8 Comments

Geez, Bernard, between this and your earlier mail about spending cuts, you're a real font of good cheer this morning. Seriously, though, keep up the good work. We need to know what's going on.

Expand full comment

If an insightful person like Bernard didn't exist, we'd have invent him!

Expand full comment

OML what fabulous in-depth analysis. Thanks

Expand full comment

But nowhere is there any mention on the planet's population increasing by 50% before even the fabled plateau in global population occurs - the planet's #1 problem is the burgeoning global population followed by per capita energy consumption- the place cooking might be the most immediate answer to these two causative problems.

Expand full comment

They are not separate issues. Expansion in energy availability was an enabling factor for population growth. Fertility rates are most highly correlated with rates of child mortality - there is some suggestion that climate change will worsen child mortality, which will result in higher fertility rates and population growth that worsens climate change and so on, in an amplifying feedback. It is well established that access to education and healthcare (particularly fertility control) for women breaks that cycle. There's a great debate on the role of population in Frontiers (open access), original article "Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future" lead author Corey Bradshaw, follow the commentary responses for the critique/debate: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/conservation-science/articles/10.3389/fcosc.2020.615419/full

Expand full comment

I do not understand why the Potsdam Institute is launching its new planetary boundary reporting initiative without mentioning the prior work of the Stockholm Resilience Institute. Even though the identified thresholds are the same and the assessments the same.

Expand full comment

Johan Rockström led the international team that developed the Planetary Boundaries framework. He used to be at the Stockholm Resilience Institute and is now at the Potsdam Institute, where he continues his work on the framework.

Expand full comment

Its increasingly hard to live in this country under this Government's belligerence and short-term negativity-based backward-looking dogma. Equally dispiriting to see the way in which their 'policy' settings and narrative are encouraging so many NZers to double down on myopic, evidence-less, short-term and anti-indigenous virtue signalling.

Expand full comment