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17B life years could be saved if air pollution was reduced to WHO standards

322 points by nixass 5y ago

danr4 5y ago
Aren't we heading towards overpopulation? in the case... is that a... "good" thing? Seriously curious. 17B is alot.
- codetrotter 5y ago
  From the Wikipedia article on Human overpopulation: > The concept of overpopulation is controversial. A 2015 article in Nature listed overpopulation as a pervasive science myth. Demographic projections suggest that population growth will stabilise in the 21st century, and many experts believe that global resources can meet this increased demand, suggesting a global overpopulation scenario is unlikely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
  - ta1234567890 5y ago
    > suggesting a global overpopulation scenario is unlikely. The world is already overpopulated. We just haven’t completely destroyed it yet. The way we currently run the world is not sustainable long term for even the current population.
    - ben_w 5y ago
      The first statement does not follow automatically from the second. It is not currently run in a sustainable way. It can be, and people are trying change it so it is sustainable. This is hard, but does not appear to be impossible.
      - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
        >It is not currently run in a sustainable way. which creates something of a tautology. Ability to maintain a population in the long run implies 'sustainable'. I guess that given nutrient vats and fusion power we could have a sustainable population of one trillion. It's worth considering what the point of having so many people is....
        ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        "It's worth considering what the point of having so many people is...." What's the point of having people at all, right? Once you answer those questions, is there a number of people you'd like to propose as optimal?
        OneEyedRobot 5y ago
        >Once you answer those questions, is there a number of people you'd like to propose as optimal? That's a good question. I'll take a shot at it even though you're not really asking a question but making a point. Let's say that the one thing that people bring to the table is intelligence and the ability to design complex systems, it's something of an end-run on evolution. How large a population do you need to build modern semiconductors, discover exoplanets, solve physics problems, do a passable version of the arts? I would guess something on the order of 500M-1B which is roughly the number in 1800. You get most of the good and lose most of the bad if you're even slightly careful. The edge conditions of atomic war or a truly large nuclear incident still exist but the rest of our sins cover up well over time with that population.
      - ta1234567890 5y ago
        > It is not currently run in a sustainable way. It can be Can it? That remains to be seen. So in the meantime I would say we are already overpopulated. To be fair, your statement probably means that we have the resources and technology to run the world in a sustainable way, and I would agree with that. But then we also likely have the resources to end hunger, poverty and war, yet those have never been the world’s priorities. When will it be a priority for humans to run the world sustainably? Who knows. But right now it’s definitely not sustainable.
        ben_w 5y ago
        > But then we also likely have the resources to end hunger, poverty and war, yet those have never been the world’s priorities. And yet, all of those things declined; in the case of poverty the decline is in both absolute and relative terms. Certainly more needs to be done in all of these things: we only succeed when we reach the destination, not just when we walk the path. Conversely, every step on that path brings us closer to success and is a reason for optimism.
  - eplanit 5y ago
    To suggest that overpopulation is controversial is itself absurd, as it is fundamental to the science of biology[1]. That a species can reach numbers where their environment and habitat is depleted or otherwise unlivable is fact, not controversy. "Population Control" is certainly controversial, though, as it should be. And, though controversial, it should be considered seriously. Many environmentalists lose their credibility by speaking of "sustainability" on the one hand, but then disputing overpopulation on the other. We need to impact the earth much less, and keeping our numbers down is a very effective way of doing so. That, plus using energy and resources more cleanly and efficiently. [1] https://biologydictionary.net/overpopulation/ https://biologydictionary.net/overpopulation/
    - drivebycomment 5y ago
      The question about human overpopulation is not whether there can be overpopulation, but whether the often popular claim that the earth can not sustain the current or the projected future human population is true. The latter absolutely is debatable - there's no clear evidence that it's impossible (i.e. there's no technically feasible way) to sustain the current or the projected future human population. It absolutely is true that if we maintain the current level of CO2 emissions, it won't be sustainable. But that's not an evidence for overpopulation. If we sustain the current level of pollution, it likely will not be sustainable. But that's once again not an evidence for overpopulation - as we know for most of our resources that there are technical alternatives that can drastically reduce / eliminate them. We know there's more than enough energy. We know how to make our economy carbon-neutral. Most pollution can be controlled. The urban land takes up much less than 1% of the earth land - and we expect the world population to peak around 10B by 2100 (vs 7.7B today). No reason to believe we'll run out of land. There's more than enough headroom to improve the crop yields in poor countries. In the grand scheme of things, we - humanity - know mostly how to create a sustainable technological system that can support 10B population. Whether our politics will allow us to get to such a system is a entirely different problem, and THAT might be our undoing, but I'd argue that's not really an overpopulation problem. Also, the population growth is largely a side-effect of demographic transition - https://populationeducation.org/what-demographic-transition-model/ https://populationeducation.org/what-demographic-transition-.... i.e. it's a transitional side-effect of reducing the human suffering. The only humane and equitable way to move forward is to accelerate the demographic transition (i.e. improve the economic, health, education, etc, systems of all countries in the world to get them to stage4 at least). And, thus, "keep our numbers down" is not only inhumane or inequitable, that's ineffective - the developed countries already mostly stopped growing - e.g. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251591/population-growth-rate-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251591/population-growt... - and it's mostly the poor countries that are growing - i.e. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264687/countries-with-the-highest-population-growth-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264687/countries-with-th... . There's no other humane way to stop poor countries' population growth - the most effective way is to improve their economy, improve their health and healthcare systems, and improve education.
- burlesona 5y ago
