She does go on to list all of the different factors that were used. The population statistics and where they come from. Fertility, mortality, food per capita, etc. You can get a sense of how reliable or unreliable some of this data is.
For pollution, she says:
World3 assumes pollution to be globally distributed, persistent, and damaging to human health and agricultural production. I used CO2 concentrations and plastic production as proxies.
So we are calculating this globally distributed, persistent, and damaging to human health and agricultural production pollution, all of which are just assumed. We’re proxying that with CO2 concentrations and plastic production. There you go. That’s pollution, right?
This is the level of data that’s being plugged into these models that are telling us the year that civilization is going to collapse.
Then, when you press them on that, “Well, we didn’t actually say the year. We’re just saying around this point, a true general dynamic trend,” blah, blah, blah.
Yeah, sure. That’s the way it’ll be reported, right?
Again, go through it, please. Honestly, I’m saying: Go through this and read through it. Look at the accuracy measure table, where the green is within the actual acceptable uncertainty ranges that she was listing there.
The red figures are outside of those uncertainty ranges, by which she is assuming, “Well, the green ones, they’re within uncertainty, so they’re likely accurate.”
There’s quite a lot of red on here. I don’t know if you noticed that. A lot of red. A lot of things that are 140% off, etc. Pretty incredible. Lays it out as a line graph or a chart here.
Then we get to the “Count per scenario of closest agreement with empirical data.” This is telling us how many different variables seem to line up in the various scenario runs. It’s interesting to me that BAU2—business-as-usual 2, remember, the one where they had just to say, “Well, actually, OK, let’s double the amount of natural resources we’re starting with because we got it so wrong for BAU”—comes in as the second-closest alignment with data in this completely jerry-rigged, completely nonsensical model as I’m going at length to show here.
Actually, the closest fit with the most counts of closest alignment with data is CT. Remember the “controlled technology” scenario, where technological developments actually produce much more than we ever could have imagined under even the most amazing circumstances in terms of our access to resources and our ability to conserve them, etc.
So actually, really, the closest fit is the one where technology comes along and gives significant help.
But she concentrates on BAU2, business as usual, and that’s the one that gets cited in all of the reports about this: business as usual, business as usual.
Of course, it sounds like: “Oh, we’re still on this business as usual. We haven’t taken the actions necessary to stave off this global civilizational collapse that we know from this super-accurate model we were running with this total garbage data, with these huge error bars, is telling us 2040. It’s been business as usual. So, we’re going to have to take super-drastic action, guys.”
Anyway, that’s how she comes to the conclusion that BAU2 is the one we should be looking at. She says:
Unlike previous comparisons, this research did not reveal the BAU scenario aligning with empirical data more closely than the others.
She points out that “CT and BAE aligned closest most often,” although she doesn’t point out it was actually CT that’s empirically the largest, even within this jury-rigged game that we’re playing.
BAU2 and CT scenarios show a halt in growth within a decade or so from now.
There, QED: Quod erat demonstrandum. Who needs to hear any more, right?
4.3. Collapse?
My findings are inconclusive as to whether subsequent declines can be expected to be so steep as to constitute collapse. The CT and BAU2 scenarios show distinctly different decline patterns, and one cannot simply “take the midway” between two scenarios produced by a complex, non-linear model like World3.
Yeah, exactly right. Tell that to the IPCC, huh?
The moderate declines in CT would align with a global forecast made in 2012 by LtG author Randers. Randers’ forecast was made with a different model than World3 [a completely different one], so it cannot be compared in most ways.
Then she says that, actually, these four different scenarios were the main ones she was concentrating on here.
Well, to some extent, for all scenarios, they all fit the data as we have it, because, as she writes, “in several cases the scenarios don’t significantly diverge until 2020.”
So what does it mean to say that we’re on track for this particular scenario where this particular thing will play out when you blithely admit in the conclusion [in so many words], “Well, actually, they all look the same until 2020, so we really don’t know. It’s a crapshoot.”
I mean, there’s so much. I’m just scratching the surface here. Really, truly, go read this study for yourself. Pick it apart. I’m interested to see what nuggets everyone out there can find in it.
But that’s on just a surface reading, just at first glance. This is not the slam dunk: “Oh, my God, they’ve confirmed Club of Rome Limits to Growth that it is being portrayed as in the scientifically illiterate media that hopes you are too stupid to actually go and read the study for yourself. And this is exactly why it sat there buried on the KPMG website for several months before it was dug up by VICE as: “Oh, here, look, let’s reveal this to the world, this shocking, incredible new study,” which, of course, then gets framed in the most hyperbolic way in order to generate the most headlines.
And that’s unfortunately how this entire game works, has always worked, will always continue to work.
On that note of greenhouse gases—remember where Randers did his 2000 study and decided:
“Oh, yeah, we were way off about natural resources. Actually, we have them coming out the yin-yang, way more than we thought. Let’s double them.
“But what was all that about resources being our limits to growth? Forget all that. Forget the last thirty years of our fearmongering. Here’s the next thirty. It’s greenhouse gases.
“Pollution is going to be the reason that industrial society will collapse. You can’t tell it in the data yet, but over the next decade or two, right?”
What is that? So what is that fearmongering based on? It’s not just pollution in general. It’s not just greenhouse gases. Of course, it comes back down to carbon dioxide, right?
Where do we generate that information from? That that’s going to be this tipping point that changes everything. Oh, that’s right. More computer models.
I have definitely talked about climate models before on The Corbett Report and done deep dives into specific models and how they function and talked to Judith Curry and others about computer modeling and how that’s used and misused in the climate community.
But, speaking of the devil, just within the past 24 hours of me recording this particular edition of Questions For Corbett, we have yet more confirmation.
You don’t even have to try to find this. It’s coming out the yin-yang: “New Confirmation that Climate Models Overstate Atmospheric Warming.” It notes that:
Two new peer-reviewed papers from independent teams confirm that climate models overstate atmospheric warming, and the problem has gotten worse over time, not better [i.e., they are more and more overstating the amount of warming]. The papers are Mitchell et al. (2020) “The vertical profile of recent tropical temperature trends: Persistent model biases in the context of internal variability” Environmental Research Letters, and McKittrick and Christie (2020) “Pervasive warming bias in CMIP6 tropospheric layers” Earth and Space Science.
I’ll just put that in as a little nugget that I think is quite apropos to what we’re discussing here, isn’t it, with regard to these models and how they are misused—to mislead us into predetermined conclusions.
How do I get off saying that? I mean, this was a super above-board scientist who probably has spent decades researching this particular field and has all sorts of particular credentials in this particular field in order to talk about it, right? Right. Right?
Well, the study is by Gaya Herrington. So who is Gaya Herrington? Well, as was noted elliptically in that vice.com article, she works for KPMG, which is one of the Big Four accounting firms. What’s her role and what does she do? Oh, OK. Well, Herrington apparently, according to the KPMG website, “performed the research [this study] as an extension of her Master’s thesis at Harvard University in her capacity as an advisor to The Club of Rome.”
Yes, the person who’s confirming The Club of Rome’s fearmongering is an advisor to The Club of Rome. Wow, color me shocked. Absolutely amazing. No conflict of interest here. I’m sure if she found that there were serious problems in this garbage model, she would have reported it—above board, right?
If you really want to dig in, The Guardian recently profiled this Gaya Herrington in a report that was equally as fawning over this Club of Rome fearmongering as ABC was back when this Club of Rome fearmongering was getting kicked off a few decades ago—five decades ago.
They’re talking to her and she says: “From a research perspective, I felt a data check of a decades-old model against empirical observations would be an interesting exercise,” said Herrington, a sustainability analyst at the accounting giant KPMG that recently described greenhouse gas emissions as a “shared existential challenge.”
So, in addition to her role as advisor to The Club of Rome, she’s also working for an accounting firm that is opining on the deadly dangers of greenhouse gas— derived, at least in part, from overstated climate models.
“The MIT scientists said we needed to act now to achieve a smooth transition and avoid costs,” Herrington told the Guardian this week.
It’s always, it always just boils down to that. Business-as-usual, but we need to act now. What on earth does that mean? Oh, don’t worry about the details. We’ll work that out for you, peon.
“That didn’t happen, . . .”
You guys didn’t act hard enough. You’re still flying around and trying to live your life. Ugh, disgusting.
“. . . so we’re seeing the impact of climate change.”
Oh, that’s right. The weather gods are angry that you peons are scrambling around doing too much on this planet.
Since its publication, The Limits to Growth has sold upwards of 30m copies. It was published just four years after Paul Ehrlich’s [1983] The Population Bomb that forewarned of an imminent population collapse. With MIT offering analysis and the other full of doom-laden predictions, both helped to fuel the era’s environmental movements, from Greenpeace to Earth First!.
Herrington, 39, says she undertook the update (available on the KPMG website and credited to its publisher, the Yale Journal of Industrial Ecology) independently “out of pure curiosity about data accuracy.”
Yes, that’s right. This advisor to The Club of Rome who works for KPMG, just on a hunch, just for kicks and giggles, decided to just check this out, just because she wanted to check the accuracy of the data.
Her findings were bleak: current data aligns well with the 1970s analysis that showed economic growth could end at the end of the current decade [as in, at the end of the 2020s, in time for 2030: where have I heard that number before?] and collapse comes about 10 years later (in worst case scenarios).
About ten years later: 2040. So there you go. We’ve got the timeline. Ten years now, we’re going to start seeing the declines over this decade, and then the collapse begins and comes about in the following ten years.
So we’ve got a twenty-year timeline here, guys, and it’s the super-serial science. She’s crunched the numbers, so you don’t have to. Just read The Guardian and other propaganda outlets.
Record scratch.
Oh, where have I heard these types of timelines before? Paul Ehrlich: “Earth will be doomed by 1980,” he said in 1970, with specific examples of things that absolutely 100% did not happen, but that doesn’t matter to people who are going to promote a specific agenda. They will continue to hail him as one of the greatest scientists of our time.
Or how about the 2009 prediction by that super-awesome scientist Prince Charles? “Just 96 months to save world, says Prince Charles.” Let me do the math on that one. And oh, I guess the world ended a few years ago, or at least our chances of saving it ended a few years ago. So once again, kick back, everybody. It’s done. Stick a fork in it. It’s done. There’s nothing you can do. Oh, well.
How about the world warning from the UN? “World has three years left to stop dangerous climate change, warn experts” in June of 2017.
Wait, that would mean . . . June 2020? That was, like, a year ago. Again, “Oh, well, we can’t stop dangerous climate change. It’s already done.”
Look, prediction after prediction. I could go on. In fact, I have. In a video about that UN warning, I compiled the times I’ve laid out all the predictions that have stunningly failed to come true. All these deadlines: “It’s going to happen in three years, guys.” “It’s going to happen in 96 months.” Very precise. Is it down to the month, the decimal point? How many decimal points accurate is that assessment, Prince Charles?
Anyway, as you can see, this is the type of twenty-year timeline we’re on now. Now you can really start the clock, guys.
The timing of Herrington’s paper, as world economies grapple with the impact of the pandemic, is highly prescient as governments largely look to return economies to business-as-usual growth, despite loud warnings that continuing [ew, icky] economic growth is incompatible with sustainability.
Sorry, poor people of the world, you’re going to have to stay poor. And anyone who has any modicum of wealth is going to have to get poor to save Mother Earth.
Earlier this year, in a paper titled Beyond Growth [so keep in mind, this totally independent analyst at an accounting firm who’s totally some sustainability expert, apparently, is writing about Beyond Growth, which is about the limits to growth, of course, riffing on that], the analyst wrote plainly: “Amidst global slowdown and risks of depressed future growth potential from climate change, social unrest, and geopolitical instability, to name a few, responsible leaders face the possibility that growth will be limited in the future. And only a fool keeps chasing an impossibility.”
Alright, I’ll leave it there. Of course, I’ll link up the full interview. You can go read it.
I don’t know what else to say at this point other than Malthus in, Malthus out. And make no mistake, this is Malthus. The reheated, 200-year-old decaying corpse of Malthus that is being spoon-fed to the public who continue to lap it up because they have been spoon-fed it their whole lives and cannot conceive that Malthus was wrong.
So, let’s go back to The Limits to Growth to actually demonstrate this.
If we go to the first conclusion in the executive summary of The Limits to Growth, it says:
1. If the present growth trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime within the next hundred years. [But it’s totally not a prediction, guys. We’re just looking at general trends: “. . . will be reached within the next hundred years.”] The most probable result will be a rather sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
“. . . a sudden and uncontrollable decline”—i.e., back to the Stone Ages, make the Stone Ages great again. That is what is the long-term plan, as well as the forecast by this super-scientific model.
And make no mistake, population is listed first in their little diatribe: . . . world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, yada yada.
Population is listed first because to the eugenicists of The Club of Rome and their ilk, that represents the root of the problem. Exactly as JDR III—John D. Rockefeller III—described it back in, you’ll remember, “Why Big Oil Conquered the World,” on his little trip to the Indian subcontinent, taking a look at the crowds of teeming humanity and saying “Well, that’s the problem, isn’t it?”
Do you remember that moment? Because that’s exactly the problem from the elitist’s point of view. So we can read, for example, from “The New Threshold” by The Club of Rome Executive Committee that was published in 1973, where they lay it out.
They’re discussing “the problematique,” which is the way they framed the idea that we’re not just looking at a problem. We’re looking at this interwoven, connected matrix web of problems that all feed into each other and create this massive problem. It’s the problematique. They identify:
5. The World Population Problems
Rapid increase in world population, especially in regions already ill-favoured, appears to us to be at the center of gravity of the problematique and we feel that the establishment of wise policies for the stabilisation of population levels and the technical and educational measures which must accompany them are of top priority. We particularly welcome the activities of the United Nations in this field, which will culminate in a World Population Conference in 1974.
Yes, we’ve gone on record time and time and time and time again to talk about that, well, we’re going to have to reduce the world population. World population will have to go down. “If we do a good job with vaccines and other interventions, we can get that number down. We can reduce the world population.” “Britain should be 30 million people.” Over and over and over again, on the record statements. Ted Turner: “Well, we should have maybe 10% of the number of people that we have on Earth right now.” What are you going to do with that other 90%? Don’t worry your heads about that, little plebs. Just go about your lives. We’ll take care of that. We’re your technocratic overlords in the United Nations. We will steward over it nicely.
Does all of this sound familiar? Because it should. It should. If you have been paying attention for the last, oh, say, 220 years.
Specifically, we can go back to Thomas Malthus. I’ve invoked his name several times, as if you already know who Thomas Malthus is, and hopefully you do, certainly if you’ve looked at my work on “the population problem” over the years. But if not, we can delve right into the horse’s mouth from an essay on “An Essay on the Principle of Population” from 1798, in which Malthus wrote:
[Yada yada yada.] Assuming then my postulata as granted, I say, that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.
Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio. A slight acquaintance with numbers will shew the immensity of the first power in comparison of the second.
This natural inequality of the two powers of population and of production in the earth, and that great law of our nature which must constantly keep their effects equal, form the great difficulty that to me appears insurmountable in the way to the perfectibility of society.
All other arguments are of slight and subordinate consideration in comparison of this. I see no way by which man can escape from the weight of this law which pervades all animated nature. No fancied equality, no agrarian regulations in their utmost extent, could remove the pressure of it even for a single century.
And it appears, therefore, to be decisive against the possible existence of a society, all the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure; and feel no anxiety about providing the means of subsistence for themselves and families.
Just one problem. Malthus was wrong 220 years ago, but he’s also stunningly, incredibly wrong after 220 years of that ironclad law of nature. No way around it, folks. You can’t improve society and certainly can’t have masses of people living in relative wealth for any sustained period of time because it’s baked into the cake.
Food increases arithmetically, population geometrically, exponentially. What can you do? Except, of course, for the fact that that’s wrong. It’s been wrong every single generation since Malthus originally wrote it. It is wrong today. In fact, it is increasingly stunningly wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
If you don’t know about that, I would suggest that you take a look into my archives for the voluminous, extensive, documented, detailed, scientific reports that I have done on this in the past.
“Meet Paul Ehrlich, Pseudoscience Charlatan” [2018]
“The Last Word on Overpopulation” [2011]
“This Is What a Demographic Crunch Looks Like” [2019]
“The Underpopulation Crisis” [2010]
But in case you need more data points along that trail, here are more that have arisen since the last time I spoke about this.
We have this report, for example, that just arose in the past couple of months [May 22, 2021, in The New York Times]: “Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications“:
More people in more countries may soon be searching for their own metaphors. Birth projections often shift based on how governments and families respond, but according to projections by an international team of scientists published last year in The Lancet, 183 countries and territories — out of 195 — will have fertility rate below replacement level by 2100.
Their model shows an especially sharp decline for China, with its population expected to fall from 1.41 billion now to about 730 million in 2100. [That’s 50%.] If that happens, the population pyramid would essentially flip. Instead of a base of young workers supporting a narrower band of retirees, China would have as many 85-year-olds as 18-year-olds.
And as we saw recently [April 20, 2012], if you feel that the biggest threat to humanity is the growing human population:
FEMALE INTERVIEWER: What do you see as the biggest challenges in conservation?
PRINCE PHILIP: The growing human population.
SOURCE: “Prince Philip on what should be done about “overpopulation”
Then don’t worry, because weirdly enough, there’s another prediction that lines up with that 2040s time frame that’s making the news right now, as you’ll recall from my recent “Episode 406 — Trust the Science!” It’s Shanna Swan: ‘Most couples may have to use assisted reproduction by 2045’.
That’s right, the chemical stew that we are bathing in on a daily basis now is so drastically reducing the mobility, the motility, the availability of sperm production in humans, generally speaking, but especially in Western males, that by 2045, most couples are going to need assistance to reproduce. You’re not going to do it naturally. You’re going to need technological means. Most couples.
Think about that and what that means for this population crisis. It’s almost as if the people who have been stewarding over the mega unbelievable riches and resources of the oil barons, let alone everyone else; who set up the foundations back in the early 20th century; who have been railing for over a century now about the problem of population and been talking about ways—chemical and otherwise—to reduce this problem, it’s almost like they may have hit on something.
