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We don't talk about birth control enough. Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will -

We don't talk about birth control enough. Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will - either as a result of the migrations they do, or through development. We need to reduce the number of humans on Earth.

randomopining 5y ago
Agreed. Yet the term should be foster a sustainable birth rate. A country like Japan is doing this right. Importing migrants from overcrowded countries will only increase the overall number of people reproducing. There's definitely a sweet spot the world should hit.
cool_dude85 5y ago
So we need to "limit population growth" among "some parts of the world" - is it fair to guess that you mean here subsaharan Africa and south Asia? - because they don't consume much CO2 but will? No mention of the parts of the world that, uh, do consume much CO2, and will continue to do so?
- culopatin 5y ago
  Why don’t we just limit it all around? Why does someone need to have 4 kids which then, in rich countries, forces them to get a bigger car, use more energy, cool a bigger home, etc.
  - julienb_sea 5y ago
    You don't need to limit it, as quality of life increases people have less children. Population growth rate is on a steady decline worldwide, and has or will plateau in developed countries in the near future.
  - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
    Just implement carbon taxes based on the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere (probably $200-$500/tonne). This is going to mean about a 5-10% cost of living increase for the typical Westerner - affordable, and beneficial because it will also mean much less air pollution. It would also mean that the 2nd/3rd world would build up with renewable energy and electric transport from the ground up, instead of with fossil fuel infrastructure which will be difficult to replace.
    - twobitshifter 5y ago
      It’s a nice idea, but all consumption taxes are unpopular and federal tax revenues are just thrown into one big pile. Can we just spend a trillion a year to remove the CO2 instead?
      - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
        CO2 removal (and storage) at scale is impossible. We would basically have to recreate the Azolla event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event We already have condensed carbon - in the ground, stable, in the form of coal, natural gas, and oil. We need to just stop digging it out and burning it. There's really no getting around the need for a direct and transparent price on carbon. The health benefits from lower air pollution alone would probably pay for the transition itself. For example, at just about $15/tonne, coal is immediately dead (doubled in price) as an electricity source: https://www.resources.org/common-resources/calculating-various-fuel-prices-under-a-carbon-tax/ https://www.resources.org/common-resources/calculating-vario... Whereas current techniques are coming in at about $500/tonne for CO2 removal.
- randomopining 5y ago
  Both can be done at the same time lol! Realistically those populations are gonna grow at a crazy rate. Every country needs to adopt a minimal growth rate and be rewarded for being sustainable.
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  Per-capita CO2 usage is not really a relevant measure. What matters a lot more is CO2 efficiency. That can be determined by CO2 per unit of GDP, and CO2 per scientific article. For example, Pakistan has about the same level of scientific output as Slovakia [1], and 28x the GDP. Pakistan's population is 40x that of Slovakia. Slovakia's per-capita CO2 output is 7.1 tonnes, vs Pakistan 0.87 tonnes. But actually, per unit of CO2, Slovakia is substantially more efficient than Pakistan in terms of economic and scientific output: Slovakia is 4.9x more efficient than Pakistan at scientific output per unit of CO2, and 1.8x as efficient for GDP. You can see similar things across the world when comparing highly efficient Western countries to inefficient 2nd and 3rd world countries. But its true that Western countries must decarbonise electricity generation and transport, and then support/force others to do the same. [1] https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/global/All/score https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/glo... This is why cap and trade systems are much less fair than a global carbon tax. Countries, individuals, businesses should be able to emit CO2 if they think that the return is justified against the cost. Meanwhile, low-value and inefficient output should be eliminated as much as possible.
  - amrocha 5y ago
    You're assuming that GDP and papers per CO2 emitted are good measures of efficiency, and therefore of what are good uses of CO2. This is a false assumption. The reason African countries don't produce as many papers is not that they're less "efficient" than anyone else, it's the geopolitical history of the region. Likewise for GDP. I wanted to comment on what you said about a global carbon tax for countries, individuals and businesses though. I really don't think that's a good way to go. I'm assuming you mean a significant carbon tax, because a small tax wouldn't do much in the time we need it to. A carbon tax for corporations banks everything on the hope that it will be profitable to move away from fossil fuels in the near future. The cost of failure is a catastrophic global crisis. How do you financially factor that in? How much profit does an activity need to generate for it to be worth causing a global catastrophe? The cost is immeasurable, so you can't put a price on it. Not to mention you might create perverse incentives. An oil company might decide it's financially worth it to emit tons of CO2, pay a fine, cause sea levels to rise, and then corner the market on building inland. There is literally no monetary value that justifies the trajectory we're on. For individuals, a significant carbon tax means rich people get to emit CO2, and poor people don't. Rich people get to sail on their yachts, and poor people starve because they have to pay more for food. At a national scale, it's even worse. Rich countries that got rich off of fossil fuels get to keep emitting CO2 as they see fit. Poor countries that were exploited by the rich countries for slaves or resources have to beg for help. Legislative solutions don't have any of these problem. Ban yachts. Subsidize food. Ban cars. Stop oil extraction. Build public transit. Decrease meat production. Embargo countries that keep emitting CO2. Yeah, these are hard things to do, but they're the only thing we can reliably do. Taking the awful system that got us to where we're at today, adding incentives around it to fix it, and hoping that it works well enough within 10 years so that we don't drive ourselves to extinction is not a good plan. I personally think the economic system we have today is inherently unfixable, but even if you think there is a way of using it for good, are you willing to bet the Earth that we'll find the right configuration for it in time to stop global catastrophe? I wouldn't take that bet
