Tim Barrus, New York Times
ARE WE INSANE
Even if birth rates continue to slide, will it be enough to meet the challenges of climate change. No. There will still be too many people on the planet. Enough people will still be here for climate change to accelerate to the point where death can be seen like a carbon tax. Someone dies. Perhaps you might get money back. Someone has a baby. The penalties will include incarceration. The state will take care of your babies while it pushes you off to work. Breeders (not a pejorative) will become fewer and fewer. There’s no future in it. One thing we could do is encourage suicide. We could emphasize how humane it is. We could even make the tools available. When life has at long last become obscene, painful, addicted, diseased, and has lost any relevance whatsoever, it can hardly come as a surprise that some people (like me) will not want to be here. If Homo sapiens as a species becomes extinct, the planet might begin to recover, but it would probably be too late because it’s too late now. Just because conservatives will whine about how this works as demography becomes a living thing. Like art. Does not mean that conservatives will rule over us with compassion because there will be no more serfs and slaves to count as our responsibility will be to save the wretched iconic flag. It’s too late for that, too. The only consolation is that our presence on the planet will become lost to memory. No one will know we were here because there is nothing we leave behind that has any meaning.