Oh, but that’s conspiracy theory.
So, yes, long story short, very soon we are going to have the exact opposite of the overpopulation crisis that you have been taught to believe. Your entire life you have been bathed in this propaganda, telling you, warning you, “Oh, too many people, too many people, too many people.”
We are heading into the exact opposite. For almost every country on the planet, you will not even have fertility at replacement levels by 2100. You’re going to see significant declines in population, in country after country.
Half of the Chinese population. In Japan, the outlook is even bleaker. We’ve already started contracting in terms of our population here.
So, yeah, there are problems with the overpopulation narrative. It’s time to familiarize yourself with the demographic crunch and the underpopulation crisis.
But here’s the thing about this particular topic. It is so emotionally charged. It is so dependent on false beliefs that have been hammered into you by irrational propaganda for so long that no amount of rational argumentation, no amount of data, no amount of showing that even the UN is saying, “Look, no, look, their population, their global population level levels out in 2050 and starts declining.”
No amount of showing people this information is going to change the fundamental mindset that’s been drilled into them—that “there’s an overpopulation problem. Oh, population. Oh, oh, we’re all going to die because there’s too many of us.”
So, after fifty years of nonstop propaganda about “the growing human population” [Prince Philip repeats what he said in the above video clip], people literally can’t even comprehend the fact that we are heading towards drastic and potentially irreversible population decline, because, as I say, no amount of data and rational argumentation is going to change people’s emotional connection with this issue.
So, let me try a different approach. As you’ll note, the entire first thirty years of fearmongering about The Limits to Growth from the inception of that report onwards was the limit to growth was natural resources, and we were running out of resources. That’s, I think, still one of the things that people think of in regard to the population problem. There’s too many of us, and, look, we only have a certain amount of resources, and they’re dwindling all the time. We’re running out. We’re running out of everything.
Asterisk: *“Oh, yeah. when we actually looked in the year 2000, it turns out we were way, way, way short. So, let’s double the amount of natural resources for our future test runs of the model, right, guys?”
But let’s sweep that to the side. This is, I think, the level at which people intuitively believe the population propaganda. Regardless of the exact numbers, there are billions more of us now than there were decades ago. So, we must be running out of resources, right? And we must, I mean, it’s just a law, an ironclad law of the universe. It makes such intuitive sense. As the human population expands, we have fewer and fewer resources, don’t we? Surely we’re running out of stuff, right?
Wrong.
PROF. JULIAN L. SIMON: The newspaper stories you customarily read would tell you that we should be worrying about running out of natural resources, copper or wheat, what have you.
But the history of the past two hundred years—in fact, the whole history of humanity—has shown us the extraordinary event, contrary to all common sense, that the more that we use of natural resources, the more we have of them.
That is, rather than natural resources becoming more scarce as we use them, they have been becoming more available. When I say “more available,” I mean that when we look at natural resources with the measure that we as economists use and the measure that’s important to us as consumers—that is, how much do we have to pay to get these resources?—we see that the price of natural resources has been going down rather than up throughout all of human history.
Let’s take an example. If you want a ton of copper delivered on your front lawn, it would only cost you about one-twentieth as much of the most valuable thing you have, which is your human time, to earn enough to buy a ton of copper as it did two hundred years ago.
And it will only take you about one two-thousandth as much of your time now to earn enough to buy a ton of copper as it would have four thousand years ago.
And it’s the same story with every single natural resource. It’s the same with iron. It’s the same with aluminum. It’s the same—you name it, it’s the same story: All of the natural resources, and that includes all the foods—wheat and corn and rice, all of them—have been becoming more available rather than more scarce, contrary to all common sense, to all standard Malthusian thinking.
INTERVIEWER: So, what you’re saying is that more seems to be better. More people and more use of natural resources somehow does the reverse of what our common sense tells us.
SIMON: That’s exactly right. The more we use, the more we have. Perhaps we should take a minute to explain the process by which this occurs.
When we use more of something, when we have more people, when our income goes up so that we can buy more, there is, for a while, a shortage—either a real shortage or an expected shortage. We use more and the price goes up. But the process doesn’t end here, and that’s what’s fundamental.
In response to these shortages, some people look at the situation and say, “Aha, here’s opportunity. The price is going up. If I can find some way to get my hands on some, I can sell some and make some money on it.”
So, people begin to look around at this shortage and say, “How can I find some more copper?” or “How can I use the old copper mines to get the copper out more cheaply?” or “How can I refine it more cheaply?” Or, even more important in the history of people, “How can we find something to replace the copper with?”
So, people look. Some succeed and some fail. And the people who succeed, sooner or later, in finding ways to supply our need for this copper in response to the higher price, find ways to do it. And the exciting part of it is that at the end point of this process, after people find new ways to supply our need for copper, we are left better off than if the problem had never arisen in the first place. That’s what’s extraordinary—that we’re left better off than if the problem had never arisen. And what this means is that we need our problems.
In some fundamental way, we need bigger and better problems. That’s not to say we should run out and create any problems, because we managed to create problems pretty well. But we do need our problems.
If problems didn’t arise, if population hadn’t grown so that people ran short of food, if we still had ten million people on earth—as we had perhaps 10,000 years ago—and people were still living an average of thirty years or less at birth, we wouldn’t have had this fancy lunch that you and I had today. Instead, we’d be out chasing rabbits and digging roots. Not worried about a shortage of rabbits or roots, but that’s the kind of lunch we would have had.
That, as I hope you know, was Julian L. Simon, the economist who was the other half of the bet of the century against Paul Ehrlich, population control doomsayer, that you will remember—hopefully from Interview 1107 on The Corbett Report website—where I talked about “The Bet of the Century: Simon vs. Ehrlich” and what was at stake and what that meant and what it showed.
It was an incredibly important story that, for some reason, has been oddly unreported or underreported among the doomsayer crowd. And when it is reported, it is invariably poo-pooed, dismissed, explained away as “just some freak occurrence.” It was anything of the sort, anything but.
So, I hope you will check into Interview 1107 if you’re unfamiliar with that or with Julian Simon generally. But yes, long story short. Here is the thing. When you boil it down, our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense.
Let me repeat that. Our supplies of natural resources are not finite in any economic sense. I know that is difficult to understand. I get it. It is absolutely counterintuitive. It doesn’t make any sense. How can it possibly be that the more we use of something, the more we end up having of it? What’s going on? How could that be? That’s not right. Well, actually, unfortunately, as with so many other things, this in particular is a concept that no little soundbite or little trite two-minute treatment that I can give it in an overview like this will do justice to.
But we can try.
So let’s turn to Julian Simon’s hefty [1981] tome, The Ultimate Resource, which was updated in the 1990s [1996] as The Ultimate Resource 2.
But let’s go to the original, The Ultimate Resource, to this section from Chapter Two, where he talks about the difference between technological forecasts based on technological estimates of natural resource supply versus economic scarcity and what that actually means. So, in the section, “The Nature of Technological Forecasts: Explaining the Paradox,” Simon writes:
The historical fact [which he outlines in previous sections and previous chapters] that natural resource costs have fallen, as measured by all reasonable concepts of cost, flies directly in the face of the notion that diminishing returns must raise costs and increase scarcity. This paradox cries out for explanation. But the explanation is quite counter-intuitive. It contradicts “common sense,” — at least until one has thought the matter through, after which this way of thinking constitutes obvious common sense.
The approach of the technological writers is as follows. They estimate quantities and qualities of resources in the earth, assess the present methods of extraction, and predict what methods of extraction will be used in the future. With those estimates they then calculate the amounts of resources that will be available in future years, at various costs of extraction (in the better forecast) or just at the present cost (in the less-thoughtful forecast).
At the root of the technological view of natural resources is the assumption that a certain quantity of a given mineral exists in the earth, and that one can, at least in principle, answer the question: How much (say) copper is there? But the question of how much of a resource is “really” in the earth is like the question: Is there a sound in the forest when a tree falls but no one is nearby to hear it? The question as stated opens a Pandora’s box of semantic confusion (as do many sentence statements that contain the word “is”).
Let us examine the matter. What do we mean by a “sound”? A physical disturbance? If so, we can put a sound meter in the forest. But what about a “resource”? We have no comparable instrument to measure the quantity of iron or oil in the earth. And even if we did, we probably would not be able to agree on just what ought to be measured — for example, on whether the copper salts dissolved in the sea should be included in the measurement of copper.
Alright, it goes on and on from there. If I start reading this, I’m going to read the entire book to you, and I’m afraid we do not have time for that today.
So, I will pose this as a challenge that I sincerely hope that people who are genuinely interested in this will take up. Just read the first chapter of The Ultimate Resource on resource scarcity.
And if it doesn’t at least pique your interest, doesn’t at least present a thoughtful and different way of looking at the problem of what resources are and how we measure them and how we can forecast them—if it doesn’t, then sure, abandon it, go back to “common sense” thinking: “I know what’s what.”
But if that does at least begin to intrigue you, I really recommend you continue reading on. Because there are a lot of very thoughtful things to be said on this subject. And it’s been encapsulated many different ways by many different writers.
Let’s go back to a 1985 article from John K. Williams—that’s posted currently on FEE.org—who was writing about these concepts, including the concept of the Pandora’s box that Simons was referencing there.
Again, this is a different way of looking at it or a different way of framing it. In this article, Pandora and Hope, the author writes:
Now, if a resource involves a hidden reference to human desires and human technology, attempts to measure a resource face problems. Consider oil. Available reserves of oil were minimal until an American dug the first oil well in 1859. Inasmuch as it is technologically possible to transform tar sand and shale rock to oil, should the actually or possibly obtainable reserves of tar sand and shale rock be included in an attempt to calculate actually or possibly obtainable reserves of oil? Soybeans similarly can be turned into oil. Do they count?
Millennia ago the Iberians declared that the Rio Tinto mines in Spain were exhausted. They could extract no more copper, silver or gold from them. The superior technological skills of the Romans witnessed the reopening of these mines and a great deal of successful mining. When their technological skills had gone as far as they could, the mines yet again were perceived as exhausted. The process was repeated again and again. The discoveries of the “leaching” process, the “roasting” process, and the “flotation” process at different times transformed the exhausted Rio Tinto mines into anything but exhausted mines. Since in this obvious sense attempts to specify “available resources” must refer to available technologies, should not technologies transforming one substance into another similarly be referred to?
More subtly, a resource becomes “less scarce” when a new way to perform a given task is discovered. Vast quantities of copper were once required if the inhabitants of one country were to speak to inhabitants of another country, thousands of miles of cable being needed if such were to be done. Space satellites now serve for this purpose. Economically speaking, copper today is less scarce than it was two decades ago.
Simply, in any humanly significant sense, resources are no more limited than is what Julian L. Simon calls humanity’s “ultimate resource”—the human imagination. Perhaps one should add that resources are similarly no more limited than is people’s liberty to exercise their imaginations.
Alright. Again, I hope you’re at least starting to get the glimmer of the idea here—which, oh, by the way, doesn’t that perfectly line up with what we just saw in the Herrington study, where she was talking about Randall, who, looking at the data back in 2000, realized, “Oh, actually, we have way more resources than we counted in 1972. If we count them in the year 2000, we have, well, I don’t know, let’s double it. Let’s say there’s double the amount of resources.”
How did that happen? Why did that happen? Oh, maybe there’s an explanation for that. And maybe that process could be applied again today in 2021, and maybe we’d have to revise those 2,000 estimates for the business-as-usual two (BAU2) scenario that Herrington takes at face value. And maybe there’s a reason it was so off. And maybe we should look into that.
And maybe that’s the reason that the CT, the control technology scenario, actually lined up better than the business-as-usual scenario, as we saw, again, from Herrington’s own data, that some technological changes will come along to vastly increase available resources beyond even our most wildest estimates. Maybe that’s why that’s lining up.
No, that’s silly. What we have is a fixed baked pie. All we have is that pie, and every new mouth is just one more mouth that has to feed from that pie. But the pie is growing. And the pie is bigger today than it was twenty years ago, let alone thirty years ago, let alone fifty years ago, let alone one hundred years ago, let alone one thousand.
Oh, don’t think about that. Don’t think about that. No, it’s a fixed pie.
So, there is an incredibly important point being made here. I will just once again lay it out for you. Please take the challenge to read that first chapter of The Ultimate Resource and continue reading. Read the rest of it. Read Ultimate Resource 2 to really get an understanding of what’s being said here.
But I certainly don’t want to just limit this to “Oh, it’s only Julian Simon. He’s the only person who ever made this argument. He’s the only person who ever . . . .”
No, he was a great articulator of this idea. He was a popularizer. People know it largely because of Julian Simon. But he’s not the only one arguing it. And for anyone who wants to play that game where, “Oh, I’ll go and I’ll look up his biography. He studied at the University of Chicago. Oh, I knew it. He’s just a cigar-chomping capitalist swine who’s just trying to stick up for his big business buddies so they can continue to rape the earth, right?” Or “he’s a right-winger,” or whatever you want to say to try to dismiss the ideas he is laying out there in voluminous, documented, demonstrable detail—that in every single generation in all of recorded human history, the amount of available natural resources has expanded, not contracted.
Explain that, Malthus!
But anyway, for anyone who wants to dismiss, because of those ad hominem attacks, the source of the information rather than look at the information itself, fine then. I’ll provide you something from the other side of this argument. Someone who’s very much not aligned with the cigar-chomping capitalists.
In this case, Richard Werner, who people might know from Princes of the Yen. He was the economist who came up with the idea for quantitative easing, and he says they misapplied it. But I just want to show that it doesn’t matter what end of whatever spectrum you want to apply you go to. There are people who are saying the same thing.
TAYLOR HUDAK OF THE LAST AMERICAN VAGABOND: Now, stakeholder capitalism also sounds a lot like looking out for society as well as the environment. And there has been an emphasis on sustainability and climate change. How does this tie into the Great Reset?
RICHARD WERNER: Well, that’s actually an important question. . . . [W]e have to distinguish between what’s a narrative—what stories are being told—and the facts. What we have been told recently—the narrative—seems to be economic growth is bad, therefore we should have less growth.
They coined this term “degrowth.” [They say] we need to get rid of growth, which of course will happen as banks get killed when central bank digital currency gets rolled out and the banking system disappears: There will be no more economic growth. So then they’ll say, “Oh, that’s good for the environment.”
That’s the narrative. But what’s the reality? What are the facts on this? Well, the fact is, economic growth is not necessarily bad for the environment. There’s no evidence for that whatsoever. What is bad for the environment is policies and activities that hurt the environment, such as pollution. I think we all agree if you have pollution of the environment—of rivers and so on—that’s bad for the environment.
Well, you can have this pollution whether you’ve got zero growth or 10 percent growth, right? So clearly it’s not the growth that’s the problem. It is the pollution activity that’s the problem.
So, you see how very cleverly they’re spinning this. They’re distracting your attention away from what really hurts the environment: “Well, let’s not talk about that! Oh, it’s economic growth that’s the problem. Well, we’re going to have zero growth then. Everything will be fine.”
That’s absolutely not true! Where does this come from? What are the facts about economic growth and the environment? The facts are—this is perhaps slightly surprising or shocking—there is no economic growth. Growth doesn’t exist.
If you ask a physicist, it becomes very clear: We’ve got the laws of thermodynamics. Energy is a closed system. You can only transform it. But you can’t make it or make it disappear.
We have entropy, so there’s no there’s no growth. Growth doesn’t exist. But hang on: Economists talk about growth. So what is the economic growth? Economic growth is a statistical illusion. It’s a statistical illusion that was created by taking certain statistics and putting them together to create GDP, which is an artificial concept.
We don’t have time to go into this—why it was created this way, which is an interesting story. But it was created in a certain way by picking and choosing certain activities and putting it together.
And then that’s GDP, that’s economic growth. You know, when GDP is higher this year than last year, that’s our growth. So it’s entirely a statistically artificially created concept. And in reality, there’s no economic growth.
That proves also that growth can’t hurt the environment, because there is no growth in terms of physics and energy.
Now the good news, therefore, is we can have very high economic growth—10 percent, double-digit growth—like China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea have done for decades. We can have that and be good on the environment: You know, have growth that is very green environmentally, very sustainable, and that doesn’t hurt the environment. We can have that. It is possible. And so it’s a false narrative to say that economic growth is always bad for the environment, therefore we shouldn’t have growth.
But it reveals something about people who say this. What they really want to do is kill growth. And they’re just coming up with an excuse, which they try to pull the wool over people’s eyes so [those people will] believe, “Oh, yes, growth is actually bad. We should have no growth.”
And there seem to be people at work to engineer that scenario where we have no growth. Namely, when you kill small banks, local banks, community banks, and you have a very concentrated banking system that’s only a small number of big banks, or you’ve got rid of the banking system entirely and there’s only the central bank left, you will have no more economic growth.
Well, I hope that that’s not what policymakers are aiming at, because that would not be good. And certainly, we should all try to prevent such a scenario becoming true, because it will create many problems. It’s like the twenty-year, you know, zero growth or depression we had in Japan, which causes a lot of hardship in the economy for people. And we don’t really need that. I mean, there’s no real justification for that.
HUDAK: Is the emphasis on sustainability perhaps a globalist initiative to control the population?
WERNER: Well, population control is another interesting concept. And of course, it has been linked by some to the environmental damage that humans allegedly cause. The narrative that’s being told is that we don’t want economic growth and we don’t want people. But that’s a very unhealthy thought process, I must say. I mean, it’s an anti-human thought process—that the source of all the problems are humans. I think it’s the other way around. And I told you at the beginning: Essentially, with economists, you just have to take the opposite of what they say.
The solution is humans. Humans are the creative ones. They’re the ones who come up with new ideas, new patterns, new inventions. Nobody else does. And so if we want more prosperity, we need more humans.
Of course, we need to train them. The education system is very important. But that’s how we get prosperity. How historically society has always thrived is when we have more people and people are also educated.