- prvc 5y ago
  In almost all countries in the global North, the pop. growth rate is already far below replacement. There's nothing nefarious, contrary to your insinuation, about focusing on populations that are actually increasing.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Its not just a matter of birth control. In many of these countries, there are ingrained patriarchal practices which lead to men pushing for their family unit (which sometimes includes multiple wives) to simply have as many children as possible. In other cases, its a ponzi scheme, where people have an excessive number of children in order to ensure their own livelihood in old age. The solution is probably to stop sending all forms of food aid, to stop interfering in local and regional conflicts, and to replace all aid with education, abortion and contraception for women. For example, in countries like Somalia, about half of the population rely on food aid for survival [1], but the fertility rate is 6.07 children per woman. The population is forecast to double in the next 25 years [2]. It would seem reasonable to me that if we are offering food aid, that we also require all recipients to undertake long-term contraception. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/somalia-people-depend-on-food-aid-to-prevent-deaths/a-37855420 https://www.dw.com/en/somalia-people-depend-on-food-aid-to-p... [2] https://www.populationpyramid.net/somalia/2021/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/somalia/2021/
- jandrese 5y ago
  Telling people to have fewer children in an area where few children make it to adulthood due to factors like poor healthcare, war, crime, etc... is kind of cruel and likely to be ineffective. There's a lot of evidence that simply improving the standards of living will reduce birthrates naturally. It's better to attack the cause than the effect.
  - koheripbal 5y ago
    Humans ARE the cause.
    - willmadden 5y ago
      I'm leaning more towards solar activity and H2O myself.
      - imtringued 5y ago
aww_dang 5y ago
I think you'll find that most of the organizations promoting climate apocalypse agree with your ideas about population control. Interestingly, they proposed population control before promoting the climate agenda. Many view fear of a climate apocalypse as a vehicle to advance the preexisting agenda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Biodemography_and_Social_Biology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Biodemography_and_... https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-lessons-of-the-american-eugenics-movement https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-le... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation#Eugenics_and_Nazi_racial_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation#Eugenic...
- WalterBright 5y ago
  I also see climate change being adopted by people to advance their unrelated causes. For example, AOC's "Green New Deal" proposal was full of social justice programs. Socialism is often put forward as the solution to climate change, although socialist countries have a very poor track record of environmental stewardship. Free markets, on the other hand, produce the necessary surplus needed to address environmentalism, i.e. free market countries can afford to address it. Marginal economies cannot.
  - cure 5y ago
    > For example, AOC's "Green New Deal" proposal was full of social justice programs. Socialism is often put forward as the solution to climate change, although socialist countries have a very poor track record of environmental stewardship. Which "socialist" countries are those? Do you mean (ex-)communist countries instead? Socialism != communism.
    - WalterBright 5y ago
      A better argument you could make is name a socialist country (use whatever definition of socialism works for you) that has a better environmental track record.
wolfretcrap 5y ago
I live in India, even after working hard and making good money it's not possible to live a comfortable live here. There's no space for you, everything is packed up in tiny spaces. Yet some people keep reproducing here, it's true birth rate has fallen in educated people but there are simply too many people at the bottom here in India so our population isn't going to come done anytime soon
- tomerico 5y ago
  India's women fertility rate is already below replacement level if you consider the gender imbalance.
  - wolfretcrap 5y ago
    Yes but even at current population level with 1.5 kid per women, it's still very difficult to achieve quality life for everyone
coldtea 5y ago
>Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will A, the "kicking the ladder" argument. We had a good run in the West over-consuming and producting Co2, and we continue to be at the top (including the Co2 we outsource to our global outsourced factories for our consumption), but others shouldn't. Before we talk about over-population in e.g. Africa and India, why not talk about cutting down on consumption in the US (#2 co2 global producer with just 5% of the global population - and that's even not including the co2 produced in China for products the US companies ordered/will consume/sell). Giving a good example how more people can live with less? Else it's "let us keep our mega-polluting way of life and you better stop having kids so we are not inconvenienced". (It's also often accompanied with quotes from westerners not having children "for the planet", when they just do it for their career, or to avoid any obstacles like kids on their personal "journey" to consumption and fun).
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > A, the "kicking the ladder" argument. We had a good run in the West over-consuming and producing Co2, and we continue to be at the top (including the Co2 we outsource to our global outsourced factories for our consumption), but others shouldn't. Developing economies don't have to imitate everything the west did. Solar technology and cheap battery storage can be built from scratch instead of retrofitted.
  - esarbe 5y ago
    Indeed. And there's a good argument to be made that industrialized countries have an obligation to help building that infrastructure.
    - teachingassist 5y ago
