The global fertility rate is now close to the replacement rate of 2.1, China is at 1.5. The children will pay the biggest price for any die-offs, but absent a global policy, we could create zones of natural preserves, much like the national marine reserve in Hawaii. For example, most of the sea area around Antartica up to the 55th parallel. Similarly, the ideas like the northeast passage in the north should be revisited. Much of the route is to transport LNG. Within each country the goal is simply to reestablish the natural services (species loss already happened) to where they were at say the 350 ppm level. Otherwise we really do go off a cliff as in the old Olduvai theory from back in the day. It assumes political incompetence and greed are givens. We’ll see soon.
Well take that, Al Gore!
/s
Right up to the end, if a real estate deal looks cheap enough, there will be more than one sucker who will go all in. It’s the 'Merican dream. And, they will pay cash if they have it.
I always say, it doesn’t matter what individual countries do population wise, it’s the total number of people globally that matters. .
Fertility rate should continue to slow, and absolute population begin to decline already in 2050. The problem is that we collectively consume resources at about the rate of 5 earths, so an 80% reduction in population or 80% reduction in consumption, or a substantial gain in technological efficiency is needed to reach a sustainable level. A chaotic collapse is not good, but we’ve been in things-fall-apart mode before. Russians got a taste of rapid collapse in the 1998 financial crisis. With the payment system seized up, people reverted to barter. Watermelons for haircuts. Sexual services for gasoline. Errsnds for vodka. It gets tiring very quickly. A good start is for the biggest polluters to stop with the phony accounting. For example, the US, by importing goods from China, offshores its pollution. About 20–30% of the entire US carbon footprint is embedded or embodied carbon, mostly generated for our “benefit” in China. In addition, as the current Finnish government crisis reveals, the assertions about carbon uptake of forests as noted above assumed healthy forests as in pre-industrial times. Boreal and tropical forests are suffering, and a lot of forest was simply chopped down in more temperate climates over the last few centuries. Indiana is a great case in point. I’m sure we could both write books on this topic, but the reality is that we are now already in an existential emergency. It took a couple hundred years to arrive, and will take that long just to stop ongoing degradation and begin repairs of natural systems.
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Any alcoholic alternative is equally off limits. No exception made for mead.
Yes.
Any form of intoxication is prohibited.
Thank you for being decisive! I’m just so used to Talmudic casuistry – this is, somewhat, refreshing – if dangerously proscriptive/draconian. 
Born and bred Muslim. A member of mainstream Islam my entire life. Not proscriptive nor draconian. Just clear 
No, not until someone cuts your hands off for stealing beans when you are eight and starving – that would be draconian… I say this because I ran away from my hellhole of a home when I was a kid, hopped on a boxcar, jumped out at a little town store and stole a can of tuna fish. Then sat on a curb with out any way to open the damned can. I sat crying, and a local yokel cop took out his pistol and told me he could shoot me for theft. Not an event I could ever erase. But of course, never stole anything again. 
My experience of identifying myself as Muslim on discussion boards is that I am often in danger of being called upon to answer for anything thought, done or said, real or imagined, by anyone identifying as Muslim, or accused of being Muslim, at any time, anywhere.
Answering a question of fact, such as what I meant to do here, therefore becomes complicated for me.
In response to your example, and any others that are brewing, Islam is not draconian but Muslims come in all the psychological shades of humanity.
Who knows what someone is thinking to point a gun at a little kid. So sad to hear about your experience.
I think you replied completely, and appropriately. Direct, to the point. And with an over-arching summary truth about living a Muslim moral life. I appreciate that. I see and hear too many “splitting hairs” arguments, especially in the laws. I’m a born taxonomist – always wanted to know what boxes things and people fit in – classification in biology and in behavior. One of the only times I felt like there might actually be an order to a universe with a “creator” at the head of it was when I truly learned the intricacies in the Periodic Table of the Elements – I think I was in 8th grade, but cannot remember 99% of that year. I blacked it all out, for good psychological reason. Just for the sake of maintaining psychological order.
You did a great job. We all know that we tend to live in the swamps and not on the mountains or in the stars – we have different understandings of the ideal and of the reality of the nitty-gritty. But I like to think that one can always act morally on every occasion, if we have learned what being a moral human being is. Deep bow to you. I like to think I recognize the soul in you.
What a beautiful, lyrical response. Thank you so very much for taking the time to write this 
🥲
Excellent discussion people! 
It’s amazing what we have to go through and experience in life, especially as children trying to figure out how the world works.
I think your assessment is well thought out and probably fairly accurate except for one thing… we don’t know exactly how the earth will react to what we’ve already done to it.
I don’t think we should rely too much on the past to inform what is likely to happen in the future because what we’re doing and the way we’re doing it has never been done before. It won’t take much to overwhelm our institutions on a global scale, where hot spots are cropping up around the world at the same time and crisis abound without pause in one form or another. I just have a sneaky suspicion we could be in for some real surprises.
“… the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.”
--Matthew Arnold