  As you’re asking in good faith I don’t see why you’re being downvoted. Population carrying capacity is difficult. We know that given a particular level of technology we can support a particular number of people with global resources in the short term. Intuitively it seems like we’re wrecking the environment and we’re in for a nasty fall when we exhaust those resources. However, Malthusian predictions like that - so far - have a bad track record, because with more people comes more innovation, and so far that innovation has been increasing carrying capacity faster than population growth. Ultimately it looks like the world population is going to stabilize as most people seem to prefer smaller family units once they achieve “western level” of child survival expectations and material wealth. Strangely enough it may be harder to maintain a stable population with our consumption habits if it means that technological advance slows down. That said, for most people all the above is unimportant compared to caring for the living. Preserving and extending life and quality of life is fundamentally good, and shortening human lives to “save the planet” is not. So while you can have the macro level discussion along the lines of “do we really want the population to increase,” for most people if you venture into “should we just let the people who are already alive die sooner than they must” is pretty offensive.
  - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
    I just assume that any population level that can't be maintained on pre-20C. technology is probably dangerous. You'll either see a crack-up in terms of society and/or resource depletion at some point.
- legutierr 5y ago
  Improved quality of life and reduced infant mortality are shown to reduce population growth by creating incentives for people to have fewer children. If you want fewer people, then you want to improve the material well-being if as many people as possible. As it stands, the global population is projected to peak at around 10 billion people some time this century, per current trends.
  - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
    >If you want fewer people, then you want to improve the material well-being of as many people as possible. I'd genuinely like to see that model applied to sub Saharan Africa.
    - foxfluff 5y ago
      https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-by-gdp-per-capita?country=AGO~BEN~BWA~BFA~BDI~CMR~CPV~CAF~COM~COG~CIV~COD~DJI~GNQ~SWZ~ETH~GAB~GMB~GHA~GIN~GNB~KEN~LSO~LBR~MDG~MWI~MUS~MOZ~NAM~NGA~RWA~STP~SEN~SYC~SLE~ZAF~TZA~TGO~UGA~ZMB~ZWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-by-gdp...
      - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
        So you are suggesting that the per-capita material well-being in Nigeria has gone down all this time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#/media/File:Nigeria-demography.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#/media... I don't doubt that wealth can be a factor, but those systems are a whole lot more complicated than that. Money+Low Gini = Low birthrate is a meme as much as it is a primary driver.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    I think this is incomplete. In every case so far a reduction of infant mortality and improved quality of life are coupled with power structures that increase the amount of productive output that is captured by a family, increasing the relative cost of producing children.
- robbrown451 5y ago
  Your argument could be as easily used to say "maybe mass murder isn't a bad thing." The early death of a person who would prefer continue living is, to reasonable people, a tragedy. If overpopulation is really such a problem, I'd think incentivizing the choice to have fewer kids is a reasonable one.
- runesoerensen 5y ago
  Would you consider it a good thing if air pollution kills you?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - junon 5y ago
    To be fair to the GP, this isn't the point they're making. Your argument would be valid if they were positing "it's not like it's me who's going to die." They're asking, in good faith, if the effects of pollution-related deaths would have a net benefit to the world due to overpopulation concerns. Your response is a strawman.
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  While I agree with you on overpopulation, I would guess that the 17B number comes from 8B * 2.something years. Back of the envelope, it's odd that air pollution is around 100x as bad as cigarettes (which admittedly not everyone smokes).
- occz 5y ago
  > Aren't we heading towards overpopulation? No. Population growth slows down as nations rise in economic prosperity, and is projected to cap out at around 11 billion.
  - cgrealy 5y ago
    There's still a pretty reasonable argument to be made that 11 billion is not a sustainable number. I'm not suggesting we start killing people, but we will seriously need to think about how we manage the finite resources of the planet with >1.5x the number of people.
- drivebycomment 5y ago
  Most people die due to various diseases / accident / suicides, thus extending human lives collectively means reducing those human suffering. Implying extending collective human lives as "bad" is basically declaring you don't care about people's suffering and that you'd rather choose more suffering.
clairity 5y ago
imagine if we directed as much attention as covid is getting toward such a more insidious, and more tractable, problem like air (and water) pollution. we could really do something in a relatively short time (like 2-5 years). for instance, we could measurably reduce air pollution by replacing the top 25 most polluting power plants (coal). that might cost on the order of a 100 billion dollars, but that's less than 1% of america's gdp, nevermind the world's.
- newaccount2021 5y ago
  pollution kills slowly, and as a result is imperceptible to the public covid hysteria is just getting started. years from now, decent people will lament that covid hysteria continues to suck all of the oxygen out of the room...and when they do, they will be cancelled fifty years from now, no one will admit to having been part of the covid mobs...but for now, they rule the world
  - epistasis 5y ago
    > years from now, decent people will lament that covid hysteria continues to suck all of the oxygen out of the room...and when they do, they will be cancelled Years from now, people will look back at 1M people in the US that unnecessarily died and marvel at just how inhuman people can be when subjected to political forces. I only wish that current day leaders in the US will look at today's traitors to humanity with the same disdain that future generations will. Only then could we quash the sick disregard for human life that drives us apart.
- DudeInBasement 5y ago
  Those power plants are in China. Good luck
  - rocky1138 5y ago
    The fourth largest coal plant is in Taiwan.
  - jointpdf 5y ago
tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
I expect pollution to be as much of a driver of the push for electric cars as climate change. It's something that affects people directly, immediately and noticeably - it stinks. If I had a vote whether to ban combustion engines from my city (cars, trucks, mopeds, leaf blowers - everything), with a relatively short transition period (say 5 years), I'd be in favor. It would probably initially drive up prices of goods due to a shortage of electric delivery vehicles or the need to repack everything onto smaller local trucks outside the city, but I think it'd be worth it.
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  It would also financially cripple any poor person that relies on a car to get to work. And public transportation won't be viable in the US until cities finally wrap their head around the reality that you need basic security checkpoints at entrances to discourage riff raff from getting in (like in China). If you've ever ridden BART, you know what I mean.
  - wffurr 5y ago
    BART is uniquely bad in that respect. Significantly worse than other North American cities. Chalk it up to Bay Area dysfunction and inequality. Used EVs will be relatively affordable soon and the total cost of ownership is significantly lower.
    - refulgentis 5y ago