      Isn't this the canonical historical justification for colonialism? That colonialist barons are helping the local population by improving infrastructure for them? (While massively enriching themselves) I don't think that really worked out well. The exploited wealth (both from resources and labour) arguably contributed to our current position, where unlimited greed at others' expense and total exploitation and destruction of the planet's resources is seen as noble. Continuing this theme with modern-day Western corporations seeking further profit extraction is a tragedy.
thorwasdfasdf 5y ago
i don't why this is being downvoted. He's abosultely right, if you want to reduce CO2, you need to reduce the number things that cause it: Humans. The alternative: Asking each human to reduce their C02 output won't get you very, especially since most of our individual output is more influence by govt policy rather than our own actions, for instance: commute distances, etc.
- codebje 5y ago
  Perhaps we could alter government policy then?
justaman 5y ago
Microplastics and other chemicals infiltrating our food and water supply has had a negative effect on male sperm efficacy. We also see population replacement weening in highly developed nations such as the US and Japan. Perhaps there are systems at play beyond our ken. We are merely part of the ecosystem, not its master.
esarbe 5y ago
Good news everyone! > We need to reduce the number of humans on Earth. I'm happy to point out that this is not the case. We're already peak child and the next two billion will not come from population growth but from population replacement[0] (Thanks, Hans. RIP, I loved you), where children replace the people in previous cohorts that never made it to reproductive age. The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. Many countries on earth already and most countries on earth in about twenty years will have problems maintaining their population as it is. Fertility has been dropping all over the globe, with a few exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa. No, really. There's nothing we can do about the people we already have and there are barely any new babies arriving. What we do need to worry about is population migrations. We need to make it easier for people to migrate. We need to set up political and social infrastructure to welcome people from places that climate change has made inhospitable. Since most of the world will be suffering from over aging and from a lack of births, these migrants will be dearly needed. So, no need to talk about birth control, let's talk about immigration reform instead! [0] https://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.gapminder.org/
- greeneggs 5y ago
  > The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. It doesn't look like it. The UN predicts the population will be ~10.5 billion in 2070. Of course, there is a large range of uncertainty. [1] Given sustainability limits, the cost to the environment (and to humans) of going from 10 to 11 billion is a lot worse than the cost of going from 5 to 6 billion, say. (For example, there's only so many fish in the sea.) [1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/900 https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
  - esarbe 5y ago
    > The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. Sorry, I should have been more exact in my choice of words with this regard, mea culpa. Yes, total human population is expected to grow. But this growth is limited to very few places, especially found in sub-Saharan Africa (and strangely: the USA). If you look at places like West Asia, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, the more-developed-group of countries or the middle-income group of countries you will see that all across the board population is expected to fall within 50 years. This groups of countries will have a desperate worker shortage in the given time frame and we should start thinking how we can accommodate the needs of both immigrants and residents alike. Fertility is already falling, rapidly. There's not much that we can do in that regard (some countries are even trying to raise total fertility). We will not get rid of the people we already have. (Well, not in any way, shape or form that is ethically and worth further discussion). I agree that we need to have a good and hard think about our resource management. We need to reduce waste. We need to reduce our footprint. We need to stop the predatory ecosystem exploitation we're currently practicing. We're moving very fast towards a cliff. >> The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. I really should be more careful how to phrase my argument. Thanks for pointing it out.
yongjik 5y ago
We don't talk about birth control much because: (1) the majority of CO2 emission is happening in North America, China, Europe, and industrial part of Asia, none of which exhibits high birth rate. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re... (2) Birth control is already being tackled with in developing countries. It's just not being talked much in the context of global warming, because (1). (3) Talking about population when the majority of CO2 is emitted by a small number of wealthy countries (with low birthrate) seems like focusing on the wrong thing. Especially since almost all arguing about it online are living in one of those wealthy countries. Yes, it would be really convenient for me if climate problem could be solved by telling Africans to get their shit together, but it's not happening that way.
- megablast 5y ago
  How is birth rate being tackled?? Yes, it’s dropping, but not because of any active effort to drop it.
  - andrewljohnson 5y ago
    China?
  - yongjik 5y ago
    Like this? https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-development/family-planning https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-dev... I mean, if you're saying "We should do more," then I wholeheartedly agree. I just don't think it will make a meaningful dent on CO2 emission in the short to mid term.
sam345 5y ago
About That Overpopulation https://slate.com/technology/2013/01/world-population-may-actually-start-declining-not-exploding.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/01/world-population-may-ac... The Bomb That Didn't Explode: Why Our Fears About Population Growth Didn't Come True https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813801640/the-bomb-that-didnt-explode-why-our-fears-about-population-growth-didn-t-come-tr https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813801640/the-bomb-that-didnt... And a debate : https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/ECSP7-forum.pdf https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/docum...
swader999 5y ago
You go first then?

