4 ms·
That's recursive reasoning because a child also eats, travels by car and by airplane. It's also equivalent to saying: Kill yourself because you cause 58.6t CO2
by dmichulke 8y ago
That's recursive reasoning because a child also eats, travels by car and by airplane.
It's also equivalent to saying: Kill yourself because you cause 58.6t CO2 (unless children cause more CO2 than adults which would be absurd because children don't take a lot of emission-relevant decisions)
- drankula3 8y agoLimiting further population increase is in no way equivalent to saying kill yourself. This is a gross exaggeration.
- dmichulke 8y agoI'm just saying it logically follows that killing yourself is likely even better than not having children. I consider it a failure of the study if it says "don't have kids" if (and only if) its original aim was to show how that can be done without drastic measures (such as "kill all humans", "don't have kids", ...). It's like suggesting to not have kids in order to fight cancer. Yes, absolute cancer occurrences will decrease if you don't have kids, yet we have not in any way addressed the underlying problem. EDIT: Previously I said "absolute cancer rates" where I should have said absolute cancer occurrences
- drankula3 8y agoFighting cancer involves lowering cancer rates in each individual person. Individual likelihood of cancer is unaffected by the global population. Fighting climate change involves lowering CO2 rates for the globe, and is heavily influenced by the global population and the population of rich countries.
- dmichulke 8y ago> Fighting climate change involves lowering CO2 rates Exactly, and not having kids doesn't lower CO2 rates per capita, it just reduces absolute CO2 emissions. Hence the equivalence that the article's statistics implicitly suggest killing humans reduces CO2 emissions and my claim that this type of info doesn't help at all.
- toasterlovin 8y agoIt reduces absolute CO2 emissions if everyone has less children. Biology tells us that life does not stop reproducing short of extinction level events, however.
- lotsofpulp 8y agoIt's not equivalent since you're already alive. Not producing a child isn't the same as killing one's self in any way.
- tomp 8y agoIn your value system. It's easy to construct a value system where my own life and my future child's life are both worth more than 58 t CO2.
- Zoh0eich 8y agoWell, then you may have a catch-22 where the expense of having your child could cause making the world unlivable for that child thus condemning it or its descendants to non-existence. Thus generalized to the whole population the best action to maintain the ability to have those valued children is to have fewer of them on average. So we're back to the same conclusion.
- throwaway5752 8y agoHow do you reconcile the future warfare and famine risk to your N existing children caused by the additional carbon of your hypothetical N+1 vs your utility of having an N+1th child, though? Because that is the actual formulation.
- toasterlovin 8y agoYou reconcile it by reading some history books and realizing that life has always been tough and that the future probably won't be any tougher than the past.
- ryanmercer 8y agoExcept for the fact we are, in decades, affecting climate in a way that took several millennia previously and we've contaminated the water and air with not only microplastics but all sorts of outright toxic compounds. Then of course we are making species go extinct 1,000 to 10,000 times the background rate because we are contaminating ecosystems, clear-cutting ecosystems and causing ecosystems to collapse by directly influencing climate making it impossible for parts of those ecosystems to survive. Life is already orders of magnitude 'tougher than the past'.