There’s no evidence that having more people is bad for the planet. But it is a narrative that’s been scarily out there for decades. There is a United Nations Population Fund, which is a big international organization. And it seems that, despite its name, the actual goal is to reduce the population of the world. One could say that certain policies that have been taken since March 2020 seem to be part of this agenda, and that is quite concerning. So, it is certainly a topic we should look at in the future in great detail.
SOURCE: Richard Werner Interview — Covid Measures and the Central Controls over the Economy [August 15, 2021]
Richard Werner. I suggest you do look into his work and his writings: Princes of the Yen, the documentary, for example. There’s some interesting stuff in there. I certainly don’t agree with him on everything, but I’m just going to prove the point: This is not a left-right thing. Do not try to put it in that context.
Just because you see the effect of the human population on the planet differently than the doomsayers and the fearmongers does not mean you do not care about the earth. Quite the contrary. It means you very, very much care and you’re willing to look at the truth, like a Julian Simon or a Richard Werner or many other people who are trying to combat the demonstrable untruths that are being slung on people in the name of sending us back to the Stone Age, which, unfortunately, a lot of the population has been psyoped into actually desiring.
Look, at the end, this is actually pretty simple. This is not about science—at least not the scientific method of actually coming up with hypotheses and testing them against data, etc.
It’s about “science”—i.e., the science worshippers, the scientistic method of having pre-established conclusions, pre-established ideas of what actions you want the world to take and then fitting your models and your data around it so that everything points in that direction.
“See, it’s because you didn’t act that we have climate change, which is why we now have to do this, that, and the other.”
At least the pandemic has taught us the lesson that governments can act in times of crisis to shut down the world economy. Isn’t it working out all so beautifully for the people who want this agenda to go forward?
And who is that? Look, I’m not saying that all of the scientists in all of the various fields and statisticians and accountants and other people who are presuming to weigh in on this issue are all morons. I don’t think they are blithering idiots.
And I don’t think they’re necessarily being deceitful—at least not consciously so. I think they are starting from incorrect assumptions and likely—although I’m not trying to psychologize—motivated by what they feel to be the noble and genuine cause of saving the earth or saving the planet, whatever, but ending up in the incorrect places because they’re starting from the wrong points. They’re using the wrong methodology. They’re coming to the wrong conclusions.
So, it’s not the mid-level technocratic bureaucrats, the middle managers, the people who are crunching the numbers and are getting thrust in your face as “This new scientist has confirmed this.” “Is she a scientist?” “No.” Well, whatever. It’s not those people who are really at base to blame for this agenda.
The question is, who is funding this agenda? Who has the resources to make sure that these organizations, these groups, are able to fund these research projects that then get promoted in the bought-and-controlled, paid-for media? Who is really doing this? Who has that kind of control? This is not a rhetorical question. It’s one that you already know the answer to.
INTERVIEWER: What do you see as the biggest challenges in conservation?
PRINCE PHILIP: The growing human population. Because of where we are, there’s nothing else.
SOURCE: Prince Philip on what should be done about “overpopulation”
DAVID ROCKEFELLER: The negative impact of population growth on all of our planetary ecosystems is becoming appallingly evident.
SOURCE: David Rockefeller UN 1994-09-14
BILL GATES: Here we can see a chart that looks at the total world population over the last several hundred years. And at first glance, this is a bit scary.
You already know the answer to this, because I’ve shown you many, many, many times. But let’s reiterate it, let’s lay it out for the hard of thinking: The people with the immense, incredible resources and political leverage and power to bring together and support the organizations like The Club of Rome to sponsor the scientists like the MIT researchers that produce the reports that say what they want them to say and then sponsor the media like ABC and Guardian and VICE and all of those controlled outlets that then trumpet those results and poo-poo anybody who says anything otherwise.
“Julian who? I’ve never heard of him. He hasn’t been featured in a VICE magazine article, so he mustn’t be important.”
Those are the people who are running and funding this agenda. And at the end, this isn’t about science. This isn’t about an attempt to save the planet. It’s demonstrably wrong. They even come out and admit it. In the year 2000, they go, “Oh, you know, all that stuff we said about running out of resources. Yeah, it turns out that doesn’t wash. So, it’s about . . . POLLUTION! Yes!
“So now all economic industrial activity is to blame for this coming collapse that we’re prophesying and bringing about with our actions to shut down the global economy, which is part of what is going to lead us into Agenda 2030 toward the collapse of civilization as we’ve known it in 2040.”
That isn’t some sort of prediction that’s just coming from this straightforward data that’s being fed into this model that knows everything. No, this is a game plan that is being worked toward, and they need the narrative in place so that people will accept it as it starts to happen. I am saying: DO NOT ACCEPT THIS. Do not give in to the propaganda. Do not believe them when they say, “Oh, look, it’s in the data. The computer told us it’s going to happen.” As you start to watch it happen, I guess you’ll just sit back and go, “Well, I knew it. Hahaha. Let me get the popcorn.” It should have started earlier, as a lot of the people in the comments section, the peanut gallery, will say about this in the various mainstream media that I’ve cited here.
We do not have a population problem, at least not an overpopulation problem. We do have an underpopulation problem. And the perceived scarcity of resources or the impending collapse of the world or industrial society or however the doomsayers want to frame, it is caused by the people who are telling you that you are to blame and you should feel guilty. “You’re the one. You didn’t act hard enough. So it’s all going to fall apart.”
Here’s the real question. Why? Why would they do that? Why would they do that? What is the agenda? It’s almost like everything they do and promote is anti-human and anti-life. And if that is what is ultimately motivating them, then what is the way we can actually counteract that agenda?
Those are not rhetorical questions. Those are questions with answers. And in the coming days at The Corbett Report, I’m going to have a couple of other reports that I think are right along these lines and will answer those rhetorical questions.
So, I hope you’ll stay tuned for that as we continue our exploration on this very important topic. But as I’m pretty sure you know by now, there’s a lot of info to go through today. I always tell you to go to the Show Notes to start reading some of this for yourself. I will once again implore you to do that, especially for this episode, especially for people who find anything that I’ve said today to be challenging to their beliefs and to people who have that gnawing sense in the back of their mind.
Maybe I have been propagandized my entire life by the very people I know are lying to me time and time and time and time and time again about everything of importance in my entire life. But not this time. They’re not lying about this. No, I believe this. I would wholeheartedly invite people who are having that little bit of cognitive dissonance in their head to go and explore these resources and go through and actually start reading this for yourself and try to puzzle this out and see why things are trending in this direction and what we can actually do to counteract it.
Very important stuff, but we’re going to leave that exploration here for today. So to everyone who’s written in with questions about this topic over the years, I hope this at least goes some way towards answering that. I’m sorry I couldn’t be more concise, but this is one of the most important topics facing the human species, so you’ll forgive me if I want to thoroughly document it and continue documenting it.
As I say, stay tuned to corbettreport.com. In the coming days, I will have more information about this very subject. I hope you’ll be there with me to explore it. I am James Corbett of corbettreport.com.
Thank you, wonderful report! I am looking forward to the forthcoming videos!
This Limit to Growth is a complete BS! I will debunk it in one sentence without the need to study the mathematical model behind their program. You can not predict the technological inventions that will happen in the future, but these future technological inventions will have far more impact on the statistical model than any those resource variables of theirs or the assigned coefficients. So that’s it. That program can’t predict even the current situation in the present second, as one can’t input the correct data representing the current state of the world, just to begin with. So I see no point in trying even to construct any simulation for this kind of problem. However, this whole thing just looks pretty much like the case of a bad student in school, who wants to complete the exam, while he knows nothing. So he glances over to the guy next to him and he notices what the solution is, but he can see only the number that is representing the solution. So, he will start writing the derivation of the problem by some utterly nonsense hocus pocus BS right until he gets that very same solution number.
So whoever is behind this false scientific attempt for Limit to Growth must be some kind of psychopath if he thinks that a scientific model will give him justification for his evil agenda. Well, we see where it is going. It looks very much like Eugenics where they want to reduce the population so they will have the complete Earth for their family and descendants only.
But on second thought I don’t think that they are worried about the actual overpopulation as in the sense of growth. It smells rather like the limit of growth of their money wallet. Surely that will not grow that much if they destroy the economy under false flag events. Nor will it grow at such a high speed, if they steal everything from the people and then suddenly they realize they have to give something back to the world. They definitely must have some sort of massive money-sucking diabolical machine which devours every piece of resource out from the world like a leech that can’t stop. So, as the current economic system was proven to be a failure, the solution is not in killing of the population for preserving their money pot, but the solution should come in the form of addressing the real root of the issue, which is most probably the underlying greed. Until that is not addressed, no other system can be sustained on a long enough timeframe before its becomes corrupted.
There are many solutions, one example for the resource problem could be mining the meteors. Those are rich in resources. I have already suggested this 21 years ago… However, Pentagon rather spent trillions and trillions on Afganistan doing nothing and stealing again.
On final note I would like to recommend you a video which is quite interesting:
https://youtu.be/o8YomEOExkc
“We’re in a Collision Course for Disaster and Tragedy!”
Emblematic propaganda piece you linked at the bottom of your comment, Joseph.
It’s Ehrlich’s Population Bomb revamped for Millenials. Unsurprisingly he
and his bogus bomb come back to haunt us several times during this strident pamphlet.
In addition to reinforcing all the usual unsubstantiated claims surrounding both overpopulation and so-called man-made climate change the agenda behind the characteristic guilt-tripping and fear-mongering that ooze and drip from this doc is evident from the title:
Endgame 2050: Meat Your Future.
The shrill and peremptory messages of “stop eating meat” and “stop having children OR ELSE” are repeated ad nauseum in the politically correct guise of smilingly earnest passive-aggressive messaging, emotionally reinforced by horrifying images of agonizing and murdered animals with smooth insinuations advocating population control measures. Abandoning the overtly coercive;
“Good population policies and programs respect what people want and they are about giving women and men what they want and not telling people what to do…”
culminating with the punchline announcement by Ms Ochea, the messenger of good population practices, having chosen to have her tubes tied. (which for some reason reminds me of Angelina Joli having had her breasts removed to avoid getting cancer…)
The following quote by IPCC lead author Stephan Schneider came rushing to mind as I sat through the emphatic moralizing and doomsday scenarios presented by our charming narratrice:
“to capture the public’s imagination… of course, entails getting loads of media coverage.
So we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements…
Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective, and being honest.”
Yes, the phenomenal quantities of plastic being dumped into the environment should be addressed, as should the abject cruelty of industrial animal farming.
But manufacturing myths about methane bubbles as time bombs for catastrophic climate feedback loops (debunked by Tony Heller among others) or wildly wielding the misleading but duly terrifying term “Ocean acidification” (debunked by Don Easterbrook and Jim Steele among others), besides being mendacious, manipulative and insulting, ultimately plays so perfectly into the hands of the very Elite of Great Resetters described by Mr. Corbett in this most recent podcast, that I have to wonder who exactly Ms Ochoa is and who funded her film. Indeed, it comes across as the full-length version of that “We The People for the UN Global Goals” clip.
As a side remark, the years seen in the title and year of release, namely 2050 and 2020, evoke 2030, that magic year of the post-Agenda 21 Sustainability agenda.
And finally, to finish on another titular note, I suppose I’m not the only one who lifted an eyebrow at the name Gaya Herrington for an ambassador of Rockefeller-style Gaya worship propaganda? Not to mention her Pocohontas-Mayan Princess beauty vaguely reminiscent of Green Deal goddess AOC’s…
“Emblematic propaganda piece you linked at the bottom of your comment, Joseph.”
Thank you very much for pointing this out! Also, I am sorry for recommending it 🙂
I have watched that video before I have found and seen the first video from Corbett Report, namely the How big oil conquered the world which led me to become a subscribed member. Since then I did not watch it again, but as I watched this Limit to Growth report it came to mind immediately, so I took it into my note.
Which, if I think into it is interesting, because those depictions must have worked quite well as propaganda if it made me to save it into one of my video lists…
Anyway, thanks for pointing it out!
Joseph,
I’m glad you are here at Corbett Report.
“ people are oxygen-deprived!! ”
George Wiseman believes people are hydrogen deprived!
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=george+wiseman+why+hydrogen+&t=brave&ia=web
this degrowth nonsense is actually pretty big in Germany as Wachstumskritik (critics of growth) – and all over the place people love to ponder about it. with that I mean, not only mainstream scientists but altmedia-people also think, yeah it is important to think (seriously) about that (No, I don’t want to think any further about another ridiculous ideological nonsense by anointed people)
albeit it is just another große Umkehrung (great reversal)
purpose of economy is create more (more physically or better in quality) useful stuff with less resources or in short growth
now they want degrowth
*critique not critics of growth
Morgenthau plan 3.0 make them want to never reproduce again, germans ending themselfs,
but i sure cant argue i am part of the problem, 49 never married no children, my whole life wasted and im german.
depends what you mean by scarcity
so far we cannot escape two points about scarcity: time and
where there is one body there cannot be any other
Time does not exist. There is only the present moment. What we refer to as time is actually spatial placement of planets relative to each other.
You fail to understand, at surprise of absolutely nobody.
The idea of time is instituted so that people lose present moment awareness. Instead of living in the the only time that counts, that is now the present, they obsess over the past or the future.
The past is easily changed for these people because it exists only as a record that can be adjusted.
They accept and ignore the present because of a false belief in a better future.
Time is a form of mind control for people who don’t understand anything. It’s insiduosly simple and omnipresent.
How do you count years?
I’m going to follow the lead others smarter than I have put forward and leave you with that rhetorical question.
you can’t speak of the present then.
if you really wish to speak of time not existing, then you have to say something like
To Be.
Nothing about a moment.
People fail to (fully aware, consciously) be.
(Being instead of striving.)
present needs past and future
you cannot make a point without a background
same you cannot have a moment or the present without a background of past and future
Mielia, the only moment is now. The present moment awareness means to be present in the now, to be aware that we are living NOW. The way our perception of time is tied to material celestial objects that are moving cyclically creates the impression that we are in a loop (swimming in circles, as stated elsewhere in the comments) and are basically pacified as we believe that nothing changes and that we are stuck in a loop.
I’m not saying people should not be striving nor take notice and lessons from events that have transpired, but much of the past today is brought on through official records presented by people who like to have authority as either experts or gubment representatives. People sacrifice a whole lot of what can be only experienced right now for a false promise of a future benefit.
There is a good reason why week days are named after celestial objects of the Solar system:
Monday (lat. lunae) – Moon
Tuesday (lat. martis) – Mars
Wednesday (lat. mercurii) – Mercury
Thursday (lat. iovis) – Jupiter
Friday (ital. veneris) – Venus
Saturday (lat. saturni) – Saturn
Sunday (lat. solis) – Sun
What about Hours? In latin it is horis, and that’s rather close to Horus. A wikipedia quote:
By no means I’m an expert in astrology nor do I aspire to become one. But there are so many coincidences here that it strikes me none of this is a coincidence. It is not time that makes these objects move and determine their trajectory, but the natural law. They are guided and bound by the eternal rules put forward by the force of creation.
The way we are trained to think about time is inline with many of the gotchas of our system of indoctrination. The outcome based “education” is a perfect example. We know that at a certain point, when the planets have rotated around a specific number of times, we’ll get our “graduation”. And at that point, as instructed, we have come to the end goal of our journey, by virtue of going through a maze like rats. We did not make sure that the travel was worth it as, in the end, only grades count. I can not speak for others, but in my case this last statement was reiterated quite often.
Time is a fabrication of the mind given to us by the same people who built the system into which we were birthed.
my comment regarded the time people have. your time on a day is not infinite, your life neither.
that’s why I said, depends on what you/people mean by scarcity
of course there is plenty of food and starvation pretty much needs to be manufactured by and large
by the way
(father of Boris Johnson, pm UK)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Johnson_(writer)#Works
The Green Revolution
The Population Problem
Pollution Control Policy of the EEC
World Population and the United Nations
etc
ah and personally I disagree with ‘we have underpopulation’ too.
I totally disregard the notion that we can say this or that is the appropriate human population for the entire earth.
It has always be something – related to.
And as there are a million things related to with various population densities on earth there cannot be one number for all this combined imho.
You can only say something useful about something very specific. (E.g. limits of persons in a certain lift.)
But talking about a grand narrative of under/over population to me is hubris.
ah and personally I disagree with ‘we have underpopulation’ too…talking about a grand narrative of under/over population to me is hubris.
Not sure what you mean… ?
Do you mean that there is no dangerously diminished population size that Elites can obtain in their deliberate campaign to forcibly reduce the number of people on Earth? (combined with an engineered drastic decline in fertility)
You mean, world population numbers can reach no “dangerously few” people level? There is no bottom limit that would put the perpetuation of the human species in peril?
Hubris I find to state ANY number as THE number of people the whole earth should have.
This is all dependent on an uncountable number of factors.
Of course that does not mean I’d like all of humanity dying out or sterilisation or slaugther being applied.
“the elites” in “their campaign”
elites in different regions on different levels think and act differently, chemicals brought out, resilience to them, food and water consumed counteracting can be or are all different depending on region,
mind control campaigns are applied and work out differently too
I wouldn’t accept China (or India) made a good decision to attempt to enclose their numbers at 1 billion either
this is all some hyper-rational technical nonsense totally excluding everything about life (meaning, heart, living, connection, decisions) to attempt to say: This is the number of people that should live or be allowed to live.
Ah. You don’t believe in anyone stipulating ideal population numbers.
But it seems to me that the only folks trying to stipulate numbers are the promoters of the Overpopulation fear campaign;
I haven’t heard the people warning about the dangers of under-population, aka a demographic winter, saying ‘we must quick start having lots more babies, we must have many more people on the planet!’
Have you? Even the Julian Simons defending the power of human ingenuity don’t seem to be advocating for accelerating population growth.
The ones I’ve heard warning about a demographic winter are doing so in protest of all the overt and covert means employed by the (various) elites of deliberately reducing the population including massive environmental or demographic propaganda, ubiquitous endocrine disruptors and various other sterilizing chemicals and the oopsy! more or less deliberate side effects of mass vaccination campaigns.