      > Used EVs will be relatively affordable soon We're very far away from crossing under 30K, much less 10K
      - cyberbanjo 5y ago
        Used Chevy volt for 5-15k, it seems you can get a sub 10k electric car already?
        5y ago
dqpb 5y ago
This seems like a poor model of population dynamics. Isn’t it possible that earlier deaths in the elderly population might act as an economic stimulus that increases birth rate in the younger population? (So the net change in life years would not be 17bn). Edit: I assume the downvotes are suggesting my logic is wrong. It would be helpful to hear why.
- MattRix 5y ago
  Even if that were true, it wouldn’t be a good thing.
  - dqpb 5y ago
    I didn’t say it would be a good thing. I’m just questioning the math.
- dm319 5y ago
  > It would be helpful to hear why. Granny dying does not make me broody.
  - dqpb 5y ago
    So you’re arguing the decrease in average lifespan effects fecundity of the younger population. That might be true, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
meeshoo 5y ago
I think there has been a miscalculation. It's 17.26 billion years, not 17 billion years.
- eCa 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding
  - meeshoo 5y ago
    I know they rounded up that number, but that's not correct, nor scientific. Do we fucking love science or not? 0.1 billion years is 100 million years, you can't just round them up like they don't mean anything.
    - IAmLiterallyAB 5y ago
      It's perfectly acceptable to round in an article summary like this. Such a ridiculous thing to complain about
- climate_death 5y ago
  Yes, 260 million years is nothing to sneeze at, especially considering that earth is only about 5,000 years old!
- IAmLiterallyAB 5y ago
  ...I swear HN comments get dumber every day. Is this satire???
  - meeshoo 5y ago
    That is not satire. Satire is recognized as such by smart people and you are a smart person, because you don't like dumb comments. Ergo, since a smart person like yourself didn't see satire, there is none. QED.
josh_today 5y ago
There’s a zero percent chance this can be validated but a 100% chance it will be used to increase government control. What’s being done to address the 100 corporations that cause 70% of the world’s emissions? Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/10/just-100-firms-attributable-for-71-percent-of-global-emissions-report-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/10/just-100-firms-attributable-...
- noja 5y ago
  Government control of what exactly? Lowering emissions?
  - Splognosticus 5y ago
    Egh, right? It's kind of annoying how whenever anyone suggests trying anything to improve society someone comes out of the woodwork to cry about government overreach. Never an argument about the merits of the proposal, just some trite hand-wringing that somewhere somehow someone might be able to use it to their political advantage. Never even an explanation of why this one thing would be so dangerous when governments already by nature have vast authority to control pretty much anything they want. Worst of all you can't reason against it, since it's not a position of reason. Regardless of what point you make they'll just dig in and ignore them. :(
  - josh_today 5y ago
    Revisit this comment in 20 years
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  It might as well be 1000 corporations. The problem remains a version of the village commons.
  - R0b0t1 5y ago
    Not really. People consume what is produced. You can see this bias in news and print media and its effect on propaganda, but it really applies to all items produced. It's a popular retort to "just don't buy Apple" in the tech lockdown debates that crop up.
BeautifulWorld 5y ago
Recent events confirm that the only thing which has been reduced is the WHO's standards.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Is this really that complicated? We can have more people living lives with limited freedoms and limited lifestyle quality, or more people with greater freedoms but greater health/climate/whatever impacts, or we can have fewer people. Fossil fuels aren’t the primary problem or even the sole problem. It’s that we have enough people living rich lives to create problems of scale whether from fossil fuels or mining or whatever.
climate_death 5y ago
You don’t understand do you, this is the end goal. The thing we are all cheering on.
climate_death 5y ago
Covid reduced life by over 17Tn years.
notanzaiiswear 5y ago
Never mind that billions of people are only alive because of fossil fuels, and it is so far not really proven that they can be kept alive without them. That kind of calculation seems rather silly.
- kovek 5y ago
  Interesting! Young adults are comfortable today. There’s infrastructure to support them. Would society survive with suddenly less efficient processes? Everyone needs to pay rent/food/products, but modern transport and manufacturing are suddenly not useable. So, how to source items to do work/survive? I’m sure one solution would be to relocate. Some cities/societies exist with less efficient processes.
  - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
    For starters, modern food production relies on fertilizers produced with fossil fuels. See "the green revolution": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution quote: "associated with chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, and controlled water-supply (usually involving irrigation) and newer methods of cultivation, including mechanization" Billions of people are only alive today because of that.
- jmcqk6 5y ago
  You also gotta consider the reality that it is pretty clear that our current use is totally unsustainable, and pollution is just one of the downsides we are seeing. Things aren't entirely good or entirely bad. It can both be true that fossil fuels have created great wealth in a variety of different ways, and is also systematically dooming our future in a variety of different ways. In fact, that is what the truth is.
  - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
    Nevertheless the calculation of the article is complete bullshit. You can not claim "not using fossil fuels would save billions of lives" when you need fossil fuels to keep billions of people alive in the present moment. It just doesn't make sense.
morpheos137 5y ago
On HN we are not supposed to accuse people of shilling but I see a steady drumbeat of low-brow populist evironmental advocacy links on this site every single day. Often the pieces are not even scientifically justified. At what point does this specific genre of "general interest" posts become disproportionate? This after all is supposed to be an IT tech start up focused site.
- SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
  It’s not shilling. The users here are interested in these things. Are some of them “things the users want to hear”? Definitely. But there are great articles from time to time. Flag the bad ones and move along.
nikkinana 5y ago
It's great with all the quarantine going on, we all stay home and no air pollution! Problem solved! What's next, a water shortage?
amelius 5y ago
Too bad that addressing the issue is once again political suicide.
alex_young 5y ago
So, 17B / 8B world population = 2 years. Nothing to sneeze at, but much more understandable in per person terms.
- Cyril_HN 5y ago
  Two years unevenly distributed and with decreasing quality of life long before your time is up.
john_w_t_b 5y ago
Air pollution is reduced by misty light rain. The process is called wet deposition. Swarms of electric drones could mist cities with water every morning to reduce air pollution. The technology should be feasible and economically justified. Here’s a link about wet deposition. https://public.wmo.int/en/our-mandate/focus-areas/environment/atmospheric-deposition https://public.wmo.int/en/our-mandate/focus-areas/environmen... Here’s a recent example of misty rain at work in the Bay Area. https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/pj12nx/a_labor_day_miracle/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/pj12nx/a_labo...