randomopining 5y ago

Agreed. Yet the term should be foster a sustainable birth rate. A country like Japan is doing this right. Importing migrants from overcrowded countries will only increase the overall number of people reproducing. There's definitely a sweet spot the world should hit.

cool_dude85 5y ago

So we need to "limit population growth" among "some parts of the world" - is it fair to guess that you mean here subsaharan Africa and south Asia? - because they don't consume much CO2 but will? No mention of the parts of the world that, uh, do consume much CO2, and will continue to do so?

culopatin 5y ago
Why don’t we just limit it all around? Why does someone need to have 4 kids which then, in rich countries, forces them to get a bigger car, use more energy, cool a bigger home, etc.
- julienb_sea 5y ago
  You don't need to limit it, as quality of life increases people have less children. Population growth rate is on a steady decline worldwide, and has or will plateau in developed countries in the near future.
- ArkanExplorer 5y ago
  Just implement carbon taxes based on the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere (probably $200-$500/tonne). This is going to mean about a 5-10% cost of living increase for the typical Westerner - affordable, and beneficial because it will also mean much less air pollution. It would also mean that the 2nd/3rd world would build up with renewable energy and electric transport from the ground up, instead of with fossil fuel infrastructure which will be difficult to replace.
  - twobitshifter 5y ago
    It’s a nice idea, but all consumption taxes are unpopular and federal tax revenues are just thrown into one big pile. Can we just spend a trillion a year to remove the CO2 instead?
    - ArkanExplorer 5y ago
      CO2 removal (and storage) at scale is impossible. We would basically have to recreate the Azolla event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event We already have condensed carbon - in the ground, stable, in the form of coal, natural gas, and oil. We need to just stop digging it out and burning it. There's really no getting around the need for a direct and transparent price on carbon. The health benefits from lower air pollution alone would probably pay for the transition itself. For example, at just about $15/tonne, coal is immediately dead (doubled in price) as an electricity source: https://www.resources.org/common-resources/calculating-various-fuel-prices-under-a-carbon-tax/ https://www.resources.org/common-resources/calculating-vario... Whereas current techniques are coming in at about $500/tonne for CO2 removal.
randomopining 5y ago
Both can be done at the same time lol! Realistically those populations are gonna grow at a crazy rate. Every country needs to adopt a minimal growth rate and be rewarded for being sustainable.
ArkanExplorer 5y ago
Per-capita CO2 usage is not really a relevant measure. What matters a lot more is CO2 efficiency. That can be determined by CO2 per unit of GDP, and CO2 per scientific article. For example, Pakistan has about the same level of scientific output as Slovakia [1], and 28x the GDP. Pakistan's population is 40x that of Slovakia. Slovakia's per-capita CO2 output is 7.1 tonnes, vs Pakistan 0.87 tonnes. But actually, per unit of CO2, Slovakia is substantially more efficient than Pakistan in terms of economic and scientific output: Slovakia is 4.9x more efficient than Pakistan at scientific output per unit of CO2, and 1.8x as efficient for GDP. You can see similar things across the world when comparing highly efficient Western countries to inefficient 2nd and 3rd world countries. But its true that Western countries must decarbonise electricity generation and transport, and then support/force others to do the same. [1] https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/global/All/score https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs/generate/All/glo... This is why cap and trade systems are much less fair than a global carbon tax. Countries, individuals, businesses should be able to emit CO2 if they think that the return is justified against the cost. Meanwhile, low-value and inefficient output should be eliminated as much as possible.