When you say “ah and personally I disagree with ‘we have underpopulation’ too…
it sounds like either you don’t agree that under-population could be a potential problem for the perpetuation of the human species,
or you don’t agree that it’s necessary to speak about it or warn of the dangers.
But, if now I understand you correctly, it seems we would agree that the ideal situation would be that each person be able to decide for him/herself if, when and how many children they want to raise without the (various) elites legally, physically and/or psychologically forcing their (various) agendas on them.
it seems we would agree that the ideal situation would be that each person be able to decide for him/herself if, when and how many children they want to raise without the (various) elites legally, physically and/or psychologically forcing their (various) agendas on them.
yes of course
and by and large I am also fine with the rest of your comment.
I just attempt to refuse to take part in the discussion of ‘there is overpopulation’ with ‘no, there is underpopulation’. I cannot accept some premises in the first statement but answering with the second signals I do.
you could also say, I want to escape the framing (or overtone window, although it is probably not the proper term here)
I’ve noted on here, as an aside before:
You’ve pointed out (in partial jest, I do believe) “Everything I Know About Conspiracies I Learned From The Beatles” I’d have to say (partially in jest), that – Everything I Know About Conspiracies I Learned From “King Of The Hill”…
There are some very pertinent examples for THIS particular presentation including in particular, S01 E02, when character Dale Gribble asserts that the public school’s sex-ed. program for middle-schoolers is “the same ol Club of Rome zero-population bull-dink that the U.N.’s been tryin’ for years.”
Another one that came to mind watching this is KOTH S05 E17 when he yells in favor of an environmental campaign (for purely ulterior reasons) “Earth First!”
Finally, in S13 E02, Dale starts selling “carbon offsets,” (justifying it by saying something like ‘who knows how much carbon one tree off-sets’ & pointing out examples of failed past predictions). His side-scheme threatens to get Hank & the propane company in trouble.. except when Hank tries to confess about the trick in front of a large crowd of ‘environmentalists’ (who think they can pollute & pay and that makes it ok) NOBODY understands it, and NOBODY even cares, THE ENTIRE (pre-existing) tree-hugging crowd just cheers in ignorance!
On a real-life related note, Truthstream Media did some work covered this topic from a different angle in Feb 2020: “A Stunning Admission on the So-Called Population Crisis”
https://odysee.com/@truthstreammedia:4/a-stunning-admission-on-the-so-called:1
It’s just like breastmilk… and love!
The more you give, the more you make, naturally.
(@1:11:00ish)
Great line!
Oops, you completely ignored the energyproblem.
In The Netherlands we first used up wood and peat as fuel…. all of it in the 17th and 18th century
After that we used coal in the 19th century and first half of the 20th century.
In the second half of the 20th century we used oil and natural gas.
And now the oil and gas are all but gone. You can burn it only once.
Now in the 21th century we have no fuel left in the Netherlands. We import nearly all of the fuels we use: coal, wood, oil and gas all come from abroad.
The only energy we produce in the Netherlands comes from solar panels and windmills. Which is not enough to power 8 million cars, trains, planes and heat all our houses in wintertime.
Let me hear your thoughts on our future energy supply.
Do you think oilfields will magically fill up again… in a couple of years?
Do you think the Groningen-gasfield is inexhaustible?
The energy situation was not ignored. The shortage leads to innovation which ultimately finds solutions. The pattern has repeated itself countless times over the years.
I don’t know what the solution will be for The Netherlands but there will be one. Or more likely many.
I don’t know how long before the solution comes, but it will come.
There are all sorts of ways to produce energy. Many of them are impractical as long as there are easier and cheaper ways. But when those easier ways become too difficult or expensive, the impetus will be there to come up with alternatives.
Heat from compost. Tidal generators. Thorium reactors. Heck, even nuclear if you’re not NewZealand. Lots of possibilities and probably plenty more that haven’t been thought of yet.
Obviously you have not considered Julian Simon’s work. I recommend strongly you look at the “science” that was put forth in his book The Ultimate Resource.
According to R. Buckminster Fuller, the more we make technological progress and imitate the built in economic genius of nature, the more we are able to do with less resources. Economic genius and ingenuity is built within the species. Nature keeps on echoing this timeless truth that the more we invent and discover, the more we are able to accomplish with less resources. More with less, more with less.
Limiting the growth of the “ultimate resource” which is people is putting a damper on this relationship. But…the ruling oligarchy does not have your best interest in mind, and has been put forward time and time again they are the ones pushing this propaganda.
Really?
You mean “non-renewable” energy problem.
However, let’s say Cold Fusion was finally implemented, or heck, traditional Fusion. That would “solve the energy problem” because that IS an infinite resource.
And, if we limit more people with the creativity, brains, and talent to come together to solve the energy problem, then it would never be solved if you ‘limit the human population’.
Such lack of imagination and pessimism is “the problem” sir.
@Ethan Hunter
It is also worth considering that we could scale up fusion (cold or hot) and get access to unlimited clean energy, only to use it to destroy what is left of the natural world in the name of “progress” and turn the whole planet into one big Ecumenopolis.
Thus, we face not only a challenge of how to power our technology in a clean way, but also the more underlying and fundamental challenge of educating the human beings that are deciding what to do with that technology to value the sacredness and intrinsic value of wilderness places and intact ecosystems.
LFTR is the way nuclear reactors should have been built from the get go. They would introduce a near infinite source of cheap, reliable and clean electricity, sparking a major shift on geopolitics, a new industrial revolution and a massive increase of living standard for billions of people that would then lead into a massive reduction of slavery. However, the people are simply too ignorant and are not nearly ready for it.
I think you mean stop polluting and destroying natural habitats. I agree with that part of “environmentalism” to not pollute and be respectful of other animals who live in the environment. I think some humans have the belief that they are the only ones who matter and that their convenience is the only thing that matters. Well, there are other living things that share the earth and those other life forms matter too.
Who wants to live in a world without other animals and trees? I don’t. That would be awful.
@cu.h.j
Thanks for speaking up for the trees and wild animals we share this world with and thank you for helping people to differentiate between the impacts of human population increase vs the increase of destructive industries that destroy wilderness places. The two are not intrinsically linked and it is important to understand that.
Have you read a book called “To Speak for the Trees” by Diana Beresford-Kroeger?
Hans,
I follow the energy markets and commodities.
Energy sources and minerals are essentially infinite.
They can always be obtained.
In my opinion, technocratic policy makers often upset the natural rhythm of the economy.
I think Corbett explains it very well in 5 minutes.
Economics in One Image
https://www.corbettreport.com/economics-in-one-image/
When a person looks at the very long term graphs of commodities, many commodities are currently, relatively underpriced next to the value of the dollar (which has much less buying power than it had 20 years ago.)
https://tradingeconomics.com/commodities <– Each commodity has graphs
NOTE: Scroll to the bottom for EU Carbon Permits of which prices are up 65% for 2021 alone. But look at the price in 2017-2018 on the graph. This is the big scam…the big money maker for the elite.
In my opinion, Europe has gone insane with this “sustainable” narrative trying to suddenly switch everything to only wind and solar.
It will be an expensive winter for Europe. Asia also. Japan is nuts trying to suddenly shift.
Unfortunately, it is the common person who becomes victim of the policy makers when they pay the utlity bills.
I follow Natural Gas or Propane or LNG (Liquid Natural Gas).
SUB-THREAD on Power Outages & Prices
https://www.corbettreport.com/cashfriday/#comment-114139
Do you think the Groningen-gasfield is inexhaustible?
Certainly, eventually, other viable energy resources will be explored and implemented, especially as geologists forecast depletion of Groningen.
From Wikipedia
The Groningen gas field is a giant natural gas field located near Slochteren in Groningen province in the northeastern part of the Netherlands. Discovered in 1959, it is the largest natural gas field in Europe and the tenth-largest in the world.
They have been pumping oil out of Oklahoma for many decades now. Since my family hails from Oklahoma, my brother who follows commodities and I were amazed that currently Oklahoma ranks #4 in U.S. oil production. We had the previous impression that Oklahoma oil was essentially pumped dry, and that only gas wells were the mainstay.
It is not a ploy to get the money but what money stands for. Belief in the authority of money makes it the life blood of our reality. So when they drain money, they suck out the immaginary life force.
“Energy sources and minerals are essentially infinite.”
Do you want to say they are infinite? Why then essentially?
Essentially infinite I understand us huge, but limited, so infinite is deceiving.
Its like the allegory of the guy who argued about God’s authority by asking the question:
“Who created God?”.
Does it matter?
Oh for heaven’s sake. Listen to yourself! You don’t believe in a soul. You don’t believe in the afterlife. You certainly don’t believe in God. You crave oblivion and worship carnality. And you are worried about who created the God you deny? Really?
You’re drunk right?
That mankind is limited by a fixed numbered quantity of natural resources is a canard in my opinion.
I have faith in the resourcefulness of mankind when left to be creatively free.
Humans have always found more efficacious means of utilizing the planet and what it has to offer.
Virtually, there is no set quantified limited amount of minerals or food resources on this planet which limit the natural creativeness of man.
“Humans have always found….”
In a comment below I’ve pointed out that’s bad argument. Also, Simon’s approach to the topic represent for me unacceptable level of hubris. With less hubris and more humbleness many of our problems would be gone.
Certainly I don’t think the potential lack of some resources in the future will result in demise of humanity, but more that it might be huge problem, obstacle.
Whole debate is not well framed. Known enormous variation in abundance of various resources is not addressed. Topics that people more or less rightfully associate with the theme like consumerism, extreme wastefulness of our system should have been included, otherwise we have two camps talking beside each other.
“That mankind is limited by a fixed numbered quantity of natural resources….”
Limited… lets make thought experiment.
Do you think 100 trillion people would be possible to feed??
Thanks god we don’t have similar problem.
@HRS
“there is no set quantified limited amount of minerals or food resources on this planet which limit the natural creativeness of man.”
Agreed, and this is especially so when we align our food production systems with (and build them in a way that emualtes) the dynamics of a functioning mature ecosystem.
I have no doubt if we started planting food forests in every town and adapting them to become optimized for the climate and local species.. that the Earth could support 20 billion humans and a diverse array of intact ecosystems filled with myriad non-human beings.
Thanx Dogstar. We don’t have electric trucks and airplanes, because batteries cannot rival the energy-density of liquid fuels like diesel and jetfuel.
The amount of liquid fuel that can be produced limits the amount of goods mankind can ship around the globe. That’s all. The amount of world trade and transport is limited.
Hans say:
“The amount of liquid fuel that can be produced limits the amount of goods mankind can ship around the globe. That’s all. The amount of world trade and transport is limited.”
To me, that doesn’t add up.
In my opinion, world trade and transport is NOT limited (except by decree).
Commerce could be so much more! And exciting! With people actively participating in a myriad of ways.
Petrochemicals are not a limiting factor. Governments and Elite Players are the limiting factor.
Thank you so much for this epic journey! I deeply appreciate your time in creating this mountain of material for us to consider. And love your levity in the midst of a tough topic. Laughed right out loud, delighted, at your analogizing the lust some have for toxic ideas with the lust some have for mind-altering drugs. Hahaha!
“We are left better off if the problem had never arisen in the first place. That’s what’s extraordinary. That we’re left better off than if the problem had never arisen. And what this means is that we need our problems. In some fundamental way we need bigger and better problems.”
I like to see this idea in the context of the problems that psychopathic parasites in positions of power create for free humanity. Like the problems we face today with the pandemic crisis and the other looming problems with “solutions” to the Great Reset they will attack us with. Without these problems, we would not evolve and grow. We need these psychopaths in a sense, to help us develop and grow into a better and more free society.
That thought occurred to me as well but I couldn’t figure out how to formulate it. So thanks.
Perhaps the “shortage” of freedom will lead to an abundance if we can resist the tyranny long enough.
Steve,
I think that is a possibility.
scpat says:
“In some fundamental way we need bigger and better problems.”
You really hit on something with “problems”.
I’ve noticed that we as humans “like” to have problems.
It is observable.
On one day, a person has his attention stuck on a problem, a situation. By the end of the week, that problem has faded away.
But wait…another mind consuming problem emerges.
Big or small, problems tend to come and go in the mind.
Yep. Maybe if we study our own minds/thoughts more we would come to a better understanding of our problems.
RE: “Are There Limits to Growth? – Questions For Corbett”
I am so glad that Corbett walked us through this episode revolving around the postulata of population problematique.
I needed this walk thru.
Reading a book like “The Limits to Growth” is not on my “fun to do” list.
However, I track.
Corbett does an excellent job of laying it all out in an organized fashion.
I grasp the concepts, including an ‘unlimited’ abundance of physical resources.
I very much look forward to the other follow-ups which Corbett will be doing.
In my mind’s eye, there is no doubt that the “Powers That Should Not Be” are full throttle on a Eugenics agenda control of the population.
“Eugenics” – that word is almost politically incorrect to say in mixed social company. It is as if using the word automatically categorizes a person as a “conspiracy theorist”.
During the very early 1970’s, there were two “predictive” media narratives which stuck in my mind.
“The Coming Ice Age”
and
“Japan’s rapid population growth will become a disaster.” I remember talking to my friend Billy about Japan. Where will they live when they run out of room on that island?
Wow that was heavy duty and jam packed full of information. I haven’t missed an offering of yours starting early last year. What I noticed most was instead of the objective persona you normally project (which don’t get me wrong is a good thing), your passion came through in spades on this topic. I sincerely Hope it ignites passion in those who’ve listened to it and you continue to let it sneak out more often. As a fellow Canadian in Saskatchewan Regina actually but from Saskatoon I recommend your work foremost in my networking because networking in my own way is important to me on the bizarreness of what’s unfolding in this totally f’d world. And your objectivity and transparency is fundamentally important now more than ever while the links in your show notes are still reasonably accessible. And you’re a fellow Canadian I love that and trying to capture the Canadian patriotism in those I pass the credibility of your work on to. But please don’t try to suppress your passion going forward. It’s a human thing as are you, me too still?
Wow that was heavy duty and jam packed full of information. I haven’t missed an offering of yours starting early last year. What I noticed most was instead of the objective persona you normally project (which don’t get me wrong is a good thing), your passion came through in spades on this topic. I sincerely Hope it ignites passion in those who’ve listened to it and you continue to let it sneak out more often. As a fellow Canadian in Saskatchewan Regina actually but from Saskatoon I recommend your work foremost in my networking because networking in my own way is important to me on the bizarreness of what’s unfolding in this totally f’d world. And your objectivity and transparency is fundamentally important now more than ever while the links in your show notes are still reasonably accessible. And you’re a fellow Canadian I love that and trying to capture the Canadian patriotism in those I pass the credibility of your work on to. But please don’t try to suppress your passion going forward. It’s a human thing as are you, me too still?
Look, what have I found:
WHAT IS REALLY IN THE C19 VACCINES?
https://www.notonthebeeb.co.uk/post/what-is-really-in-the-c19-vaccines
Interesting site. I had a hard time reading it because it kept reloading every few seconds.
I will be looking forward to when they are willing to tell us who the scientists are who performed the tests.
Rogero,
Thanks for commenting.
Abiotic Oil or Abiogenic petroleum
It’s been discussed. Corbett touched upon it briefly in an early episode.
Here are a couple Threads…
https://www.corbettreport.com/weather-is-not-climate/#comment-34320
and
https://www.corbettreport.com/episode-323-the-saudi-purge-is-a-global-crisis/#comment-45533
Hear, Hear!
In a just world, James Corbett would be celebrated on an honest, mainstream media.
More good news and limits to growth!:
A New Contraception Method Uses Antibodies to Neutralize Sperm
By Mary Moore | Published on August 16, 2021
Reviewed By Gilmore Health | On: August 16, 2021
In some infertile women, some antibodies are directed against the sperm in a way that incapacitates it. Mimicking this condition may lead to a new form of non-hormonal contraception.
The cause of infertility could be reproduced to prevent pregnancy in nonsterile women
Read Also: Declining Sperm Count in Western Men Does Not Necessarily Mean a Decline in Fertility (hmmm, sounds familiar… and (cough) very philosophical)
Researchers in the US have used one form of infertility as the basis for a new, non-hormonal method of contraception. This is because some women have antibodies that detect and neutralize spermatozoa. Their immune system is directed against these foreign cells, making it impossible to have a baby without medical help. In fact, knowing how to reproduce this type of infertility could lead to the development of an alternative to current contraceptives that women use…
…A nonhormonal alternative
So far, these researchers have not studied the effectiveness of this contraceptive in women. However, when injected directly into the sheep’s vagina, these antibodies significantly restricted sperm movement: up to 99.9%. And this with only 33 μg of the product.
Read Also: A New Cause of Male Infertility Found: Spermatozoa Swimming in Circles (considering the behavior of a lot of people in my entourage, I think of these dizzy spermatozoa actually make it to the egg)
Of course, the authors point out that it is first necessary to test its effectiveness and tolerability in women, but this trial on sheep offers great hopes that a product will be developed in the near future.
https://www.gilmorehealth.com/a-new-contraception-method-uses-antibodies-to-neutralize-sperm/
So it is, in fact, being tested on people.
Coming soon! To a junior high school near you!
This was a play of words banking on the reported sheep testing.
Ah! Gotcha! Missed yer wild and woolly “sheeple people” word play! Ovine humour! Man! Ewes bad!
Swimming in Circles had me grinning.
People usually don’t see the cause and effect when they are spaced out too far apart. The glooming demographic crunch is one such hard to notice event that’s just around the corner and is going to result in very unhealthy demographics. Something that is going to take decades, if not centuries, to overturn. And that is assuming people understand what is going on, something they absolutely do not.
For the population to STAGNATE, every woman needs to birth two children minimum, one to replace herself and another to replace one male. The actual number needs to account for some disease and premature death so it is set to something like 2.1, meaning every 10 women will need to birth one extra child.
The current birthrate in US, according to the world bank, was 1.73 in 2018. In Japan it was 1.43. Just try to put these numbers in proper perspective and realize how far off they are from the required stagnation rate of 2.1. Still, the overpopulation myth is hyped up day in day out, the program is running in full swing in unthinking people’s brains.
This thing is going to end like a driver who is driving really fast into a really sharp turn that’s ending in a ravine on the other end.