- woodruffw 5y ago
  This is probably great for the humans involved, but it occurs to me that using misting to lower air pollutant levels while not actually reducing air pollution just means that we're dumping those pollutants into the watershed instead.
- dundarious 5y ago
  Isn’t water vapor a significant GHG? Wouldn’t daily misting of cities augment the greenhouse effect significantly?
  - kilotaras 5y ago
    Not even close. *Total* urban area in the world was around ~3.5M km^2 in 2010[0], or 1% of total ocean area. Daily evaporation dwarves anything a couple thousands of drones can do in the morning. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.UR.K2 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.UR.K2
    - dundarious 5y ago
      Shouldn’t it be measured against human GHG activity like transport and agriculture, and not standard operation of the planet whether we exist on it or not?
- megablast 5y ago
fnord77 5y ago
with global warming, shouldn't we be looking to reduce life-years? the longer a person is alive, the bigger their carbon footprint
- beervirus 5y ago
  The exact same reasoning justifies murder.
Havoc 5y ago
Just replaced my air filter. Felt pretty bad about it...the cartridge is a mix of plastic and god knows what that seems unnecessarily robust and not eco friendly. Like the appliance itself in build quality. Normally I'd be impressed...but filters that destroy the environment because we destroyed the environments seem uhm not ideal
cannabis_sam 5y ago
What? In which countries are pollution and climate destruction taken seriously? We live in a world that will protect car and gas usage, no matter what… all of our cities are shaped around cars and roads, young people are excluded from homeownership, but old assholes have access to luxurious parking spaces.. But yeah, apparently electric scooters are the worst hate crime since hitler.
dundarious 5y ago
Should the title not be “Fossil Fuel Capitalism Is Cutting Our Lives Short”?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nbzso 5y ago
Please, I would love to convert my Jag to electricity. This is the future. But reality is that aside from tech sector, people cannot afford buying a new electric car. End countries from EU with high standard of living are not the example. "Banning" cannot solve the problem. Transportation is affecting prices of goods. There is no magic bullet. You cannot shut down economy like that. I still don't understand why there is not global initiative for synthetic fuel. Only Porsche and Siemens are thinking clearly. We have a proven way to transit to electric cars and build adequate architecture.
- justinator 5y ago
  I think the overlap of those who can afford a Jaguar and those who can afford an electric car is pretty great. But I also think the overlap of those who can afford a Jaguar and absolutely don't give a shit about the poor, or the environment or anything else is also great. And the latter is the problem.
  - nbzso 5y ago
    My Jag is second hand classic. I use it mainly in the summer for short trips. My daily is hybrid. But this is not the point. The point is that we have to find a way to optimize ideas and legislation towards reality, not towards some dream world. Legislation or not, to have electrical infrastructure and accessibility in place, combined with synthetic fuel will solve the problem.
    - octodog 5y ago
      What do you mean by synthetic fuel? And why do you see it as necessary or more practical than electric vehicles?
      - nbzso 5y ago
        The problem nowadays is that pragmatism and conservatism are a victim of popular propaganda and emotional overreactions. My theory about this is based on economic and societal differences between countries. In high developed countries, with functioning or semi-functioning social security systems, people can afford to think more liberally even in socialistic views. For underdeveloped countries, especially Eastern Europe this way of thinking is form of luxury. We have lived trough transformation from communistic regimes towards capitalism and payed the high price. Some of us emigrated and created something out of nothing. We are hardworking and ambitious and with this fight comes realistic and conservative view of the world. https://www.bosch.com/stories/synthetic-fuels/ https://www.bosch.com/stories/synthetic-fuels/
tommymachine 5y ago
Which Chinese country do you guys think pollutes the most?
randombits0 5y ago
How would life-years be affected by economic and political changes needed to affect WHO standards and within what time frame? See? It’s a hard problem. Humans are inherently chaotic.
- droidist2 5y ago
  Right, it's only looking at one part of the equation. You could also say it'd save 4 billion life-years worth of car accidents if we banned automobiles.
a1371 5y ago
I'm looking for other studies considering this idea of "life years". Generally around where people's time is going, what is wasting it, or taking it away. Does anyone have any suggestions?
- nicwilson 5y ago
  The determination of whether to proceed with medical intervention is usually done with a metric called quality adjusted life years (QALY: which is life years adjusted by quality of life), or rather they are never done if QALY is negative. And proceed to make a judgement call based on QALY/cost. As for studies, almost every cancer treatment study will use this metric as will _many_ other medical studies.
dirtyid 5y ago
How much resources / CO2 is needed to sustain 17B life years?
Proven 5y ago
The usual nonsense repeated every year, this time repackaged in an "easy to consume" iconographic for the idiot voter. > A new study shows that 17 billion life years could be saved if air pollution was reduced to WHO standards, but there's only one way to do it – ending the system that pollutes the world in the name of profit. The system that pollutes the world sustains 7 billion additional (compared to life without it) lives and "produces" 17b life years in just 2 years, morons.
Hunter235711 5y ago
I really like Freeman Dyson's take on carbon dioxide: "The most important fact in the history of the 21st century is that China and India, with about half of the world's population, are getting rich. To get rich in the next 50 years, they must burn prodigious quantities of coal and add big quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. China and India have a simple choice to make. Either they get rich and cause a major increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Or they stay poor. I hope they choose to get rich. The choice is theirs and not ours. Whatever we may choose to do will not make much difference. The discussions in Paris will not make much difference. The good news is that the main effect of carbon dioxide on the ecology of the planet has nothing to do with climate. The main effect of carbon dioxide is to make the planet greener, feeding the growth of green plants of all kinds, increasing the fertility of farms and fields and forests." Source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/12/03/freeman-dyson-misunderstandings-questionable-beliefs-mar-paris-climate-talks/vG3oBrbmcZlv2m22DTNjMP/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/12/03/freeman-dyson... Also, I really recommend this Web of Stories interview (actually all of them in the playlist) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=848X64FXGp0&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQEgWfcIu49J4nN&index=144 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=848X64FXGp0&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...
perryizgr8 5y ago
Paraphrasing the common saying: it's not the years, but the quality of the years. I'd rather live a comfortable and happy life for fewer years than many more years of misery.

