"It's better to reign in hell."

Poverty is worse than most natural disasters and worse than most of the predicted consequences of climate change. I'm willing to bet that the infant mortality rate in Miami is lower during a category five hurricane than it is in a crushingly poor society in perfect weather.

People will burn the world to escape poverty. It's better to reign in hell.

Poverty is also relative due not only to the hedonic treadmill effect but to relative differences in cost of living. An American cannot even eat on $2k/year and in many places you need a minimum of $40k+ per year to afford basic housing. We have an inflationary economy, which means that anything not increasing is decreasing. You can plunge a first world person into poverty by just not inflating their wages for a while. Now add a ridiculous debt load and high unemployment.

This is why we need to drop what I call "abstinence based environmentalism." The only hope that we have of evading a global environmental catastrophe is paradoxically to increase wealth and standard of living as much as possible. Not only does this make people open to conservation but it also reduces birth rates. Trying to deny wealth to conserve resources will have the paradoxical effect of promoting short term greed and increasing birth rates. It will also lead to conflict and destabilize the international political order, making large scale cooperation on global environmental challenges impossible.

First world morons who romanticize poverty drive me nuts. These folks are either hopelessly naive, delusional, or crypto-elitist. I heard it put this way once: "Rap music comes mostly from poor inner city neighborhoods. That's why it's full of references to money and getting rich. Poor people know that money actually does matter. Only rich people can afford the luxury of not caring about money." I forget where I read that (years ago) but it's spot on.