There is a very good reason to entice people to live in large cities. You guessed it: keeping the overpopulation myth alive and fresh in the mind.
This reminds me of a video I have seen where the author claims forests do not exist. Who would believe such a thing? Someone who has lived for their entire life in a large city is a prime candidate.
Not only is the population concentrated in coastal areas, but evergrowing swaths of land are being sequestered by gubment to compound to this effect.
To understand the real measure of overpopulation, calculate what would be the average distance between two individuals if you would cram all the world’s population into one geographical area like Texas. Texas is a rather large area, but it’s just a small part of inhabitable land on our kind host.
The current birthrate in US, according to the world bank, was 1.73 in 2018.
In Japan it was 1.43.
Just try to put these numbers in proper perspective and realize how far off they are from the required stagnation rate of 2.1.
Regarding oil, there are some who will claim that oil consumption tantamounts to a ritual of sacrifice, where the population at large will expend their mother’s blood while comletely unknowingly, and in a fervently ignorant fashion, taking part in the sacrifical rite.
This is very much similar to the blood rites in which trillions of animals are dispatched every year. You may not believe in blood rituals, but I assure you there people high up in the pyramid who do and they enjoy the unfathomable power bestowed upon them by the unthinking masses who are tacitly giving their consent.
indeed, extraordinary work, James. It’s a shame I discovered the corbettreport.com only in the course of the plandemic in Spring of 2020. Now from my exile in the South Caucasus I try to miss no episode and to catch up on the excellent documentaries
Totalitarian Control – Mass Depopulation
This video has some good clips. I liked it. It is related to the Saturday August 21st protests in Australia.
Summing it all up in 8m – Doctors and Whistle blowers unite! MUST SEE
https://www.bitchute.com/video/JRAjMw61OiKG/
Eugenics Agenda
Dr Sean Brooks at SW Ohio School Board Meeting:
“Getting the Vaccine Will Cause your Death”
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Ra6Q3jXUMOMz/
I really like seeing this.
Slap a hardcore scary narrative right back in their faces.
Give the pro-vaccine people nightmares.
Make them worry.
THE STORY – That’s how we win.
Alternative useful link for the mentioned book of Julian Simon.
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
you may find it also on https://b-ok.org/ but I don’t know if it’s legal.
Excellent presentation of model-science, which in this case reminds on orbs, beans or whatever fortune tellers used in the past. Now they use language of new religion, scientism. I have no remarks on first part, but I have huge objections to the second part.
I don’t get it, why is necessary for debunking of “limits narrative” to take the opposite position, “no limits narrative”,
that is just less wrong (ok, the former one is evil too).
For me it’s inconceivable how one cannot see that this world is big, plentiful, but at the end finite. This is a damn fact. Sure, people found substitutes probably for everything until now. Tar sands might replace oil, but that is extremely dirty. Rio Tinto, many times reopened mines and method of leaching was mentioned…cyanide is used. But if you need cobalt for some product and there is none, you won’t have a product( 🙁 cobalt-coated drill-bits); yeah, vegans then eat B12 supplements.
Today planned obsolescence is a norm, necessary for a beast that needs growth. Absurd. Next one is gone for now with bio-security, cheap airlines. Before many adolescents from western Europe were coming to Zagreb for a weekend partying, paying for a ticket less than a round of drinks. Absurd.
One growth problem that hasn’t been addressed at all, is a necessary growth of bankster-capitalist system. Fractional reserve banking must have growth, otherwise its ponzi-schemeness shows up to quickly. This is unspoken growth problem “elites” have to solve very soon (remember repo crisis), because uncontrolled implosion is possible and that is certainly not their preferred way. Climate madness and CBDC are a solution, ‘rona madness is training. Werner said interesting thing: with CBDC there will be no banks, no interests, no need for growth–>>no growth.
So, banksters problem is solved, while some kind of reformed capitalism (stakeholder, what a bs obfuscation) is still in play. I haven’t heard any proposals what to do with a notion of profit (they don’t talk about it at all), namely, my conjecture is that profit is similar in effect as interests, so growth is needed.
I won’t read J. Simon for sure. In this short expose he committed three major mistakes.
Argument, it is been so and so in the past, therefore it will be the same in the future, shows he is not aware of Problem of Induction. It might be, we can hope, but there is no guarantee, or an extreme example: sun has risen for the millennia, but that doesn’t mean it will rise tomorrow.
On the other hand, Julian is no stranger to philosophy and he wrote: “Is there a sound in the forest when a tree falls but there is no one nearby to hear it!” (1:18:24). Well, from the context how this saying was (ab)used, I can’t value him as a thinker.
Prices are very deceiving measure for scarceness. Prices are so manipulated one has to be very cautious and he isn’t.
Werner: “There is no growth.” (1:28:15)
What???
Look, I know that I’m not as smart as you all but it seems like you’re jumping to the conclusion that Corbett is endorsing a position rather than countering it.
I took from this episode a crap load of good information. It prompted me to think differently about some things.
But I will still compost my waste and leave the earth that I have control over healthier than I found it.
I’m not sure what you are upset about.
Thanks for your comments. I know that I write like a high school dropout. (For good reason) and I appreciate the tolerance I usually receive here.
I completely understand how you feel about the pollution and disregard people have had for the environment. Its inexcusable. But I believe that our planet can heal from it.
What I am most concerned about currently is that there won’t be the freedom to experience our world for the future generations.
I also get defensive when because of my rather extreme environmentalism I am assumed to be a left wing whacko. Or because I am vegan that I harbor animosity towards people who are humane meat eaters.
Its so easy to box people into very limiting descriptions.
I am a free market capitalist as far as I understand it. But I don’t think that we have anything of the sort today. The global economic system is corrupt. Again, I’m not smart enough to tell you how. But I am convinced that the problems the world faces today are unnecessary and are created and perpetuated to enrich entities that are enriched enough already. Add illegitimate authoritarian government and this is the result.
I am optimistic in that I believe that if we can change the way we do things by promoting freedom and personal responsibility that we will eventually change ourselves. We will grow better and more aware generation by generation.
If we live that long.
Steve Smith,
I’m not that smart. It’s just some decades on my back, interest in acquiring knowledge of all sorts and ….philosopher by nature I say to my friends.
I have a feeling James is endorsing Simon, I reject some of his ideas.
Me upset, that’s to strong. It’s very important topic, Limiters ideas must be debunked, I’m not satisfied how this has been done.
LFTR. Probably as close as we can get to near infinite, very clean, very cheap energy without fiture technology.
It is estimated that there is sufficent thorium on this planet for 10.000 years of world wide heawy LFTR use.
The price of said electricity would ve comparable to gas powered electric plants, so relatively inexpensive. With adoption it would probably go very low.
LFTR is a lot easier to implement than LWR as it is inherently safe (the process shuts itself down in case of emergency insted of going ballistic).
Fuel usage is better by a factor of 500.
The really bad byproducts compared to enriched uranium fuels is lesser by a factor of 10.000. The really problematic aspect of LFTR is the Flouride acid.
It’s questionable if we would have enough of it to put in the water supply. But I’m sure we could find poisons just as efficient.
LFTR is not future tech, first LFTR was up an running (I think, but certainly decades ago) in the 60es. Its installation can be so compact that LFTR is considered as a gret solution for mobile applications.
Our current energy paradigm is not such because of technical solutions or lack thereof, but it is limited by a number of societal issues and geopolitical considerations.
In other words, we won’t get access to nearly infinite, very cheap and very clean energy until we abolish slavery once and for all on the entire planet all at once.
With the current poisonous mindset many exhibit, I’m quite certain if LFTR was starting to be wildly adopted and getting ready to bring immense prosperity all over this planet, you would have dozens of death cults popping all over the globe.
DogStar
“……the environmental damage that humans allegedly cause. – Allegedly? – Can we not even agree that humans must shoulder the blame..”
I’m totally with Werner on this point. I don’t feel any responsibility for poisoning of the planet. I’m not behind glyphosates of this world and the same goes for majority of mankind. I’m not deciding how things are done. We have to put a finger to decision makers, blame mf at the top.
This sick idea embraced by huge majority might well come from mf Club of Rome.
“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself”
Not that this blather is just a deadly poison, it’s also patently wrong. One day humanity will be the salvation, but not until it will deal with bad self-esteem that is a result of such a poisonous ideas.
@DogStar
“well, show me the cold fusion!”
I can do that but as I said in a comment above, even if we got that tech out of the hands of Murder Inc (the energy cartels and their hit men) having it scaled up and widely available that would not necessarily prevent humans from using that clean energy tech to decimate all the forests in order to build more cities.
———————–
Cold Fusion and Beyond (with Dr. Eugene Mallove)
https://archive.org/details/youtube-6y98YwJ2GEE
(no I do not advocate depopulation agendas)
Well said. His work is really very valuable. But the big search machines aren’t objective, their algorithms don’t like his work.
As I started to watch the videos of the Corbett Report I noticed some suspicious patterns in the events and started to connect the dots. I am not saying that my suspicions are right, but I think they should deserve an investigation. Please, point out if there are some errors in my assumptions.
I have discovered James’s How big oil conquered the world report and I was shocked by the facts! It was not what I was being told and taught in the school system of Europe. So, what I learned from the video is how Rockefeller conquered and then dominated the US, which was mostly achieved by cheating as he himself said, that competition is sin and must be eliminated. His success story spread quickly and it was copied elsewhere in the world. Rothschild started to do the same “business” practice in Ukraine and some parts of Europe. There were other parties as well, as the Shell from Netherlands and England. As it turns out from the documentary, these big businesses were competing against each other but soon they realized that destroying each other is a difficult task, so they rather stopped fighting and started to merge. As time has passed I reckon most of them just realized that the easiest thing to do is if they all join forces and go against the world as a big cartel. I don’t want to mention the first two world wars, but I start to realize that everything the public was told about those events were mere lies. Then came the first meeting in 1954 where they started to collaborate secretly and created the IMF and World Bank. What was very suspicious is (if I did not misunderstand it), they agreed on dismantling the BIS bank at the earliest possible time. Well, I guess BIS did not like that idea and started to act on his behalf secretly to counteract that.
I guess most of these elites were followers of the principles of Eugenics, which says there are 3 kinds of people. The ubermensch – they regarded themselves as gods and that they must rule over others by birthright, the mensch – the ordinary people who must be exploited, and the untermensch – the lowest living things that must be eliminated. So, I am not surprised if the school system was designed by them in a way, which will hide the facts from the people so they will be kept in a big alternative reality by mass hypnosis. If the teachers were kept in dark as well, it was not that hard task, but as first they had to wait one generation to raise up plenty of children, who were taught in an isolated false reality, who they eventually become the teachers of the following generation, as we can see from this point, their master plan starts to become self-sustainable, as the people who were kept in dark are teaching the future generations who will be kept in dark as well.
[SNIP – Please keep comments to 500 words or less. Longer comments can be split into multiple posts. -JC]
Thank you for the note, I will split my comment into more pieces. So here goes the second part:
They started a massive surveillance system and wanted to pick out as early as possible those, who will recognize that there is something fishy about their system. But, as it was a massive surveillance system they were always one step ahead. They have set the checkboard, the players on it, and they could move every piece of the chessplayers on it by constantly feeding the smaller players certain information, so the pieces on the board will move into positions they want them to be in. I guess, the center of the surveillance system was in the hands of the founders. I guess they can be the: Rockefeller dynasty, Rothschild dynasty, Shell dynasty, Bilderberg group, Club of Rome, Vatican, RIIA, CFR and probably some more. As we know from the Eugenics, they like to make lists. Lists of people whom they deem unfit for life and who can be easily exploited. People can be put on this list I guess, as early as 4th or 5th grade of primary school, when they measure certain properties (physical or mental or so). Once someone is on the list will be under 24/7 surveillance. I highly suspect that there are far too many people all over the world, who were put onto this program.
If we know, that they want to eliminate the competition, so the easiest way is not to allow them to begin in the first place. So, these listed people will be misled and misdirected into such positions, that they will not be able to start to live their own life. All their decisions will be influenced and eventually blocked completely. Everything they discover and invent will be secretly stolen by the central surveillance system and will be sold probably to the highest bidder. Who can be for example Soros.
Let’s not forget the underlying banking cartel behind these controlling rulers, where they put in all the stolen money. This can be what they refer to as the thing which must “grow”. I suspect that members of the secret banking cartel can be found in Israel, in Switzerland, US and definitely under the reach of BIS, though there must be more to it. By following the news lately, Blackrock, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are highly suspicious. All of them must have some devilish plan. I wonder where their ultimate headquarter could be, where they are doing some satanic rituals. Could it be in the US in some deserted areas like Utah, or in Switzerland under the mountains or perhaps in Italy under an Illuminati-funded “tunnel”? Or what if the old particle accelerator in Switzerland was decommissioned because they needed a secret unreachable facility to store their secret documents?
I am sure the very top of their pyramid is hiding in some sort of secret basement who is afraid of being seen because he knows if a living thing sees him then that moment can be relived in memory by going back in time so his identity will be revealed. Anyway, they must have some sort of secret devilish hidden agenda. And the best thing to achieve that agenda is if it is broken down into smaller pieces, what are carried out by a different group of people so the master plan can not be found out / recognized. I suspect all the universities are in a way or other part of the grand scheme, as the most intelligent researchers usually work there. After the different parts of the researches are finished all the work is funneled to the central secret system, where it is assembled.
I guess, this is what could happen to the mRNA vaccines as well. Probably even the Moderna CEO is kept in dark about the real purpose of the vaccines. But I am sure, the western made vaccines are not good for humanity, because if it would be, then they should not need to use persuasion, lies, coercion, pressure, bullying, deplatforming, threatenings, punishments, and all sorts of criminal activities to force it upon the population. They have breached even the Nuremberg code. Everybody, who is advocating for the vaccines should be confronted by the facts and reality of the side effects of the vaccines. If they still advocate for the vaccines, I say, that should be highly suspicious.
The situation is even more dangerous than we think. As I have read, recently Tesla announced he will manufacture human-looking robots. We also know Boston dynamics (and others) are manufacturing robots as well. What if all these good willing people are led onto directions by carrots and sticks by certain hidden players so these organizations will develop the toys without any suspicion. Then, when the inventions are done, they just steal it and use it for their nefarious agenda? I just wonder WHAT IF? What if all my assumptions are correct and the worst is yet to come?
I also wonder why is it no coincidence that the cartel took away the power from the central banks of every state in Europe in 1992 and just later they suddenly announced the Euro, where all the power went to the ECB? Why 1992? There must be more to it…
Please, point out all the false assumptions and I apologize if I misunderstood some facts from the videos I watched.
Joseph,
Like you, I really get a lot out of Corbett’s documentaries and episodes. There are many which I revisit, and glean out parts which I missed on the first go around.
And like you, I keep evolving my understandings.
We are all on an adventurous journey.
I just have found this, a lot to consume:
https://file.wikileaks.org/file/
BUT, if all the documents have been made public, then I wonder if it is real or a false flag leak?
James, climate change may or my not exist but pollution sure does. Stop pumping toxic chemicals on our water, air and earth. If our activities are not responsible for climate change they are responsible for the quality of life on earth, particularly for those in areas where pollution is constant and unregulated. Lives are shortened and health is badly affected seriously. People in those areas are mostly poor so what does that matter? Does it? Let’s talk about pollution, whether it has to do with climate change or not, Who is in favor of pollution in your neighborhood? Not me.
“Let’s talk about pollution, whether it has to do with climate change or not, Who is in favor of pollution in your neighborhood?”
I think if you just type “pollution” into the search bar above you’ll see Mr. Corbett has covered the topic quite extensively, addressing subjects ranging from Monsanto and Bayer to GMOs to Christine Todd Whitman and her pronouncements on air quality at ground zero to endocrine disruptors to glyphosate to the Environmental Movement itself etc etc etc…
Look at the extreme environmental damage done to the rain forests in Ecuador by Texaco Chevron, apparently on purpose,leaving behind more toxic oil waste than the Exxon Valdez? Generations of indigenous people were poisoned and killed by the devastating byproducts of oil production and still are being injured and killed by corporate negligence. Their way of life was destroyed. Texaco Chevron would rather spend millions of dollars fighting the lawsuit than cleaning up their devastating mess. Yes there are plenty of natural resources on this earth for the humans living on earth, but at what cost? Responsible drilling and mining has to be part of the deal.
cjon,
When you read/listen to “Are There Limits to Growth?”, James Corbett shows that the Globalists are defining pollution as solely carbon, that is CO2.
When looking for a scapegoat for the pollution and devastation that has undeniably been wrought in many places and many ways on this planet, blame the consumers.
But if you’re looking for a true culprit, the responsibility lies with government and it’s corporate cronies.
If there is a problem with “growth”. If there is a problem with a “pandemic”. If there is a problem with unendingly war and strife. You don’t have to look very hard to find out who to blame.
Its always those who have the monopoly on violence and those with the money who control them.
Do you blame the lazy dickhead that is programmed to believe that he simply must purchase a gallon of poison, with a convenient attached sprayer, to kill the dandelion that dares take root between the driveway and sidewalk. Or perhaps the blame lies with the giant hardware corporation that still stocks the crap that Monsanto/Bayer has already lost court cases about. With huge settlements.
And maybe blame the local municipality that still buys and uses it on “public” land.
Does it make sense to blame people who were conditioned, programmed and brainwashed to fear when told to, to hate when told to, to buy when told to, for succumbing to their programming? Programming that I feel very fortunate to have escaped.
My point is that you can name the issue or problem and the culprit is always, always going to be government, authoritarianism, power tripping elite rich psychopaths. Petty tyrants and pettier bureaucrats….
But I repeat myself.
We who have awakened are somewhere along a curve of awareness. Many people are so far down the rabbit hole that they spot propaganda before its issued. Some are still being surprised by the revelations daily.
Strangely, some are seemingly awakening while still clinging to the statism straw. They don’t understand that statism is ultimately the cause of all the evil.
The scenes keep changing but the actors never do.
With my dying breath I will repeat it.
The state is the enemy!
