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Article Summary and/or Excerpt:
The article argues that the claims that humans are causing a “sixth mass extinction” and that we would need the equivalent of five planet earths for all humans to live at current Western levels, as recently stated on CBS’s “60 minutes” by scientists, are not true. The assertion that five more earths are needed to sustain humanity comes from something called the Ecological Footprint calculation which the author of the article, Michael Shellenberger, debunked with a group of other analysts and scientists ten years ago in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, PLOS Biology. The article claims that reducing carbon emissions requires neither that rich nations become poor nor that poor nations remain poor. Rather, it simply requires that we move toward energy sources that produce fewer carbon emissions, namely natural gas and nuclear.