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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

I would like to add 2 additional points.

Point 1:I think that it is easy to see humans can do great damage via pollution, even if you don’t think global warming is happening (and I feel odds are that it is these days) there is still the toxic pollution that has been added to rivers, lakes, and some pieces of land that has a detrimental effect of plant and animal life in that area. So we do cause pollution and it does cause harm.Does that last point mean that life/from Earth would be better without us? I argue no. Not only are we part of life on/from Earth but if we are able to limit the damage we do to various ecosystems around the world so they do not collapse then we provide means by which life on Earth will become life from Earth and those have the potential to survive past the point (in about 5 billion years from now-so keep paying your mortgage) when the sun expands and most things remaining on Earth get cooked. While humanity should learn how not to damage other forms of life on Earth and should actively work to avoid harm now, we are the only species likely to currently enable space travel and thus create the ability to evacuate the planet when such an evacuation becomes necessary to sustaining most of the life on/from Earth (not just us).Thus calling for human extinction actually removes a potential boon to the survival of Earth’s various life-forms.

Point 2:

I would argue the harm via pollution that humans cause is mainly not due to the number of humans but to the manner we go about economic development. Global Warming is caused by greenhouse gasses. This are released by the burning of fossil fuels. If not for the latter the former would not be a problem. Also look at China, it has a great deal of problems relating to both air and water quality because of the many emissions (some of which are quite toxic) put into each. China's emissions problem (touching on fossil fuels again) has grown worse after it started its population control program. This can happen because of the fact that there is no stable ratio between the amount of humans and amount of emissions, factories, cars, coal powers plants, and so on. China jumped ahead of the USA in CO2 emissions not by a population boost but through rapid and reckless economic development in which consideration of the environment was not an issue. Thus focusing on economic systems systems to be the logical way to prevent pollution and environmental damage.

Note: Population control does not involve counting and limiting the amount of emissions-only the number of humans. This is why it actually fails to serve as effective protection for the environment.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

J Thomas, my wish for chimps, or starfish, or intelligent aliens, to prosper has (so far as I can tell) very little to do with the genes they share with me. Which is hardly surprising; nothing in our evolutionary past has selected us for preferring the interests of creatures sharing 90% of our DNA over those of creatures sharing 0% of it, since we've never had any of the latter to interact with. But, regardless, why *should* the fact that (say) starfish share some genes with us make any difference to how much we value their survival?

(I can't tell whether my preference for native Australians over chimps has anything to do with the genes they share with me. Causally, it probably has. But I like to try to minimize the excess of rationalizing over reasoning in my value judgements, and it doesn't seem to me as if those shared genes are much of a *reason* for preferring them. But there are other reasons that seem better.)

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