The majority of blame is always with those taking the action. Ignorance does not exculpate.
You can beat the dog to death but the trainer is the one who should be blamed for the bite.
The dog is not a concious being and can therefore not be held to the same standard as humans. Granted, most humans are not very concious themselves, but they have all the required equipment at theit disposal. Ignorance does not exonerate.
Well I won’t argue about the consciousness of dogs. Above my understanding.
But how about children. When does a human child achieve consciousness? When do they become responsible? When is ignorance no longer an excuse?
And what of those people who, as you concede “are not very conscious themselves”. Or said differently, are overgrown children.
Are they not deserving of some understanding for having been the victim of a state that dumbed them down and repressed their critical thinking skills and poisoned their minds and bodies their whole lives making them believe that allopathic medicine was their only hope?
I just can’t help being extremely grateful for having escaped that trap to the extent that I have and I can’t help feeling sympathy for those who haven’t experienced that moment of awakening yet.
You ought differentiate between ignorance and nescience.
Children can be considered nescient because of their lacking cognitive abilities as well as lack of knowledge and experience. A part of adults with cognitive impairment can be placed in this group as well. To be nescient means not to know because the knowledge is not present or could not be processed.
To be ignorant is a completely different animal and this is where the majority of population are today. It meas to willfully ignore all the information that is contradictory to what one believes to be true. These people do not test other people’s ideas, they do not even try to mull things over and are simply complying.
Delineating precisely somewhere along the lines of development between a child and an adult is not only impossible (as it differs wildly from one situation to another) but is also immaterial for this discussion. I’ll start worrying about children going around threatening via various means to penetrate people with a range of medical devices when I see it happening.
We need not worry about children doing so because there are plenty of adults doing it, very eagerly. They are either doing it directly or supporting (usually proudly) those who do it. They are all over the place and a vast majority of them can be considered completely ignorant simply because they follow orders without processing them through their own morality compass.
Even if it is a lawful and moral order, one is still acting ammorally if they follow orders others bark at them. And it will be always invariably valid that those who do the deed hold more culpability than those issuing orders or merely influencing the order followers.
Order followers are the ultimate scourge of this planet and the baton that makes slavery a thousands of years honored tradition.
“ To be ignorant is a completely different animal and this is where the majority of population are today. It meas to willfully ignore all the information that is contradictory to what one believes to be true. These people do not test other people’s ideas, they do not even try to mull things over and are simply complying.”
I guess I just see a difference between ignorance and willful ignorance.
If the club of Rome is evil, why would Vandana shiva be a member?
and the inverse: if Vandana Shiva is “good”, then why would she be a member of the Club of Rome?
Recently on these boards I’ve labelled this question “the Shiva Syndrome” (originally I’d proposed “the Shiva Paradox” but I thought “Syndrome” was more in tune with the times and click-baity)
The second week of August 2021, James Corbett mentioned Sharon Lerner who has written about some toxic environmental substances, but also has some pro-vaccine views.
NoSoapRadio pointed out some examples of a cast of well known characters who have “the Shiva Syndrome”.
Here is the mid-part of that discussion.
https://www.corbettreport.com/trustthescience/#comment-115409
“…that’s kinda what gatekeepers and limited hangout agents do:
they tell all on a major emotions-soaked subject that can’t be hidden, since many others are already reporting or already have reported on it; using it to win people’s powerful hero-worship gratitude,
so as to fatally mislead them on other crucial issues… even life or death ones such as the covid jab…
…unfortunately, it seems so many have trouble distinguishing the baby from the bath water.”
“inversely”,
vandana could be keeping an eye on them? so which one is it?
So the Club of Rome was founded by Malthusian industrialists (if that’s not an oxymoron) whose forebearers and obvious ideological leanings support the even more paradoxical notion that competition is a sin.
They have committed to print their project of finding a common enemy behind which humanity could unite and decided it would be humanity itself. And they seem to have the means of enforcing this campaign.
So questions remain.
Why would the Club of Rome accept Vandana Shiva, an ardent enemy of (fellow member?) Bill Gates with whom they seem otherwise fairly cooperative, into their fold?
If they are or were both members as alleged by various websites (though neither appears on the members lists of the official Club of Rome website), what does that say about all their media-hyped antagonism?
And
Is Vandana Shiva keeping an eye on the Club of Rome
or is she keeping an eye on The Greater Reset crowd comprised of all our alternative heroes who together are all Broze, all a Winner in a Cristian Webb of Powers to Foster a Gamble in Wildcraft and where the Stone Sayer Mayweather what the Crowe in the Bush must So/Below the Brooks and Koire…for Liberti…
Is Ms Shiva getting an insider view of the Club of Rome so as to better infuse it with honesty and compassion?
Has she gained a position of influence in the the Greater Reset movement to better infuse it with Malthusian sustainability?
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer?
Perhaps Ms Shiva is right and David Rockefeller wasn’t such a bad guy after all and pulling the strings of so-called governments from behind the scenes is good and necessary.
At any rate, she certainly seems to have a panoramic view of the future from at least two sides of the playing field. Are they opposing sides?
Shiva, god of creative destruction, the great Destroyer, the Great Resetter, the Greater Resetter, the god of “building back better”?.
Think I’ll go back to the “Shiva Paradox” epithet
and go have a swim now…
“perhaps resources are no more limited than peoples liberty to excersize their imaginations”
Being a builder of houses and boats Ive been fairly high up or in and around on the food chain of material consumption. Ive also lived and traveled around in many countries, so feel like I have a bit of perspective on the general impact of people on the environment. The average Human behavior around use of material and energy is in general disgustingly wasteful; I bet just cleaning up that mindset would solve most of the issues around environmental degradation/abuse, and material availability. But its arrogant to not acknowledge that the industrial use of flora and fauna and minerals has no limits, just use your imagination and the extinctions and damage to water which is to aggress all life,,will be limitless.. NO. we live on a spaceship, she’s a garden, and thats the reason any of you reading these words exist at all. we are part and parcel, we are the garden, and its looking like we may witness the great plowing under. True large scale predictions being blamed on Carbon may be a cloak hiding a dagger, or maybe its a sideways way of saying time to get off the clock & dollar. Its a manic messy affair, all of these billions trying to emulate kings and queens or the vassels of,,
I am glad you made this point. Listening to James, and skimming through the comments, it is so damn human-focused. Oh right, no need to worry, there’s always more resources. Really? More snow leopards? More black rhino? More tigers, elephants, whales, wolves …. ? Just a bunch of humans on a depleted, saddened, filthy, oily, foggy, noisy, stinking, choking Earth? That is not how it was meant to be. We are fellow-citizens, fellow-inhabitants of this Pearl of Great Price. The global ‘elites’ don’t give a damn either. Prince Philip wanted fewer humans just so he could shoot more big game more easily. But some of us do care. We do want to live in balance, and respectfully, with all our non-human compatriots.
I’m not sure that was your point, but I feel it needs to be said – so I said it! 🙂
@sgvegan
Thank you for speaking up for the snow leopards, black rhino, tigers, elephants, whales and wolves. I honor and respect your compassion and your choosing to see our fellow non-human beings on this Earth as being worthy of our respect and reverence (especially in a comment thread that is often dominated by quite anthropocentric worldviews).
This discussion reminds me of a question in the climate change debate.
People almost always say something along the lines of “Well, so what if it’s the Rockefellers leading the transition to renewable energies to stop climate change? If it helps us all to be more responsible?”
and my answer to that is
“If averred crooks, liars, polluters and murderers are leading your movement, there’s a good chance it won’t turn out the way you want it to”.
That’s the point in this “limits to growth” discussion.
As long as the people who created the conditions for the offensive growth that’s killing the snow tigers and polluting the water
are the ones managing “the limits to growth”
you can be sure that your dictated efforts in curbing growth will not serve the purposes you hoped for. They will simply be used as still another means of enslaving humanity.
When ingenious humanity is free to address the real problems, real pollution, making a genuine effort to eradicate famine in so-called 3rd world countries instead of pillaging them and engineering the famine, instead of incriminating CO2,
then humanity will have the opportunity to act responsibly.
But if the famine and pollution engineers are managing the clean up efforts
humans will continue to be accomplices to their own demise and that of the other species on the planet.
If humanity ever gets its shot at managing its fate
we might discover that Julian Simon was right and there really are no limits to growth.
RE: Are There Limits to Growth? – Questions For Corbett #077
Judging from the comments, it seems that there are confusions relating to some points made in this QFC. Here are two points of confusion.
“Pollution”
and
the size of the Pie as ordained by “experts”.
@HRS
Agreed.
I also think that people are mistakenly intrinsically connecting population growth to industrial growth, but those two things need not be connected.
High population densities can be supported without decimating forests to create concrete jungles (this has been historically proven) it just requires actually learning to engage with the ecosystems we depend on to breath and eat, and giving back to them through how we grow our food (rather than being lazy and hoping some farmer “out there” somewhere is gonna do the right thing for us).
Cities, in their current modern format, are inherently ecologically devastating and degenerative to our sources of clean water, oxygen, soil and natural beauty, however, we do not have to live in big New York city style, cities, we can redesign them to honor nature rather than pillaging her.
Exponential Growth was also used to fabricate postive PCR cases. I have attempted to show/prove this in my last post on controlsavvy.wordpress.com.
https://controlsavvy.wordpress.com/2021/08/23/19-pcr-and-exponential-growth/
Exponential growth is simply a mathematical algorithm. No need to hate it.
There is a lot to hate in the way it is being used to manipulate our minds and behavior. Exponential growth in mathematics does not transfer cleanly to biological systems.
James does not mention Lyndon LaRouche, who wrote “There Are No Limits to Growth” , but he should read him if he has not. What LaRouche says, in a nutshell, is that scientific progress discovers and creates new resources, and this is the only escape from the Malthusian trap of overpopulation and exhaustion of resources. Man can develop new resources such as atomic power. Fusion power can become a source of unlimited, cheap, non-polluting energy. Oceans can be desalinated, and water can be distributed though large water projects such as NAWAPA. From the LaRouche standpoint, the Western US is underpopulated, and we need to bring water to the whole Western US through such a project. This would replenish all the aquifers and green the whole west, creating vast new agricultural lands and also benefitting wildlife, which are also limited by the amount of water available in desert areas. This development would increase the human as well as animal and plant population of the west, because water is life. All this is perfectly feasible technologically, but requires a leadership not controlled by special interests that really represents the economic interest of the people, and can instill in the people a sense of national mission (as there was under FDR) to build these large projects. https://www.amazon.com/There-Are-No-Limits-Growth/dp/0933488319
This was an outstanding presentation. Thank you JC for all that you do. I noticed when you were scrolling through the YT comments that the recommended videos on the right were a 90% match with videos that I keep getting recommended by YT, some of which I have seen as well. Did anybody else experience this?
Hi Cambodia!
I’ve noticed the same as you on YouTube from time to time.
Lately, they try to sway me towards “tidbit topics.”
Are you currently in Cambodia?
Not yet!
Last I saw, a photo of my wife (ex) and I with the Founders hangs on a wall at a school in Cambodia. Texas State International Academy in Cambodia
https://www.corbettreport.com/venezuelas-new-cryptocurrency-is-a-scam/#comment-48411
Ha!…You can’t make this stuff up…or you can.
Go figure…the “marketing’s positioning”, a concept held in the mind.
DEFINITION:
Positioning refers to the place that a brand occupies in the minds of the customers and how it is distinguished from the products of the competitors and different from the concept of brand awareness.
James, Another stellar presentation! There is so much I could say, but I’ll be brief (sort of).
I greatly appreciate your pointing to our essential need to re-examine all our biases over & over again. I try to do this now, after noticing that I kept running into my own blind spots – how do I know what is true if I don’t look closely and dig? As a scientist, I know this is also an essential aspect of science. It is painful to hear “science” being skewered, often by people who don’t understand even basic scientific principles. I am so grateful for my years spent in graduate school & medical research, because they demonstrated to me the challenges and rewards of being vigilant at every step in the scientific process – including public health work, believe it or not. If we stop questioning, we lose it all. Dare I say, “true” scientists understand that failing to deeply examine their assumptions, the quality of their data, all the METHODS they apply, the analyses they use, and the conclusions they come to leads to what statisticians politely call “spurious” results (i.e., bogus, bogus, bogus – think the scare-tactic corona death “model” from Imperial College in early 2020). Critics of science seldom evaluate scientific activities based upon how carefully and appropriately the methods and analyses were done, even though these aspects largely define scientific quality and integrity. I have been dismissed by so many non-scientists recently who have zero knowledge of or experience in scientific research. So, I deeply appreciate your articulating these basic yet crucial issues, in this episode as well as prior episodes.
I also appreciate your understanding of how people (scientists and non-scientists alike) become captured by the organizations for which they work. I have found that oftentimes people fail to question what they’re doing & why as well as what their employers are doing & why. Part of that scenario includes employees trying to ignore their sometimes small inner voices of integrity which say “something is wrong here.” I have faced this scenario multiple times; hence my experience working in different environments. I have worked as a scientist in public health departments, private so-called “independent” research organizations (that were completely captured by their corporate clients, as I discovered) as well as medical schools (where basic science research was first slashed during the Reagan era). Most of the scientists I worked with were dedicated and intended to be of service, including those at the CDC, EPA, ATSDR (Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a sister organization of the CDC), and NIH. The problems usually stemmed from those at the “top,” who either weren’t scientists at all (e.g., marketers, business people, bureaucrats, political appointees), or who had some science credential but little actual understanding of science, or, yes, the occasional scientist who had abandoned his integrity. This seems to be the situation in most employment situations now, regardless of the sector. It is the people at the “top” of organizations who benefit most from selling out, not those who actually do the work they were hired to do and who care about the results.
[SNIP – Please keep comments to 500 words or less. Longer comments can be split into multiple posts. -JC]
Just saw your note above about limiting length. Shall I cut it down?
I’ll keep my Part 2 short; thanks for the tip, James.
The current global turmoil is the challenge of our lifetimes, pushing us to ask some difficult questions, many of which you, James, address in Solutions Watch. But, I still see much division around me. I see people dividing themselves by the usual left/right, liberal/conservative, etc., as though we can afford to waste our energy fighting each other. I’m left with one big question: How can we finally unite, harness our collective power and put an end their violent agendas? We have to do that before we can move toward the next step in our Evolution intact, as fully human beings.
Thank you, James, for pushing and pulling us along this path to freedom. You are making a real difference.
I read Schwabb’s book titled “The Fourth Industrial Revolution”. He seems to insist on the goal being more empathy from humans and developing spirituality- through epigenetics. Now, whether that is true or not is not what I want to point out here. We all know why this may not be the case – it could be just a sheer power trip, right? It very well could be.
But what if becoming less materialistic, greedy, narcissistic and toxic really is the goal of all of this? Then, the real question is: why the hell are they using such evil measures to impose this on all of us like this? Couldn’t they just use the same, already well-oiled machine that made society what it is today and create a more psychologically and spiritually friendly world? Positive propaganda is a thing, right?
As much as many of you hate where this is all going, I am sure you can understand what my point is. I want a much more empathic world, but not one where murdering as many people as possible through disease, famine and war, plus through forced sterilization by using dangerous toxins, is the method to achieve that goal. The ends do not justify the means. Maybe encouraging a different path towards this goal would help things change for the better – for real.
You mean Schwabb’s WEF that is promoting “You’ll own nothing, have no privacy, and be happy”? What the WEF means is that they will steal all of the resources and property and rent them to a subservient slave class who by sufficient propaganda and marketing will actually “love their servitude”.
I don’t care what Schwabb says and how much he might say he wants spiritual enlightenment and less suffering and whatever else he might say, when the WEF says “you’ll own nothing and have no privacy” I take that to mean they want to steal my property and put me in prison. No, I don’t care how many gadgets I get to have or convenience or fun drugs, I want my own property and freedom. I am not a slave and Schwabb and these other wealthy “elites” have no right to do what they are doing. They might think they do, but this agenda is pure evil, even if they don’t know it. This agenda with the Covid scam and the Great Reset is demonic and I pray every day (though I am not very religious) that God will help us defeat this agenda and show the people running it that they are wrong to do this to us.
I want this to stop. I just want to live my life in peace and freedom to travel and work and go out and have fun without subjecting myself to toxic chemicals and masks and destructive propaganda. They have no right to do what they are doing to the human population and on some level they know this and if any of them had a conscience, would stop immediately.
Thanks anniees.
I haven’t read the book, so I’m glad that you relayed the concept of “empathy” that Schwab mentioned.
It reminds me of the “empathy” that the new Left want no one in the world to ever, ever catch the Covid, even if we have to lockdown the world forever.
I can definitely see epigenetics as a eugenics front. Epigenetics being a genetic ‘credit score’ so to speak. I like to point to someone like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Horvath and his statistical analysis in determining who is likely to die early based on their lifestyle choices (Epigenetics). Not sure if it’s a coincidence he’s from Frankfurt Germany and a connection to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School , but epigenetics could be easily spun as an up and coming shadow ‘social credit score’. The public epigenetic science is still in its infancy though from what I understand.
Seems to me the following video had something to do with epigenetics and behavior modification via interaction with digital devices:
https://swisscows.com/video/watch?query=the%20selfish%20ledger%20google&id=C2646DA4BF3FB9B28084C2646DA4BF3FB9B28084
though not the social credit score per se.
That was eloquent, elegant and insightful.
I always imagined how having a philosophical debate and doing blow in a Yakuza dive bar in a seedy part of Japan with James might feel but the 9 minute 50 second mark really brought it home. I really shouldn’t have been in mid-sip of my local craft ale whilst watching that one 😀
What is James’ argument about limitlessness of growth, along with such towering intellects, Werner and Simon?
That technology, innovation and imagination will stay ahead of the curve and fix it all up?
Talk about leaning on techno solutions to solve techno problems.
Technocrats in disguise? Ha ha! No, not you, James, just Werner and Simon, the Chi-town cigar chewin’ chump.
Near limitless gas and oil? No problem. Just frack the shit out of the earth, drill sideways, drill deeper, open up new oil fields, etc., etc. No fucking problem, boys.
