Is the world being destroyed?

If no one were actually taking these extreme positions, then I wouldn't be arguing so strongly against them.

You can advocate for productive change without making outrageous claims of impending doom.

This Peak Potassium nonsense is just another conspiracy theory.

Once you have that, you can always "gather facts" to support your theory.

We are getting stuck in personal squabbling and tangents.

I don't like them putting chemicals in the water that turn the freakin' frogs gay! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT?!

Legal experts from across the globe have drawn up a “historic” definition of ecocide, intended to be adopted by the international criminal court to prosecute the most egregious offences against the environment.

The draft law, unveiled on Tuesday, defines ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”.

The Stop Ecocide Foundation initiative comes amid concerns that not enough is being done to tackle the climate and ecological crisis. ...

Prof Philippe Sands QC, of University College London, who co-chaired the panel that spent the past six months hammering out the definition, said: “The four other crimes all focus exclusively on the wellbeing of human beings. This one of course does that but it introduces a new non-anthropocentric approach, namely putting the environment at the heart of international law, and so that is original and innovative.

“For me the single most important thing about this initiative is that it’s part of that broader process of changing public consciousness, recognising that we are in a relationship with our environment, we are dependent for our wellbeing on the wellbeing of the environment and that we have to use various instruments, political, diplomatic but also legal to achieve the protection of the environment.”

An ecocide law has been mooted for decades, with the late Swedish prime minister, Olof Palme, pushing the concept at the 1972 UN environmental conference in Stockholm. More recently, ecocide was considered for inclusion in the 1998 Rome statute establishing the ICC before being dropped. The Scottish barrister Polly Higgins led a decade-long campaign for it to be recognised as a crime against humanity before her death in 2019.
... ... ...

Boy, that's a few decades too late ...

The draft law, unveiled on Tuesday, defines ecocide as “unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts”.

“For me the single most important thing about this initiative is that it’s part of that broader process of changing public consciousness, recognising that we are in a relationship with our environment, we are dependent for our wellbeing on the wellbeing of the environment and that we have to use various instruments, political, diplomatic but also legal to achieve the protection of the environment.”

In the 1996 movie, “Independence Day,” the people of the Earth unite to fight off a swarm of scuzzy-looking alien invaders. It is a fun film, even if parts of it are implausible.

And, by implausible, I don’t mean how the humans shoot down the aliens’ 15-mile-wide, city-destroying space ships with conventional jet fighters. What was truy implausible was the way Americans, let alone everyone else on the planet, managed to join together to fight a global threat. More realistically, if bad guys ever come at us from outer space, Tucker Carlson will insist it is a hoax perpetrated by the Democrats, the NRA will declare it is an FBI false flag ploy to get hold of everyone’s guns, animal rights activists will insist we have no right to harm another species and progressives will say the money spent on fighting aliens should, instead, go to fixing homelessness.

Well, we are, indeed, facing a global threat. It is called climate change. A NASA scientist just announced that the planet is getting hotter at an unprecedented rate — twice as fast as it was heating up in 2005. The American West is experiencing extreme drought and a record heat wave with water reservoirs disappearing, crops abandoned, electrical grids taxed to their limits and wildfires blazing. Meanwhile, polar ice and glaciers everywhere are shrinking at an alarming rate.

The human response? A whole lot of talk and minimal measures to reduce the use of fossil fuels that drive the climate phenomenon. In the U.S. Congress, our representatives struggle to reach agreement that the nation’s roads and bridges need to be fixed, that the right to vote should be defended or that a violent attack on the Capitol should be investigated. Climate Change? Nearly half of the senators and congressmen will not even say it is a real thing, let alone a looming crisis that needs to be addressed immediately.

I do not only fault the Republicans for this foolish myopia. It is human beings in general. Most of us simply cannot get our minds around an existential peril that is so enormous. Instead, we expend our angst and mental energy on transitory issues, like whether Donald Trump will be president again in a few months or a few years.

Bring on the aliens. They might do a better job taking care of our planet.

Actually it is.