- amrocha 5y ago
  You're assuming that GDP and papers per CO2 emitted are good measures of efficiency, and therefore of what are good uses of CO2. This is a false assumption. The reason African countries don't produce as many papers is not that they're less "efficient" than anyone else, it's the geopolitical history of the region. Likewise for GDP. I wanted to comment on what you said about a global carbon tax for countries, individuals and businesses though. I really don't think that's a good way to go. I'm assuming you mean a significant carbon tax, because a small tax wouldn't do much in the time we need it to. A carbon tax for corporations banks everything on the hope that it will be profitable to move away from fossil fuels in the near future. The cost of failure is a catastrophic global crisis. How do you financially factor that in? How much profit does an activity need to generate for it to be worth causing a global catastrophe? The cost is immeasurable, so you can't put a price on it. Not to mention you might create perverse incentives. An oil company might decide it's financially worth it to emit tons of CO2, pay a fine, cause sea levels to rise, and then corner the market on building inland. There is literally no monetary value that justifies the trajectory we're on. For individuals, a significant carbon tax means rich people get to emit CO2, and poor people don't. Rich people get to sail on their yachts, and poor people starve because they have to pay more for food. At a national scale, it's even worse. Rich countries that got rich off of fossil fuels get to keep emitting CO2 as they see fit. Poor countries that were exploited by the rich countries for slaves or resources have to beg for help. Legislative solutions don't have any of these problem. Ban yachts. Subsidize food. Ban cars. Stop oil extraction. Build public transit. Decrease meat production. Embargo countries that keep emitting CO2. Yeah, these are hard things to do, but they're the only thing we can reliably do. Taking the awful system that got us to where we're at today, adding incentives around it to fix it, and hoping that it works well enough within 10 years so that we don't drive ourselves to extinction is not a good plan. I personally think the economic system we have today is inherently unfixable, but even if you think there is a way of using it for good, are you willing to bet the Earth that we'll find the right configuration for it in time to stop global catastrophe? I wouldn't take that bet
prvc 5y ago
In almost all countries in the global North, the pop. growth rate is already far below replacement. There's nothing nefarious, contrary to your insinuation, about focusing on populations that are actually increasing.

ArkanExplorer 5y ago

Its not just a matter of birth control. In many of these countries, there are ingrained patriarchal practices which lead to men pushing for their family unit (which sometimes includes multiple wives) to simply have as many children as possible. In other cases, its a ponzi scheme, where people have an excessive number of children in order to ensure their own livelihood in old age. The solution is probably to stop sending all forms of food aid, to stop interfering in local and regional conflicts, and to replace all aid with education, abortion and contraception for women. For example, in countries like Somalia, about half of the population rely on food aid for survival [1], but the fertility rate is 6.07 children per woman. The population is forecast to double in the next 25 years [2]. It would seem reasonable to me that if we are offering food aid, that we also require all recipients to undertake long-term contraception. [1] https://www.dw.com/en/somalia-people-depend-on-food-aid-to-prevent-deaths/a-37855420 https://www.dw.com/en/somalia-people-depend-on-food-aid-to-p... [2] https://www.populationpyramid.net/somalia/2021/ https://www.populationpyramid.net/somalia/2021/