Depletion of world-wide fisheries? No problem. Just use your imagination and conjure back healthy stocks.
Hell, what you do find on your plate these days you have to weigh against consuming too much mercury.
Clean water? Simon. Werner. James? Please help me out here.
Oh, and water, period….
I don’t know, man, like a few skeptics on this thread have opined, I found this rehashing terribly jaundiced.
In fact, I was wondering if any actual, serious problems humanity faces in today’s world would actually be broached in what I already assumed would be, in essence, James’ anti-eugenics rant.
“ Hell, what you do find on your plate these days you have to weigh against consuming too much mercury.
Clean water? Simon. Werner. James? Please help me out here.”
I can’t speak for James or anybody else. So my response to your concerns is “personal responsibility”.
One of the very first things I did when my eyes began opening to deception that I had been living under most of my life was to make sure that I would never have to rely on someone else to provide me with healthy clean water. Pretty easy to do here in Florida.
I also set about to become less dependent on others for food. I’m getting there.
There are lots of things that individuals can do.
I don’t hold out much hope that the state and it’s corrupt bed partners will be the ones to solve the problems that they created.
I can’t know for certain that I wouldn’t become corrupted if I suddenly acquired the means to develop some world changing technology that would benefit mankind. But I don’t think I would.
I hope that there might be some individuals who do have the means and also the morals to create wonderful things to improve life of all sorts on this planet once we get rid of those who maintain the monopoly on violence.
But then I have been accused of being a tad idealistic.
You mean it will be the individual’s responsibility to find some decent, untainted fish, or get some well water (that is, if there is any water in the well)that’s not polluted? Or from the river, stream, lake and aquifer? Etcetera, etcetera. Ah, for the billions of urban people in the cities?
And, wonderful to get rid of those who maintain the status quo on violence.
Sure thing, Steve.
Walden Pond here we come!
Don the straw hat!
You don’t have to be facetious. I don’t think I said anything to warrant that.
Are you hoping that the state will solve these problems? Are you expecting that the billions in the cities will be taken care of by the state?
Are you hoping that we can take the screwed up society that we have today and fix it with more of what got us here?
I am not suggesting that by taking responsibility for one’s own needs to the greatest extent possible is going to solve the world’s problems.
I am suggesting that taking responsibility for one’s own needs and doing one’s best to find alternatives to the system might be the best way to solve some of our individual problems. And by doing so can provide an example for others. And perhaps someday influence society for the better.
But so long as people only respond to ideas with ridicule and scorn rather than curiosity. I suppose trying to solve individual problems by striving for self sufficiency is pretty pointless.
What are your ideas?
Some of the ideas you put forward here seem to in conflict with what you were eppressing elsewhere when it came to ignorance and wilful ignornce. Wilful being a superflous adjective.
Personal responsibility for one’s actions is paramount. This one change in the mindset would immediately eradicate order following and would have an infathomable effect on final abolition of slavery by eliminating the root cause.
I agree with you but for willfulness being superfluous.
How can someone change until they know that there are good reasons to and learn how to go about it?
If someone is trained to distrust and fear information that doesn’t come from “acceptable and approved sources,how will they learn?
If learned helplessness is instilled in someone, how do they break out of that?
In my opinion, only with the help of others.
If that help is rejected then I guess thats when the willfulness starts.
How do they know there is information to be had if they just blindly accept whatever they are given? This is unnatural behavior and people can feel it.
Steve Smith:
I’m sorry I offended you. I didn’t mean to do that, I was just joking around.
You framed your response around personal responsibility, which is a very worthy topic in its own right, but has absolutely nothing to do with the present podcast discussing limits to growth. Discussion of personal responsibility seems more fitting for one of James’ Solutions Watch podcasts wherein he talks about what one can do to help themselves on an individual and/or collective level. Which is commendable.
However, in this “Are there Limits to Growth” podcast, with its familiar anti-eugenics consternation, James’ seems to be arguing the feasibility of interminable human population growth vis-à-vis interminable industrialization, highlighted with the 1988 interview of Julian Simon, together with the touting of Simon’s book ~ The Ultimate Resource, which touts the advantages of ever increasing extraction from Mother Earth of Her resources by ever increasingly advanced and sophisticated methods.
It certainly sounds endless, doesn’t it?
But, what I found disturbing and jaundiced about this soliloquial monologue was the absence of any discussion about the adverse effects of such exponential industrial extraction and manufacturing, let alone the deleterious nature of its product advancement.
Forget about copper. Who needs copper? We’ve got laser and satellite communications systems now, right?
Great.
Yeah, right.
But, one of the big elephants in the room, the advent of which has been so advantageous for exponential growth to date, and is now so utterly ubiquitous that it very well might be the one agent, in all its numerous molecular forms, that ironically will be the self-limiting factor for humanity’s growth and, for that matter, species extinction in general, is plastic. It’s in our food supply, it’s in our bodies.
Industrial chemicals and plastic. It’s not working out as well as may have been thought back in 1988.
Plastic’s deleterious effects can be observed abjectly in marine life, which in turn effects our life. It’s easy enough to google. It’s easy enough to google the depletion of fisheries.
And what about the prospect of ever increasing demand for the sea’s bounty with ever decreasing availability?
How would Julian Simon address that issue? Or, would he be even interested in the issue of marine health? It seems people like him are already extolling methods to further exploit the ocean bottom to extract more minerals out of the earth, with probably little or no regard for whatever negative effects to marine life such scaring of the ocean bottom would do to further diminish returns.
Julian Simon to me represents myopic vision and narrow thinking. And using his materiel a’plenty! narrative to support the thesis that there’s nothing consequential about exponential population growth along with its corollary, exponential industrial growth, without any discussion about what the downside is now and in the future, I find very wanting.
Those are my thoughts.
“ Discussion of personal responsibility seems more fitting for one of James’ Solutions Watch podcasts”
You’re right of course. I just take any opportunity to promote my agenda. 🙂
“ Plastic’s deleterious effects can be observed abjectly in marine life, which in turn effects our life.”
I can’t disagree with that. I work on the water and have done extensive sailing. The crap is everywhere.
This is an excellent observation about the fact that expanding industrialization and extraction of resources may be harmful in addition to unethical if they are harming the habitat of other creatures who also have the right to exist. Does an expanding human population necessitate the depletion of resources and mean that other species will die off?
I would love to hear this topic explored with more rigorous analysis. I would hate for the world to become a huge city with nothing but humans and domestic animals. I had always believed that in a natural environment population size reach an equilibrium with the the ability of the environment to sustain it. But exploring this phenomenon in the context modern medicine and longer life spans would be interesting.
Thank you for sharing your well articulated points.
@candlelight
” the feasibility of interminable human population growth vis-à-vis interminable industrialization, highlighted with the 1988 interview of Julian Simon, together with the touting of Simon’s book ~ The Ultimate Resource, which touts the advantages of ever increasing extraction from Mother Earth of Her resources by ever increasingly advanced and sophisticated methods.
one of the big elephants in the room, the advent of which has been so advantageous for exponential growth to date, and is now so utterly ubiquitous that it very well might be the one agent, in all its numerous molecular forms, that ironically will be the self-limiting factor for humanity’s growth and, for that matter, species extinction in general, is plastic. It’s in our food supply, it’s in our bodies.
Industrial chemicals and plastic. It’s not working out as well as may have been thought back in 1988.”
Well said.
It would appear James now shares your concerns about plastic and other industrial chemicals/EDCs
https://open.substack.com/pub/corbettreport/p/japan-is-committing-harakiri-but?selection=f4460186-8002-495a-8c83-e6f58301915c&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web
I personally do not think that population growth of humans necessitates the growth of industrial civilization and cities. Those two variables have been fused together in many of our heads for a range of reasons, but given all we know now of regenerative agriculture, food forest design, hydrological/riparian regeneration techniques, low impact natural home building methods, soil phytoremediation and diverse regenerative food sourcing potentials (both animal and plant/fungal based) I think the limits to population (with regards to ecological carrying capacity) could support many more humans than are already present on Earth.
(continued..)
(continued from above..)
Though, that said, I do agree with you about Julian Simon and the aspects of his book “The Ultimate Resource” that encourage endless extractivism, perpetual industrial exploitation of intact ecosystems (which leads to water contamination) and growth of mining industries (such as copper, or in today’s context, perhaps more pointedly, Lithium, Cobalt, Uranium, Tungsten, Tantalum, Iron and Silica).
He looks at a limited window in history in the context of increasing food availability (and neglects to discuss how that increase in food supplies from the monoculture crops he listed “wheat, corn and rice” have necessitated the devastation of water systems, soil and resulted in desertification via abusive tilling/chemical big AG practices). And his statements about how increased mining of minerals leads to those materials being more cheap totally avoids mentioning how mining invariably (every single time) contaminates water sources, destroys soil, poisons the air (no I am not talking about carbon emissions) and necessitates military imperialism and/or various forms of slavery. The man (Simon) is very anthropocentric and apparently ecologically illiterate as he paints a rosy picture of endless industrial expansionism talking about how “cheap” things will become and how much nutritionally depleted monoculture food we will get out of the deal, meanwhile completely ignoring how that will result in shortened lifespans, decreased beauty and rising infertility due to all the toxic chemicals those activities leave in their wake.
For instance, Even two millennia after their abandonment, some Roman copper mine sites, like those in Wadi Faynan, Jordan, remain toxic wastelands.
So, sure, we can exponentially increase our mining, automate it even, have an army of Elon Musk robots extract the ore (and kill any pesky people that refuse to get off their land and stand in the way of “progress”) and it will make the materials “cheaper” in a fiat sense, but at what cost for future generations and our health?
Sure we can bulldoze all the forests and plant monocultures of endless wheat fields and increase our quantity of food supply to massive heights, but at what cost to what we leave for the next generation and human health?
Is turning the entire planet into a toxic waste dump and giant mining/monoculture factory farming operation really the type of future we want to create and hand on to the next generation?
We can find a person that apparently shares the views of Julian Simon in the recent post on Algocracy in Marc Andreessen’s “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.”
https://open.substack.com/pub/corbettreport/p/algocracy-government-for-the-new?selection=ff28d2a4-34db-4bd6-992a-61963a1f11d6&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web
Thanks for the great comments and thanks for speaking for the trees, water and non-humans.
@cu.h.j
RE: “Does an expanding human population necessitate the depletion of resources and mean that other species will die off?
I would love to hear this topic explored with more rigorous analysis. I would hate for the world to become a huge city with nothing but humans and domestic animals”
That is an important question.
The proponents of techno-optimism, transhumanism and “Bright Green environmentalism” would tell you “Yes, but that is a good thing, because we will get to live forever as cyborgs with Elon Musk brain chips in smart cities, so who needs all those dirty wild animals anyways!”.
I obviously disagree with them.
I also no not think an expanding human population necessitates the depletion of resources and means that other species will die off.
Human habitation of an area can actually increase biodiversity, water quality and beauty rather than diminish it.
It is more a matter of the ethos and self-image driving cultures that determines whether or not they serve as a blessing or an imposition on an ecosystem.
Cultures that perceive themselves as having a responsibility as stewards and caretakers, while seeing nature as being comprised of myriad beings all possessing a sprit (like humans do) and offering gifts tend to be driven by motivating factors like gratitude, reciprocity and making use of every part of another being they kill/harvest while only taking what they need to live healthily. Some of those cultures can live in an ecosystem while simultaneously enriching it.
Cultures that perceive themselves as the most important organism on the planet, being entitled to exploit as they see fit and having no responsibility/need to reciprocate, seeing nature as a collection of dead/intimate resources and stupid animals (worth less than humans) take and take for greed without restraint and kill for pleasure and profit. Those cultures typically decrease biodiversity, poison the water and desertify once lush ecosystems in their endless quest for more disposable superficial pleasures, comfort, opulence and attempting to fill a void in their heart (where gratitude should be) with more material things.
The first type of culture does not require living in teepees or mud huts, but it does require humility, being willing to constantly learn new things/skills, pattern observation, biomimicry, courage and determination.
The second cultural trajectory only requires that we keep on having faith in and voting harder (for intrinsically degenerative statist regimes), buying stuff from Amazon, Walmart, keep on making excuses why we cannot grow our own food, buying big ag/factory farm food and move into the wonderful utopian smart cities being constructed for us.
I will strive to address the your question above in greater detail further in the future as well.
Correction:
nature as being comprised of myriad beings all possessing a spirit*
I absolutely LOVE LOVE LOVE this episode!!
Thank you SOOOOO much for it!!!
I read that Vice MIT “study” update and I knew it was another load of narrative BS and I’m so grateful that you’ve picked it apart so well!
The best part is of course the last part where you explain how using more of a resource makes it being more abundant!!!!
LOVE IT!!
Thank you James and your team. A big cloud of doom has lifted from me. As you pointed out we have all been made belief that we must end humankind to save the planet. I have grown up with the belief that having (too many) children is wrong, even when the state said we need the children to pay for our pensions. This new way of looking at things, I call it my epiphany, makes a lot of sense and frees us from the shackles of being doomed. Let’s be ingenious, inventive, creative and celebrate achievements that have benefitted us. All of course while including mother earth on whom we depend. We can choose a path that respects the natural world and move forward more gentle and conscientious.
Oh James, when you popped up from the table with “white powder” on your nose after listening to that junk propaganda and mocked them mercilessly, I nearly urinated in my pants laughing!
Thanks so much for the best laugh I’ve had all week and please try and do that more often. With all the bad news we could all use a bit of levity.
After being a member here for years I still don’t know the official place to submit a “Question for Corbett”. 🙂
HomeRemedySupply?
OK Japan is the elephant in the room now w.r.t. its record-setting 5th wave of cases (5 times greater in number than previous waves and almost off the chart), combined with its 46% fully ‘vaxxed’ population.
James maybe you could give us an inside view as to how the Japanese feel about this?
Are they taking it all in stride?
Are they a little concerned?
Are you seeing any noticeable changes in day-to-day life?
Questions For Corbett
Corbett does eyeball the Corbett Report comment section.
So Fawlty Towers, I am guessing that James might view your question(s) above.
I am sure that a person can ask him a question via the “Contact” tab on the website’s top menu.
Things have changed in recent years. Corbett used to have a variety of ways to ask him questions, including voice message. I am not sure if those applications still apply.
By going back some years to previous QFC (Questions For Corbett), a person can see various examples of contacting James for a question.
There had been a previous protocol for asking a “Question For Corbett”.
It involved leaving a question in the last known episode of QFC and would apply to a future QFC if James picks that topic.
Everyone should keep in mind that James gets a lot of traffic.
Climate change coming to the forefront thanks to Canadian elections?:
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/canadas-infernal-summer-puts-climate-change-forefront-election-2021-09-01/
I need to find Tony Heller’s explanation of heat domes, that phenomenon that occurred in Canada that made such a huge impression on people apparently.
There was a discovery that heating of the interstellar organic matter at high temperature could yield abundant water and oil.
New insight into the origin of water on the earth
Also complex hydrocarbons are formed in proto-planetary nebulae and in dense interstellar gas.
Cosmic Carbon Chemistry: From the Interstellar Medium to the Early Earth
I got an “AW ShucKs” error message with the below Error ID when I tried to view the above episode #077. I tried reloading it and I keep getting the same massage.
Error ID: 6a3fd6148b494bff8c96bf2660d81c3f
None of the Show Note links work either.
This appears to be censorship like I have never seen before.
Hi everyone, first comment on this site. Loving your work James, an overwhelming amount of material on many topics of great interest. You’ve done such a good job cataloging and organizing the information.
Lane,
Welcome! from all of us here on the comment threads. We Corbett Commenters like seeing new commenters.
I completely agree…Corbett puts out “an overwhelming amount of material on many topics of great interest.”
@bleak
I agree with Steve, thanks for sharing that perspective.
Here is one potential of what “Growth” can look like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4ErWX9rCbQ
Are there limits to growth?
What kind of growth?
The growth of human populations?
Well, that is not set in stone. Depending on how we are growing our food and treating the forests and oceans we need to breath, we could maybe reach 20 billion or something and still have a world worth giving to future generations.
However, if you are talking about the growth of cities (in their current format) and the technological/resource extraction infrastructures that maintain our modern way of living with obscene excess, comfort and waste.. Yes there is certainly a limit.
If you ask me, considering that primary forests produce much of the oxygen we breath, they stabilize precipitation patterns and mitigate the harm of flooding events via holding soil together with roots, while also encouraging water to penetrate into the soil, then propagating natural precipitation patterns (through evapotranspiration and rain drop nucleation via releasing pollen) any conventional agricultural or other industrial resource extraction operation that is involved with chopping those primary forests down, is unacceptable, irrational, and in essence represents a sort of suicidal operation where we are destroying the very fabric of the ecosystems we depend on to survive.
If you ask someone like this lady ( https://elizabethnickson.substack.com/p/the-epic-bullshit-of-catastrophic/comment/45594831 ) about clearcutting primary forests, she will tell you “It pays for education and universal ‘free’ health care.” So, to her, there is no limit to the growth of the logging industry, and chopping down the oldest most biodiverse forests is a good idea.
In response to the question about “limits to growth” I have a few of my own questions for anyone reading this.
How much damage done to the environment/remaining intact ecosystems (in the name of living a life of comfort and propping up our top heavy technologically dependent civilization and technological addictions) is too much?
Is there no limit to how much is too much (if that damage is required in order to continue to allow us to live the way we do now, in perpetuity)?
Is there is a limit, how do we define it, and how should we strive to live in a way that respects that boundary?
For anyone that may also appreciate this info, around time index 42:00 of Interview 1761: ( https://www.corbettreport.com/interview-1761-james-corbett-separates-climate-fact-from-fiction/ ) JC at least partially addresses his perspective on the subject matter I was discussing above.
Thanks for the candid answer to Derrick’s question James.
I would be grateful if you could do some kind of updated “Message To The Environmental Movement” (given all that you have learned and all that has transpired since you did your last official one in 2015).
Thanks again.