322 points by nixass 5y ago

danr4 5y ago

Aren't we heading towards overpopulation? in the case... is that a... "good" thing? Seriously curious. 17B is alot.

codetrotter 5y ago
From the Wikipedia article on Human overpopulation: > The concept of overpopulation is controversial. A 2015 article in Nature listed overpopulation as a pervasive science myth. Demographic projections suggest that population growth will stabilise in the 21st century, and many experts believe that global resources can meet this increased demand, suggesting a global overpopulation scenario is unlikely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
- ta1234567890 5y ago
  > suggesting a global overpopulation scenario is unlikely. The world is already overpopulated. We just haven’t completely destroyed it yet. The way we currently run the world is not sustainable long term for even the current population.
  - ben_w 5y ago
    The first statement does not follow automatically from the second. It is not currently run in a sustainable way. It can be, and people are trying change it so it is sustainable. This is hard, but does not appear to be impossible.
    - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
      >It is not currently run in a sustainable way. which creates something of a tautology. Ability to maintain a population in the long run implies 'sustainable'. I guess that given nutrient vats and fusion power we could have a sustainable population of one trillion. It's worth considering what the point of having so many people is....
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        "It's worth considering what the point of having so many people is...." What's the point of having people at all, right? Once you answer those questions, is there a number of people you'd like to propose as optimal?
        OneEyedRobot 5y ago
        >Once you answer those questions, is there a number of people you'd like to propose as optimal? That's a good question. I'll take a shot at it even though you're not really asking a question but making a point. Let's say that the one thing that people bring to the table is intelligence and the ability to design complex systems, it's something of an end-run on evolution. How large a population do you need to build modern semiconductors, discover exoplanets, solve physics problems, do a passable version of the arts? I would guess something on the order of 500M-1B which is roughly the number in 1800. You get most of the good and lose most of the bad if you're even slightly careful. The edge conditions of atomic war or a truly large nuclear incident still exist but the rest of our sins cover up well over time with that population.
    - ta1234567890 5y ago
      > It is not currently run in a sustainable way. It can be Can it? That remains to be seen. So in the meantime I would say we are already overpopulated. To be fair, your statement probably means that we have the resources and technology to run the world in a sustainable way, and I would agree with that. But then we also likely have the resources to end hunger, poverty and war, yet those have never been the world’s priorities. When will it be a priority for humans to run the world sustainably? Who knows. But right now it’s definitely not sustainable.
      - ben_w 5y ago
        > But then we also likely have the resources to end hunger, poverty and war, yet those have never been the world’s priorities. And yet, all of those things declined; in the case of poverty the decline is in both absolute and relative terms. Certainly more needs to be done in all of these things: we only succeed when we reach the destination, not just when we walk the path. Conversely, every step on that path brings us closer to success and is a reason for optimism.
- eplanit 5y ago
  To suggest that overpopulation is controversial is itself absurd, as it is fundamental to the science of biology[1]. That a species can reach numbers where their environment and habitat is depleted or otherwise unlivable is fact, not controversy. "Population Control" is certainly controversial, though, as it should be. And, though controversial, it should be considered seriously. Many environmentalists lose their credibility by speaking of "sustainability" on the one hand, but then disputing overpopulation on the other. We need to impact the earth much less, and keeping our numbers down is a very effective way of doing so. That, plus using energy and resources more cleanly and efficiently. [1] https://biologydictionary.net/overpopulation/ https://biologydictionary.net/overpopulation/
  - drivebycomment 5y ago
    The question about human overpopulation is not whether there can be overpopulation, but whether the often popular claim that the earth can not sustain the current or the projected future human population is true. The latter absolutely is debatable - there's no clear evidence that it's impossible (i.e. there's no technically feasible way) to sustain the current or the projected future human population. It absolutely is true that if we maintain the current level of CO2 emissions, it won't be sustainable. But that's not an evidence for overpopulation. If we sustain the current level of pollution, it likely will not be sustainable. But that's once again not an evidence for overpopulation - as we know for most of our resources that there are technical alternatives that can drastically reduce / eliminate them. We know there's more than enough energy. We know how to make our economy carbon-neutral. Most pollution can be controlled. The urban land takes up much less than 1% of the earth land - and we expect the world population to peak around 10B by 2100 (vs 7.7B today). No reason to believe we'll run out of land. There's more than enough headroom to improve the crop yields in poor countries. In the grand scheme of things, we - humanity - know mostly how to create a sustainable technological system that can support 10B population. Whether our politics will allow us to get to such a system is a entirely different problem, and THAT might be our undoing, but I'd argue that's not really an overpopulation problem. Also, the population growth is largely a side-effect of demographic transition - https://populationeducation.org/what-demographic-transition-model/ https://populationeducation.org/what-demographic-transition-.... i.e. it's a transitional side-effect of reducing the human suffering. The only humane and equitable way to move forward is to accelerate the demographic transition (i.e. improve the economic, health, education, etc, systems of all countries in the world to get them to stage4 at least). And, thus, "keep our numbers down" is not only inhumane or inequitable, that's ineffective - the developed countries already mostly stopped growing - e.g. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251591/population-growth-rate-in-europe/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251591/population-growt... - and it's mostly the poor countries that are growing - i.e. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264687/countries-with-the-highest-population-growth-rate/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264687/countries-with-th... . There's no other humane way to stop poor countries' population growth - the most effective way is to improve their economy, improve their health and healthcare systems, and improve education.
burlesona 5y ago
As you’re asking in good faith I don’t see why you’re being downvoted. Population carrying capacity is difficult. We know that given a particular level of technology we can support a particular number of people with global resources in the short term. Intuitively it seems like we’re wrecking the environment and we’re in for a nasty fall when we exhaust those resources. However, Malthusian predictions like that - so far - have a bad track record, because with more people comes more innovation, and so far that innovation has been increasing carrying capacity faster than population growth. Ultimately it looks like the world population is going to stabilize as most people seem to prefer smaller family units once they achieve “western level” of child survival expectations and material wealth. Strangely enough it may be harder to maintain a stable population with our consumption habits if it means that technological advance slows down. That said, for most people all the above is unimportant compared to caring for the living. Preserving and extending life and quality of life is fundamentally good, and shortening human lives to “save the planet” is not. So while you can have the macro level discussion along the lines of “do we really want the population to increase,” for most people if you venture into “should we just let the people who are already alive die sooner than they must” is pretty offensive.
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  I just assume that any population level that can't be maintained on pre-20C. technology is probably dangerous. You'll either see a crack-up in terms of society and/or resource depletion at some point.
legutierr 5y ago
Improved quality of life and reduced infant mortality are shown to reduce population growth by creating incentives for people to have fewer children. If you want fewer people, then you want to improve the material well-being if as many people as possible. As it stands, the global population is projected to peak at around 10 billion people some time this century, per current trends.
- OneEyedRobot 5y ago
  >If you want fewer people, then you want to improve the material well-being of as many people as possible. I'd genuinely like to see that model applied to sub Saharan Africa.
  - foxfluff 5y ago
    https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-by-gdp-per-capita?country=AGO~BEN~BWA~BFA~BDI~CMR~CPV~CAF~COM~COG~CIV~COD~DJI~GNQ~SWZ~ETH~GAB~GMB~GHA~GIN~GNB~KEN~LSO~LBR~MDG~MWI~MUS~MOZ~NAM~NGA~RWA~STP~SEN~SYC~SLE~ZAF~TZA~TGO~UGA~ZMB~ZWE https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-by-gdp...
    - OneEyedRobot 5y ago
      So you are suggesting that the per-capita material well-being in Nigeria has gone down all this time? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#/media/File:Nigeria-demography.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#/media... I don't doubt that wealth can be a factor, but those systems are a whole lot more complicated than that. Money+Low Gini = Low birthrate is a meme as much as it is a primary driver.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  I think this is incomplete. In every case so far a reduction of infant mortality and improved quality of life are coupled with power structures that increase the amount of productive output that is captured by a family, increasing the relative cost of producing children.
robbrown451 5y ago
Your argument could be as easily used to say "maybe mass murder isn't a bad thing." The early death of a person who would prefer continue living is, to reasonable people, a tragedy. If overpopulation is really such a problem, I'd think incentivizing the choice to have fewer kids is a reasonable one.
runesoerensen 5y ago
Would you consider it a good thing if air pollution kills you?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- junon 5y ago
  To be fair to the GP, this isn't the point they're making. Your argument would be valid if they were positing "it's not like it's me who's going to die." They're asking, in good faith, if the effects of pollution-related deaths would have a net benefit to the world due to overpopulation concerns. Your response is a strawman.
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
While I agree with you on overpopulation, I would guess that the 17B number comes from 8B * 2.something years. Back of the envelope, it's odd that air pollution is around 100x as bad as cigarettes (which admittedly not everyone smokes).
occz 5y ago
> Aren't we heading towards overpopulation? No. Population growth slows down as nations rise in economic prosperity, and is projected to cap out at around 11 billion.
- cgrealy 5y ago
  There's still a pretty reasonable argument to be made that 11 billion is not a sustainable number. I'm not suggesting we start killing people, but we will seriously need to think about how we manage the finite resources of the planet with >1.5x the number of people.
drivebycomment 5y ago
Most people die due to various diseases / accident / suicides, thus extending human lives collectively means reducing those human suffering. Implying extending collective human lives as "bad" is basically declaring you don't care about people's suffering and that you'd rather choose more suffering.

