Religion Trumps Reality

Ignoring an existential threat.

Yesterday but in Surfing Our Kondratiev Wave there is an Ezra Klein quote that was eye opening to me a couple months ago when I saw the first draft of that text.

“Fears of falling global fertility are to many on the right what climate change is to the left: the master problem of the age, the slow-moving crisis that is even now destabilizing societies. “Population collapse due to low birthrates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming,” Elon Musk wrote. JD Vance has written that “our country’s low birthrates have made many elites sociopaths.”

That draft arrived well before The Demon Nonlinearity, which memorialized here our first year above 1.5C. Pacific Palisades Aftermath noted the distress that firestorm caused our California’s chance homeowner’s insurance. Florida’s Condo Cliff was about a policy problem they’ve caused themselves over the top of the climate change problem that’s chasing insurers from the state.

A month before the 2024 election in Weathered: Earth’s Extremes I pointed out that we now have two political parties - (R)eality and (R)eligion. This PBS is report is grounded in reality, the government’s move replaces the existential threat of climate change with a vexing policy problem - industrial societies quickly become two child families, and as inequality grows one child becomes the norm, and then no children.

If you put five American women on one side of a soccer scrimmage they’ll have an average of eight child available to play. Put five South Korean women on the other side and there will only be four kids. The U.S. had been OK despite this, thanks to our relatively high fertility of 1.6, and the fact that we were a top destination for immigration until just two months ago.

Trying to force white Millennials and Zoomers to have more children by denying what they see daily in the news would not have worked well in the teens, their views are very clear. Here in the mid-twenties there’s no imagination required - we’ve got firestorms in Los Angeles, wildfire on Long Island, dust storms scouring the Texas panhandle, and the southeast was just battered by a massive tornado outbreak. None of those things were normal around the turn of the century when my offspring were born.

Therefore this is OK, it keeps Accelerationism’s Factions cheerful and on task …