A Message to the Environmental Movement:
https://www.corbettreport.com/a-message-to-the-environmental-movement-hd/
a fun (and illuminating) thought I just came across in a youtube interview when they were discussing
“oh no, we have 8 billion people on Earth, that’s terrible! or is it terrible?”
“what if our so called population problem, is actually a population asset for the Earth?”
https://youtu.be/HumlU31zKAE?si=TBMIdDFf-DJhXZCV&t=2291
Are There Limits To Growth?
The essay below offers an invitation to take a clear look into the hellish realms of the techno-optimist’s “sustainable” civilization and ponder the question of what kind of world we really want to live in.
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/are-there-limits-to-growth
An interesting glimpse into some of the facets of the Edo Period of Japan.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n6Asb8iSXE
Beginning around the year 1600 the culture of Japan simultaneously expanded its population while fostering a respect and increasing awareness of ecology.
There are many variables involved here (such as isolationism, which may not be viable in today’s world) but I still think this slice of history is worth a peek.
By the mid-18th century, Edo (which was situated at the heart of what is now modern day Tokyo) had a population of more than one million, likely the biggest city in the world at the time. It was described as a place filled with beautiful gardens, biodiversity, exquisite architecture and rich artistic as well as culinary expression.
This is one small window in history shows how population growth does not necessarily necessitate ecological devastation.
For more on the agricultural side of this equation , Check out the bottom of my recipe post linked below :
https://gavinmounsey.substack.com/p/amaranth-seed-trail-of-tears-and
I am not an expert in Japanese history but IIRC thatbtime in Japan was more like a medieval 15 minet cities / Agenda 21 then a nature lovers eco paradise……
if I am correct that’s when they basically implemented internal passports and strict rules to keep people in their place socially and physically….iirc consumption of timber for homes was strictly regulated according to social class….they even had an analog of the car ban by massively reducing the number of horses.
Now to be fair I read only one book overview Japanese history and got some of that from “collapse” by Jarad diamond
@Duck
I am not an expert either, and you make a good point about the authoritarianism, statism and caste system involved with all that the Edo period (and the city of Edo) entailed.
I was certainly not presenting the Edo period (nor the city of Edo) as an exemplification of some kind of utopian paradise which we should aspire to replicate, rather, I was attempting to point out that there was a lot of population growth in that time, but there was also reciprocity with the land (albeit a statist incentivised / enforced reciprocity).
The fact that there was a concerted effort on the part of citizens to collect leaves, ash/charcoal from fire places, prunings, brushwood, and twigs, sea weed from the shoreline and fish bones from fishing markets and restaurants and compost them to make soil for their farms allowed for much of the waste from urban environments to feedback into their farming systems, closing the nutrient cycle and even increasing fertility in soil in some areas meant they created a relatively stable metropolitan model. Modern cities would starve in a couple weeks if the imports stopped flowing from far away lands being pillaged.
I remember also reading how human waste was recycled in the Edo period to build soil (rather than dumped back into the drinking water after being sterilized as it is in modern times).
Now, as you noted, this was in the context of an imperialistic statist regime, caste system and authoritarian control systems for the population, so obviously not some ideal role model system for replicating identically.
Still, the descriptions of that city (of a million plus) aesthetically speaking and with regards to the quality of food and farming that was available and taking place offers us some variables worth learning from, back-engineering into voluntary decentralized models and implementing in our designs for communities and parallel societies.
I also really appreciate some of the art forms that were born out of that Era in Japan (such as Kintsugi). An art form built upon an ethos of not wasting needlessly and re-using/re-purposing.
(continued..)
(continued from above..)
However, i`ll re-iterate that does not mean I endorse the statist mechanisms involved.
As I said in my article on Why Involuntary Governance Structures are Not Compatible with The Permaculture Ethical Compass:
Some might make the argument that we do have instances of top down government (statist) policies being used to enact laws, incentives and punitive measures which resulted in widespread ecological regeneration (such as the Edo Period in Japan) however, the fact that it was a limited period in time that ended and made way for degenerative agricultural practices and deforestation to be re-started with the onset of globalization and corporate influence of government structures speaks to how such a path is not viable in the long term. The Edo period was also a time of national isolation (an almost impossible prospect in today’s hyperconnected world and thus another aspect of what made that time of soil regeneration possible under a statist regime which we must carefully consider as we contemplate whether or not permaculture ethics and statism are compatible).
I would contend that punitive measures being applied by top town governmental systems (regardless of what ideological wrappings they have) are not effective long term solutions as threatening someone to behave how you want them to only remains effective as long as the threat and ability to act on the threat does, and even then industrious and inventive people will wind a way to circumvent said punitive measures if they really want to. That being said, unlike the WEF’s puppets (such as Trudeau) and their greenwashed trojan horse/profiteering initiatives such as ‘carbon taxes’ and ‘nitrogen restrictions’ for farmers etc, the will to impose strict rules on how people interact with the farm land and where their waste products end up during the Edo Period in Japan appears (to me) to have arisen out of a genuine necessity and want to salvage (and sometimes regenerate) the landscape that had been decimated by degenerative/extractive agricultural practices and urban development. Incentivizing behavior that helps to regenerate the landscape is at least a step in the right direction, as perhaps after being bribed to do something for long enough by the government the people doing it will begin to see the long term intrinsic benefits offered to their own lives by engaging in said actions.
In the end, it is my belief that neither fear of democratically imposed punitive measures, technocratic domination, bribes nor the fear of the potential impacts ecological collapse on our civilization/way of life (self-interested/anthropocentric priorities) can effectively compel humanity to change course, but rather it is love (for each other and the Earth) that will evoke the courage within us to change course before it is too late.
Thanks for the comment.
G
Here you and I are running into out different worldviews about human nature.
“…. but rather it is love (for each other and the Earth) that will evoke the courage within us to change course before it is too late….”
Yyou just need to compare Japan to Easter Island – the AUTHORITARIAN state forced an environmentally sustainable system on the people in one while the other pretty much destroyed itself thru over consumption of renewable resources.
The over consumption and destruction of resources is pretty much how humans tend to operate UNTIL they hit the fork and either go over the edge or are forced by rulers to avoid a tragedy of the commons….. the American Indians killed off all the mega fauna of then Americas. The Māori killed off the Moa and IIRC deforested much of their new homeland. On the other hand the medieval UK preserved a lot of forest thru the king claiming it was his and stopping free men cutting what they wished.
This is because each individual had zero personal incentive NOT to cut a tree or eat a Moa or a mammoth- but they had an incentive TO donthese things…..only the ruler (in Japan and England in these examples) had an incentive to preserve resources for the long term.
It’s world wide, people will get away with what they can and only think long term when they MUST.
(again , going off “collapse” by diamond)
You make goood points out the many GOOD things about Edo Japan but people only did the things you list-
“…. The fact that there was a concerted effort on the part of citizens to collect leaves, ash/charcoal from fire places, prunings, brushwood, and twigs, sea weed from the shoreline and fish bones…..meant they created a relatively stable metropolitan…”
Because
A) the ruler limited what they could consume
B) they were thus POOR wnugh to make doing these things worth while.
In London there were whole “tribes” of people collecting waste- horse and dog droppings were of value. Old bones were of value. Rags were of value.
When londoners STOPPED BEING SO POOR collecting this waste stopped being worth their while. If Londoners got starvation poor they would go back to picking up card board to sell, even dog poop if it was still used for tanning- but they won’t unless you keep a class of people on the edge of starvation.
This is why the more power people have TO do stuff they often think less about if they should.
@Duck
RE: “American Indians killed off all the mega fauna of then Americas.”
Says who? A bunch of white guys that are interested in justifying and normalizing perpetual exploitation and pillaging of nature, so they attempt to write a history that portrays it as “business as usual”?
The “overkill” hypothesis is not agreed upon across the board within “expert” fields and I certainly think it is a suspicious and convenient narrative.
Also, even if you wanna say Indigenous people from the americas killed all the mammoths thousands of years ago, that is irrelevant when you account for actually provable, currently observable and extant influences that some of those cultures had in this continent (and South America) especially when we are talking about food forests.
————————
RE:
“The over consumption and destruction of resources is pretty much how humans tend to operate UNTIL they hit the fork and either go over the edge or are forced by rulers to avoid a tragedy of the commons…”
The evidence I have seen locally and abroad points to another potential expression of human ingenuity you have not accounted for in your assessment of “human nature”:
– https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/ancient-indigenous-forest-gardens-still-yield-bounty-150-years-later-study
– http://www.daviesand.com/Papers/Tree_Crops/Indian_Agroforestry/index.html
– https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/what-is-permaculture-food-forests?fbclid=IwAR0xQQGjfgvRgpI8BFw5YcYzJfRbiX1Ao7mv9z0KgQAQ2mK4J8gamh5C05A
– https://web.archive.org/web/20221126222447/https://returntonow.net/2018/08/01/the-amazon-is-a-man-made-food-forest-researchers-discover/
– https://www.sdvforest.com/agroforestry/the-fascinating-story-of-human-made-forests
– https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol26/iss2/art6/
– https://canadianfeedthechildren.ca/what/food-security-projects/indigenous-food-forests/
– https://www.sdvforest.com/agroforestry/the-fascinating-story-of-human-made-forests
You like to paint the whole of humanity in a very gloomy, faded shade of grey in broad brush strokes, but reality is more nuanced than that. Humanity is comprised of many cultures, many of which chose radically divergent pathways in how they fed themselves and interacted with nature.
If you are just gonna go on a doom and gloom red herring fest (listing all the failures and/or alleged failures of particular indigenous peoples with regards to their relationship to nature) I am gonna have to go into eye bouncing mode again as I have community food forests to plant and no time for dealing with repetitive interactions attempting to alleviate black-pill syndrome on the internet.
G
Your eye bouncing appears more about not seeing what you dont LIKE to see then showing me WHERE I am wrong.
Looking at the links names you just posted a lot of (probably very good) articles about food forests and permaculture
but HOW DOES THAT DISPROVE ANYTHING I POSITED (with examples) IN MY POST?
‘….Says who? A bunch of white guys that are interested in justifying and normalizing perpetual exploitation and pillaging of nature, so they attempt to write a history that portrays it as “business as usual”…”
Are you saying Easter Island DID NOT get ecologically ravished by the islanders????
Are you saying that the Maori DIDNT eat the Moa to death???
Are you saying all the Mega Fauna in the Americas ‘just died” and Clovis spear points had ‘nothing’ to do with it????
“…You like to paint the whole of humanity in a very gloomy, faded shade of grey in broad brush strokes, but reality is more nuanced than that….”
I believe I think its more nuanced then you do.
You are saying a good deal about how humans can ‘evolve’ on a spiritual level ito some kind of symbiosis and worship of the natural world…. but your perspective is that of a modern man in the modern world where the incentives are different then they are for primitive people.
To be blunt its EASY to choose to be poor when you have the abundant wealth of the modern world- people BORN poor generally DONT CHOOSE TO REMAIN SO if they have choice.
I think I was pretty clear when I said that the INCENTIVE is for poor people to take, and this often causes a “Tragedy of the commons” (as on Easter Island) where the Immediate Benefit of taking a resource is large, and the eventual Cost appears far away…. do you think Japanese people stopped living in poverty and grubbing for stuff to burn because they suddenly caught ‘whiteness’?
Do you think the Japanese peasants CHOSE to live in conditions of relative shortage where they had to work hard and have less??? Or did they preserve the resources BECAUSE THEY WERE FORCED TO???
“……. Humanity is comprised of many cultures, many of which chose radically divergent pathways in how they fed themselves and interacted with nature…..”
No, Not really. Humans are humans.
Humans tend to do what they think they can get away with, there is no nobel savage living in a state of purity in nature- thats the mostly fantasy of French Enlightenment perverts.
“…..If you are just gonna go on a doom and gloom red herring fest…”
I may be ‘gloom’ (I’d diagaree) but I am pretty sure none of the historic events I mentioned were ‘red herrings’
“…. black-pill syndrome on the internet….”
I have no idea why you think I’m black pilling unless you think any failure to reach “Utopia” is blackpilling…. far more Blackpilling is to not see the world clearly and then be sad when things dont work out the way you think they should.
I do my best to live in reality… it means I cant eyebounce away from history just because i dont like it.
@Duck
If you read any of my articles on Substack or my book you will find that I offer very brutally honest assessments of what lurks in the shadows (both the shadows of the human psyche and the shadows in the physical) so contrary to what you may want to imply about “utopian” thinking, I both acknowledge and illuminate the pitfalls in our midst, while also taking steps to avoid them or build bridges over them (and help others do the same).
The real savages are those that avoid honest introspection, healing, moral courage and doing the hard emotional work of taking action to plant seeds for things that are vulnerable to being destroyed in a world full of turbulence and selfishness because remaining apathetic is easier. Those who point their finger at every ugly thing they can search out and say “see look how ugly humanity is, so my behaving this way is not so bad after all, it is just business as usual”. That is savagery and cowardice.
Having the courage to look at the beautiful things in this world, both in what people are doing and the more than human world, and learning to appreciate and build on those things is not easy, as those things are vulnerable to being destroyed, it is so much easier to dismiss any beauty and kindness as irrelevant and go doom scrolling and stagnating in negativity. There is nothing noble about that.
Noble actions are deemed as such by one’s fellow community members, it is not a characteristic that is attributable to an entire culture or race, that is a ridiculous idea.
Nobility is not something you can buy or be born with, it is something you choose, one moment and one day at a time.
Anyone can strive to walk that path. Many on earth would rather make excuses why such a path is impossible, that is the opposite of nobility.
The reality we live in has some gnarly stuff past, present and will in the future, yet it also has many beautiful, graceful and miraculous things that have taken place and will continue to take place. Where you put the bulk of your attention is what you feed into.
Thus, eye bouncing an endless stream of negativity (when one is already aware of the stakes and main variables at play) and redirecting one’s energy and focus onto constructive, hopeful and practical pursuits is what I choose.
G
Like I said this is where our worldviews differ- human nature is what it is and to be blunt want you can call the “economic” incentives are generally fixed.
Like I said very before (and you have not contradicted except to smeer “what white guys say” ) people have CONSTANTLY Behaved in the same way unless they are constrained by authority or by hard limits wiyh the environment that they feel in the reasonably short term.
When people see resources (like mega fauna or Moa or trees on Easter island) they will consume them to enjoy the material benefits….the only way they think in the longer term is when authorities tell them what they can consume.
There are no anarchy’s where people live in harmony with nature.
There never have been any anarchy’s where people lived in harmony wiyh nature…. And if such a place had existed it was gobbled up by more advanced cultures.
If you somehow created such a culture it would last a couple of generations at most before human nature kicked in and collapse or authoritarian rule happened due to resource depletion.
If you somehow changed human nature (a horrible project every time it’s tried) then some other culture would gobble up the weaker. Living in the wealth and safety of the western civilization has just dampened these facts in our minds but when that wealth and security go away things will revert to the mean very fast because that’s how humans have survived.
A lie is not Nobel, no matter how Nobel it sounds….. but I really must question WHY youbtjinkninjabe a negatives of human nature????
It is what it is, like the weather or seasons. One can only think that’s negative if you have an idea of what it SHOULD be like and since it’s been this way since the fall I don’t see it being different until the End
To be fair there’s some debate about the mega fauna. If this occurred around the ice age, that may have been contributing. The over hunting theory is still just a theory.
I think there’s truth to basics about human nature, i.e. survival instinct, avoidance of pain and pleasure and comfort seeking and a tendency towards convenience. However, culture does impact behavior to a large extent and that is influenced by a lot of different factors during the evolution of the people and culture.
I agree there are lots of cases of barbaric hunter gatherers and “low tech” people’s and history is written with a certain narrative to demonize white men. I find that tendency insulting (even though I am female) and an inaccurate historical representation.
I also do believe humans can change (maybe slowly) to survive. Just because something has always been a certain way (or seems so) does not mean change is not possible. I admire idealistic people and their enthusiasm, though I have more pragmatic expectations.
Cu.h.j
Even if human nature adapts to become “better” in better conditions it will always revert to the mean because that’s what works…I’d recommend Freakanomics and related books to show how inventives work.
For example everyone in the world becomes non violent or can’t be dishonest …. If ONE guy is born with the capacity for violence or dishonesty then he will rapidly become king of everything because he can do what others can not….. on the OTHER a hand if everyone acts like that we all die- hence things fluctuate in cycles like rabbit populations or ecological cycles.
“…. To be fair there’s some debate about the mega fauna….”
I need to re read Jarad diamonds book collapse to refresh my memory but
We know what happened on Easter island and to the Moa birds…… but I am pretty sure the mega fauna got munched because you see similar extinctions in other places when humans show up.
I do think there are cycles of creation and destruction going on all the time. I don’t understand the grand process and I don’t think a human mind can grasp it entirely.
I think it’s possible to improve things so that there is more of an equilibrium between the two forces.
Being grounded in reality is important meaning that it is unwise to underestimate the capacity for evil and depravity or expect a utopia.
I think improvements can be made, not that human beings will ever reach perfection. That is unattainable.
I think violence is probably necessary in order to survive in certain circumstances. I am not a pacifist, nor believe it is a sound ideology. Tactical non-violence is a better approach. But also, I do believe honor has tremendous value as a trait that should survive in humanity.
@Duck
What you have commented here is S.O. D.U.M.B.
(for reference to understand the acronym above for people stumbling across this: https://corbettreport.com/march-open-thread-2023/#comment-175778 )
G
lol dude , love your acronym.
It’s nice to know that my points of view are so unassailable that you need to resort to things like that BECAUSE YOU HAVE NO HISTORICAL OR FACTUAL BASIS TO REFUTE THEM.
I make no claim to being a great thinker (most of my stuff comes from wiser men) but the fact that I have changed my point of view from one similar to yours makes me proud that I am open to see my errors…….Ideology is BS and blinkers the mind.
So enjoy your errors, many people share your misconceptions and programmed ideological blinkers…..I did not wander over to the Truth side of the Internet in order that I could remain under the programming of lies.
Any time you have a refutation I will be glad to hear it…. Social pressure and shaming is how women try to win arguments so it will mostly slide off my well greased Duck back.
😉