World wildlife 'falls by 58% in 40 years' [since 1970] "...if the trend continues that decline could reach two-thirds among vertebrates by 2020."

All the usual "pundiots" are:

  1. Extolling the virtues of becoming vegetarians - as if 7.3 of the world's 7.5 billion people will stop eating meat overnight, or even stabilize worldwide meat consumption, when meat production has risen from 275 million tons in 2007 to an estimated 321 million tons in 2016.

  2. Pointing out that the exponential birth rates worldwide are slowing - as if disaster can avoided be in time for the human population to stabilize or go down after peaking at 9 or 10 billion, ignoring that even at 4 billion, renewable resources cannot renew fast enough and non-renewable resources are being played out - both being drawn down even faster as living standards improve for the world's poor and people aspire to consume.

  3. Pointing to meat substitutes, lab-grown meats, solar panels, wind turbines, thorium reactors, more nuclear reactors, as they have for the last 10+ years or more - ignoring that real meat (like bush meat) is still far cheaper and over 90% of the 2,100 power plants currently under construction or in the planning stages worldwide will all be coal-fired.

  4. Suggest recycling, reducing, reusing as the answer - forgetting that no one really does it as most recycling only occurs when it can compete with natural extraction, very little is getting recycled at all, and there is so much corporate green-washing that truck and SUV engines call themselves "eco" for powering down a couple of cylinders while batteries boast "eco" labels when even 3% of content is recycled.

  5. Suggesting having zero, or just one child - forgetting that everywhere else in the world, patriarchial societies are still rapidly multiplying, with some countries and ethnic groups having an average of 6 or more children per mother, more than blowing away the world's 2 billion having only one or two children.

Anything else I missed?

/r/collapse Thread Link - bbc.com