clairity 5y ago

imagine if we directed as much attention as covid is getting toward such a more insidious, and more tractable, problem like air (and water) pollution. we could really do something in a relatively short time (like 2-5 years). for instance, we could measurably reduce air pollution by replacing the top 25 most polluting power plants (coal). that might cost on the order of a 100 billion dollars, but that's less than 1% of america's gdp, nevermind the world's.

newaccount2021 5y ago
pollution kills slowly, and as a result is imperceptible to the public covid hysteria is just getting started. years from now, decent people will lament that covid hysteria continues to suck all of the oxygen out of the room...and when they do, they will be cancelled fifty years from now, no one will admit to having been part of the covid mobs...but for now, they rule the world
- epistasis 5y ago
  > years from now, decent people will lament that covid hysteria continues to suck all of the oxygen out of the room...and when they do, they will be cancelled Years from now, people will look back at 1M people in the US that unnecessarily died and marvel at just how inhuman people can be when subjected to political forces. I only wish that current day leaders in the US will look at today's traitors to humanity with the same disdain that future generations will. Only then could we quash the sick disregard for human life that drives us apart.
DudeInBasement 5y ago
Those power plants are in China. Good luck
- rocky1138 5y ago
  The fourth largest coal plant is in Taiwan.
- jointpdf 5y ago

tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago

I expect pollution to be as much of a driver of the push for electric cars as climate change. It's something that affects people directly, immediately and noticeably - it stinks. If I had a vote whether to ban combustion engines from my city (cars, trucks, mopeds, leaf blowers - everything), with a relatively short transition period (say 5 years), I'd be in favor. It would probably initially drive up prices of goods due to a shortage of electric delivery vehicles or the need to repack everything onto smaller local trucks outside the city, but I think it'd be worth it.

b9a2cab5 5y ago
It would also financially cripple any poor person that relies on a car to get to work. And public transportation won't be viable in the US until cities finally wrap their head around the reality that you need basic security checkpoints at entrances to discourage riff raff from getting in (like in China). If you've ever ridden BART, you know what I mean.
- wffurr 5y ago
  BART is uniquely bad in that respect. Significantly worse than other North American cities. Chalk it up to Bay Area dysfunction and inequality. Used EVs will be relatively affordable soon and the total cost of ownership is significantly lower.
  - refulgentis 5y ago
    > Used EVs will be relatively affordable soon We're very far away from crossing under 30K, much less 10K
    - cyberbanjo 5y ago
      Used Chevy volt for 5-15k, it seems you can get a sub 10k electric car already?
      - 5y ago

dqpb 5y ago

This seems like a poor model of population dynamics. Isn’t it possible that earlier deaths in the elderly population might act as an economic stimulus that increases birth rate in the younger population? (So the net change in life years would not be 17bn). Edit: I assume the downvotes are suggesting my logic is wrong. It would be helpful to hear why.