jandrese 5y ago
Telling people to have fewer children in an area where few children make it to adulthood due to factors like poor healthcare, war, crime, etc... is kind of cruel and likely to be ineffective. There's a lot of evidence that simply improving the standards of living will reduce birthrates naturally. It's better to attack the cause than the effect.
- koheripbal 5y ago
  Humans ARE the cause.
  - willmadden 5y ago
    I'm leaning more towards solar activity and H2O myself.
    - imtringued 5y ago

aww_dang 5y ago

I think you'll find that most of the organizations promoting climate apocalypse agree with your ideas about population control. Interestingly, they proposed population control before promoting the climate agenda. Many view fear of a climate apocalypse as a vehicle to advance the preexisting agenda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_Council https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Biodemography_and_Social_Biology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_for_Biodemography_and_... https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-lessons-of-the-american-eugenics-movement https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-le... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation#Eugenics_and_Nazi_racial_studies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Foundation#Eugenic...

WalterBright 5y ago
I also see climate change being adopted by people to advance their unrelated causes. For example, AOC's "Green New Deal" proposal was full of social justice programs. Socialism is often put forward as the solution to climate change, although socialist countries have a very poor track record of environmental stewardship. Free markets, on the other hand, produce the necessary surplus needed to address environmentalism, i.e. free market countries can afford to address it. Marginal economies cannot.
- cure 5y ago
  > For example, AOC's "Green New Deal" proposal was full of social justice programs. Socialism is often put forward as the solution to climate change, although socialist countries have a very poor track record of environmental stewardship. Which "socialist" countries are those? Do you mean (ex-)communist countries instead? Socialism != communism.
  - WalterBright 5y ago
    A better argument you could make is name a socialist country (use whatever definition of socialism works for you) that has a better environmental track record.

wolfretcrap 5y ago

I live in India, even after working hard and making good money it's not possible to live a comfortable live here. There's no space for you, everything is packed up in tiny spaces. Yet some people keep reproducing here, it's true birth rate has fallen in educated people but there are simply too many people at the bottom here in India so our population isn't going to come done anytime soon

tomerico 5y ago
India's women fertility rate is already below replacement level if you consider the gender imbalance.
- wolfretcrap 5y ago
  Yes but even at current population level with 1.5 kid per women, it's still very difficult to achieve quality life for everyone

coldtea 5y ago

>Some parts of the world have exploding populations, and while they don't consume much CO2 at the moment, they will A, the "kicking the ladder" argument. We had a good run in the West over-consuming and producting Co2, and we continue to be at the top (including the Co2 we outsource to our global outsourced factories for our consumption), but others shouldn't. Before we talk about over-population in e.g. Africa and India, why not talk about cutting down on consumption in the US (#2 co2 global producer with just 5% of the global population - and that's even not including the co2 produced in China for products the US companies ordered/will consume/sell). Giving a good example how more people can live with less? Else it's "let us keep our mega-polluting way of life and you better stop having kids so we are not inconvenienced". (It's also often accompanied with quotes from westerners not having children "for the planet", when they just do it for their career, or to avoid any obstacles like kids on their personal "journey" to consumption and fun).

908B64B197 5y ago
> A, the "kicking the ladder" argument. We had a good run in the West over-consuming and producing Co2, and we continue to be at the top (including the Co2 we outsource to our global outsourced factories for our consumption), but others shouldn't. Developing economies don't have to imitate everything the west did. Solar technology and cheap battery storage can be built from scratch instead of retrofitted.
- esarbe 5y ago
  Indeed. And there's a good argument to be made that industrialized countries have an obligation to help building that infrastructure.
  - teachingassist 5y ago
    Isn't this the canonical historical justification for colonialism? That colonialist barons are helping the local population by improving infrastructure for them? (While massively enriching themselves) I don't think that really worked out well. The exploited wealth (both from resources and labour) arguably contributed to our current position, where unlimited greed at others' expense and total exploitation and destruction of the planet's resources is seen as noble. Continuing this theme with modern-day Western corporations seeking further profit extraction is a tragedy.

thorwasdfasdf 5y ago

i don't why this is being downvoted. He's abosultely right, if you want to reduce CO2, you need to reduce the number things that cause it: Humans. The alternative: Asking each human to reduce their C02 output won't get you very, especially since most of our individual output is more influence by govt policy rather than our own actions, for instance: commute distances, etc.