MattRix 5y ago
Even if that were true, it wouldn’t be a good thing.
- dqpb 5y ago
  I didn’t say it would be a good thing. I’m just questioning the math.
dm319 5y ago
> It would be helpful to hear why. Granny dying does not make me broody.
- dqpb 5y ago
  So you’re arguing the decrease in average lifespan effects fecundity of the younger population. That might be true, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

meeshoo 5y ago

I think there has been a miscalculation. It's 17.26 billion years, not 17 billion years.

eCa 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rounding
- meeshoo 5y ago
  I know they rounded up that number, but that's not correct, nor scientific. Do we fucking love science or not? 0.1 billion years is 100 million years, you can't just round them up like they don't mean anything.
  - IAmLiterallyAB 5y ago
    It's perfectly acceptable to round in an article summary like this. Such a ridiculous thing to complain about
climate_death 5y ago
Yes, 260 million years is nothing to sneeze at, especially considering that earth is only about 5,000 years old!
IAmLiterallyAB 5y ago
...I swear HN comments get dumber every day. Is this satire???
- meeshoo 5y ago
  That is not satire. Satire is recognized as such by smart people and you are a smart person, because you don't like dumb comments. Ergo, since a smart person like yourself didn't see satire, there is none. QED.

josh_today 5y ago

There’s a zero percent chance this can be validated but a 100% chance it will be used to increase government control. What’s being done to address the 100 corporations that cause 70% of the world’s emissions? Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/10/just-100-firms-attributable-for-71-percent-of-global-emissions-report-says.html https://www.cnbc.com/2017/07/10/just-100-firms-attributable-...

noja 5y ago
Government control of what exactly? Lowering emissions?
- Splognosticus 5y ago
  Egh, right? It's kind of annoying how whenever anyone suggests trying anything to improve society someone comes out of the woodwork to cry about government overreach. Never an argument about the merits of the proposal, just some trite hand-wringing that somewhere somehow someone might be able to use it to their political advantage. Never even an explanation of why this one thing would be so dangerous when governments already by nature have vast authority to control pretty much anything they want. Worst of all you can't reason against it, since it's not a position of reason. Regardless of what point you make they'll just dig in and ignore them. :(
- josh_today 5y ago
  Revisit this comment in 20 years
OneEyedRobot 5y ago
It might as well be 1000 corporations. The problem remains a version of the village commons.
- R0b0t1 5y ago
  Not really. People consume what is produced. You can see this bias in news and print media and its effect on propaganda, but it really applies to all items produced. It's a popular retort to "just don't buy Apple" in the tech lockdown debates that crop up.

BeautifulWorld 5y ago

Recent events confirm that the only thing which has been reduced is the WHO's standards.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Is this really that complicated? We can have more people living lives with limited freedoms and limited lifestyle quality, or more people with greater freedoms but greater health/climate/whatever impacts, or we can have fewer people. Fossil fuels aren’t the primary problem or even the sole problem. It’s that we have enough people living rich lives to create problems of scale whether from fossil fuels or mining or whatever.

climate_death 5y ago

You don’t understand do you, this is the end goal. The thing we are all cheering on.

climate_death 5y ago

Covid reduced life by over 17Tn years.

notanzaiiswear 5y ago

Never mind that billions of people are only alive because of fossil fuels, and it is so far not really proven that they can be kept alive without them. That kind of calculation seems rather silly.

kovek 5y ago
Interesting! Young adults are comfortable today. There’s infrastructure to support them. Would society survive with suddenly less efficient processes? Everyone needs to pay rent/food/products, but modern transport and manufacturing are suddenly not useable. So, how to source items to do work/survive? I’m sure one solution would be to relocate. Some cities/societies exist with less efficient processes.
- notanzaiiswear 5y ago
  For starters, modern food production relies on fertilizers produced with fossil fuels. See "the green revolution": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution quote: "associated with chemical fertilizers, agrochemicals, and controlled water-supply (usually involving irrigation) and newer methods of cultivation, including mechanization" Billions of people are only alive today because of that.
jmcqk6 5y ago
You also gotta consider the reality that it is pretty clear that our current use is totally unsustainable, and pollution is just one of the downsides we are seeing. Things aren't entirely good or entirely bad. It can both be true that fossil fuels have created great wealth in a variety of different ways, and is also systematically dooming our future in a variety of different ways. In fact, that is what the truth is.
- notanzaiiswear 5y ago
  Nevertheless the calculation of the article is complete bullshit. You can not claim "not using fossil fuels would save billions of lives" when you need fossil fuels to keep billions of people alive in the present moment. It just doesn't make sense.

morpheos137 5y ago

On HN we are not supposed to accuse people of shilling but I see a steady drumbeat of low-brow populist evironmental advocacy links on this site every single day. Often the pieces are not even scientifically justified. At what point does this specific genre of "general interest" posts become disproportionate? This after all is supposed to be an IT tech start up focused site.

SV_BubbleTime 5y ago
It’s not shilling. The users here are interested in these things. Are some of them “things the users want to hear”? Definitely. But there are great articles from time to time. Flag the bad ones and move along.

nikkinana 5y ago

It's great with all the quarantine going on, we all stay home and no air pollution! Problem solved! What's next, a water shortage?

amelius 5y ago

Too bad that addressing the issue is once again political suicide.

alex_young 5y ago

So, 17B / 8B world population = 2 years. Nothing to sneeze at, but much more understandable in per person terms.