codebje 5y ago
Perhaps we could alter government policy then?

justaman 5y ago

Microplastics and other chemicals infiltrating our food and water supply has had a negative effect on male sperm efficacy. We also see population replacement weening in highly developed nations such as the US and Japan. Perhaps there are systems at play beyond our ken. We are merely part of the ecosystem, not its master.

esarbe 5y ago

Good news everyone! > We need to reduce the number of humans on Earth. I'm happy to point out that this is not the case. We're already peak child and the next two billion will not come from population growth but from population replacement[0] (Thanks, Hans. RIP, I loved you), where children replace the people in previous cohorts that never made it to reproductive age. The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. Many countries on earth already and most countries on earth in about twenty years will have problems maintaining their population as it is. Fertility has been dropping all over the globe, with a few exceptions in sub-Saharan Africa. No, really. There's nothing we can do about the people we already have and there are barely any new babies arriving. What we do need to worry about is population migrations. We need to make it easier for people to migrate. We need to set up political and social infrastructure to welcome people from places that climate change has made inhospitable. Since most of the world will be suffering from over aging and from a lack of births, these migrants will be dearly needed. So, no need to talk about birth control, let's talk about immigration reform instead! [0] https://www.gapminder.org/ https://www.gapminder.org/

greeneggs 5y ago
> The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. It doesn't look like it. The UN predicts the population will be ~10.5 billion in 2070. Of course, there is a large range of uncertainty. [1] Given sustainability limits, the cost to the environment (and to humans) of going from 10 to 11 billion is a lot worse than the cost of going from 5 to 6 billion, say. (For example, there's only so many fish in the sea.) [1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/900 https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/9...
- esarbe 5y ago
  > The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. Sorry, I should have been more exact in my choice of words with this regard, mea culpa. Yes, total human population is expected to grow. But this growth is limited to very few places, especially found in sub-Saharan Africa (and strangely: the USA). If you look at places like West Asia, Northern Europe, Southern Europe, the more-developed-group of countries or the middle-income group of countries you will see that all across the board population is expected to fall within 50 years. This groups of countries will have a desperate worker shortage in the given time frame and we should start thinking how we can accommodate the needs of both immigrants and residents alike. Fertility is already falling, rapidly. There's not much that we can do in that regard (some countries are even trying to raise total fertility). We will not get rid of the people we already have. (Well, not in any way, shape or form that is ethically and worth further discussion). I agree that we need to have a good and hard think about our resource management. We need to reduce waste. We need to reduce our footprint. We need to stop the predatory ecosystem exploitation we're currently practicing. We're moving very fast towards a cliff. >> The number of humans will reduce rather drastically in the next fifty years. I really should be more careful how to phrase my argument. Thanks for pointing it out.

yongjik 5y ago

We don't talk about birth control much because: (1) the majority of CO2 emission is happening in North America, China, Europe, and industrial part of Asia, none of which exhibits high birth rate. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-region https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co-emissions-by-re... (2) Birth control is already being tackled with in developing countries. It's just not being talked much in the context of global warming, because (1). (3) Talking about population when the majority of CO2 is emitted by a small number of wealthy countries (with low birthrate) seems like focusing on the wrong thing. Especially since almost all arguing about it online are living in one of those wealthy countries. Yes, it would be really convenient for me if climate problem could be solved by telling Africans to get their shit together, but it's not happening that way.

megablast 5y ago
How is birth rate being tackled?? Yes, it’s dropping, but not because of any active effort to drop it.
- andrewljohnson 5y ago
  China?
- yongjik 5y ago
  Like this? https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-development/family-planning https://www.gatesfoundation.org/our-work/programs/global-dev... I mean, if you're saying "We should do more," then I wholeheartedly agree. I just don't think it will make a meaningful dent on CO2 emission in the short to mid term.

sam345 5y ago

About That Overpopulation https://slate.com/technology/2013/01/world-population-may-actually-start-declining-not-exploding.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/01/world-population-may-ac... The Bomb That Didn't Explode: Why Our Fears About Population Growth Didn't Come True https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813801640/the-bomb-that-didnt-explode-why-our-fears-about-population-growth-didn-t-come-tr https://www.npr.org/2020/03/09/813801640/the-bomb-that-didnt... And a debate : https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/documents/publication/ECSP7-forum.pdf https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/media/docum...

swader999 5y ago

You go first then?