Cyril_HN 5y ago
Two years unevenly distributed and with decreasing quality of life long before your time is up.

john_w_t_b 5y ago

Air pollution is reduced by misty light rain. The process is called wet deposition. Swarms of electric drones could mist cities with water every morning to reduce air pollution. The technology should be feasible and economically justified. Here’s a link about wet deposition. https://public.wmo.int/en/our-mandate/focus-areas/environment/atmospheric-deposition https://public.wmo.int/en/our-mandate/focus-areas/environmen... Here’s a recent example of misty rain at work in the Bay Area. https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/pj12nx/a_labor_day_miracle/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/pj12nx/a_labo...

woodruffw 5y ago
This is probably great for the humans involved, but it occurs to me that using misting to lower air pollutant levels while not actually reducing air pollution just means that we're dumping those pollutants into the watershed instead.
dundarious 5y ago
Isn’t water vapor a significant GHG? Wouldn’t daily misting of cities augment the greenhouse effect significantly?
- kilotaras 5y ago
  Not even close. *Total* urban area in the world was around ~3.5M km^2 in 2010[0], or 1% of total ocean area. Daily evaporation dwarves anything a couple thousands of drones can do in the morning. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.UR.K2 https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.TOTL.UR.K2
  - dundarious 5y ago
    Shouldn’t it be measured against human GHG activity like transport and agriculture, and not standard operation of the planet whether we exist on it or not?
megablast 5y ago

fnord77 5y ago

with global warming, shouldn't we be looking to reduce life-years? the longer a person is alive, the bigger their carbon footprint

beervirus 5y ago
The exact same reasoning justifies murder.

Havoc 5y ago

Just replaced my air filter. Felt pretty bad about it...the cartridge is a mix of plastic and god knows what that seems unnecessarily robust and not eco friendly. Like the appliance itself in build quality. Normally I'd be impressed...but filters that destroy the environment because we destroyed the environments seem uhm not ideal

cannabis_sam 5y ago

What? In which countries are pollution and climate destruction taken seriously? We live in a world that will protect car and gas usage, no matter what… all of our cities are shaped around cars and roads, young people are excluded from homeownership, but old assholes have access to luxurious parking spaces.. But yeah, apparently electric scooters are the worst hate crime since hitler.

dundarious 5y ago

Should the title not be “Fossil Fuel Capitalism Is Cutting Our Lives Short”?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nbzso 5y ago

Please, I would love to convert my Jag to electricity. This is the future. But reality is that aside from tech sector, people cannot afford buying a new electric car. End countries from EU with high standard of living are not the example. "Banning" cannot solve the problem. Transportation is affecting prices of goods. There is no magic bullet. You cannot shut down economy like that. I still don't understand why there is not global initiative for synthetic fuel. Only Porsche and Siemens are thinking clearly. We have a proven way to transit to electric cars and build adequate architecture.

justinator 5y ago
I think the overlap of those who can afford a Jaguar and those who can afford an electric car is pretty great. But I also think the overlap of those who can afford a Jaguar and absolutely don't give a shit about the poor, or the environment or anything else is also great. And the latter is the problem.
- nbzso 5y ago
  My Jag is second hand classic. I use it mainly in the summer for short trips. My daily is hybrid. But this is not the point. The point is that we have to find a way to optimize ideas and legislation towards reality, not towards some dream world. Legislation or not, to have electrical infrastructure and accessibility in place, combined with synthetic fuel will solve the problem.
  - octodog 5y ago
    What do you mean by synthetic fuel? And why do you see it as necessary or more practical than electric vehicles?
    - nbzso 5y ago
      The problem nowadays is that pragmatism and conservatism are a victim of popular propaganda and emotional overreactions. My theory about this is based on economic and societal differences between countries. In high developed countries, with functioning or semi-functioning social security systems, people can afford to think more liberally even in socialistic views. For underdeveloped countries, especially Eastern Europe this way of thinking is form of luxury. We have lived trough transformation from communistic regimes towards capitalism and payed the high price. Some of us emigrated and created something out of nothing. We are hardworking and ambitious and with this fight comes realistic and conservative view of the world. https://www.bosch.com/stories/synthetic-fuels/ https://www.bosch.com/stories/synthetic-fuels/

tommymachine 5y ago

Which Chinese country do you guys think pollutes the most?

randombits0 5y ago

How would life-years be affected by economic and political changes needed to affect WHO standards and within what time frame? See? It’s a hard problem. Humans are inherently chaotic.

droidist2 5y ago
Right, it's only looking at one part of the equation. You could also say it'd save 4 billion life-years worth of car accidents if we banned automobiles.

a1371 5y ago

I'm looking for other studies considering this idea of "life years". Generally around where people's time is going, what is wasting it, or taking it away. Does anyone have any suggestions?

nicwilson 5y ago
The determination of whether to proceed with medical intervention is usually done with a metric called quality adjusted life years (QALY: which is life years adjusted by quality of life), or rather they are never done if QALY is negative. And proceed to make a judgement call based on QALY/cost. As for studies, almost every cancer treatment study will use this metric as will _many_ other medical studies.

dirtyid 5y ago

How much resources / CO2 is needed to sustain 17B life years?

Proven 5y ago

The usual nonsense repeated every year, this time repackaged in an "easy to consume" iconographic for the idiot voter. > A new study shows that 17 billion life years could be saved if air pollution was reduced to WHO standards, but there's only one way to do it – ending the system that pollutes the world in the name of profit. The system that pollutes the world sustains 7 billion additional (compared to life without it) lives and "produces" 17b life years in just 2 years, morons.

Hunter235711 5y ago

I really like Freeman Dyson's take on carbon dioxide: "The most important fact in the history of the 21st century is that China and India, with about half of the world's population, are getting rich. To get rich in the next 50 years, they must burn prodigious quantities of coal and add big quantities of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. China and India have a simple choice to make. Either they get rich and cause a major increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Or they stay poor. I hope they choose to get rich. The choice is theirs and not ours. Whatever we may choose to do will not make much difference. The discussions in Paris will not make much difference. The good news is that the main effect of carbon dioxide on the ecology of the planet has nothing to do with climate. The main effect of carbon dioxide is to make the planet greener, feeding the growth of green plants of all kinds, increasing the fertility of farms and fields and forests." Source: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/12/03/freeman-dyson-misunderstandings-questionable-beliefs-mar-paris-climate-talks/vG3oBrbmcZlv2m22DTNjMP/story.html https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2015/12/03/freeman-dyson... Also, I really recommend this Web of Stories interview (actually all of them in the playlist) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=848X64FXGp0&list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzDA6mtmKQEgWfcIu49J4nN&index=144 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=848X64FXGp0&list=PLVV0r6CmEs...

perryizgr8 5y ago

Paraphrasing the common saying: it's not the years, but the quality of the years. I'd rather live a comfortable and happy life for fewer years than many more years of misery.