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I didn't mean it as a serious suggestion, just that it's technically possible to reduce the population that much without killing anyone. Are you serious that t

by vba616 5y ago

I didn't mean it as a serious suggestion, just that it's technically possible to reduce the population that much without killing anyone. Are you serious that to reduce CO2 "enough" world population would have to be under 8 million people? When the Industrial Revolution started, mid 1700s, world population was something like 800 million, wasn't it? Why would it be necessary to return to the world of 4000 BC, which is what I believe 8 million corresponds to?

ben_w 5y ago
Quality of life. We don’t want to live like we did in the 1700s — 95% of “rich” nations back then were subsistence farmers, and even the richest kings were in many ways worse off than minimum wage G7 citizens today. This is also why I think the solution is to focus on the CO2 itself and not on the people. Green power, green sources for chemical feedstocks, are much faster and less violent than population limits; and also lower population doesn’t itself guarantee lower greenhouse gases because everyone might just use more.
- vba616 5y ago
  I don't understand. How would two more orders of magnitude reduction make things better? We don't want to go back to the 1700s, so going back to the dawn of history is better? What would North Korea be able to produce without 2/3rds of its population and without China?
  - ZeroGravitas 5y ago
    He means, CO2 as a problem requires us to reduce our additions to the atmosphere by roughly 100%. This is entirely possible, mostly by no longer burning fossil fuels, which is the prime contributer to the problem. It is not practical or possible via population growth reduction, which has basically already happened (people live longer so there's a delay in the result being seen, but we've basically peaked already). Unfortunately, it's politically tricky to stop burning fossil fuels, because people with financial interests in fossil fuels would prefer to destroy human civilization instead. And one of the many ways they do that is by encouraging people to believe that modern life is impossible without burning fossil fuels and so we should kill billions of poor people instead of just using cheap renewable power.
    - vba616 5y ago
      >roughly 100%. I don't understand the use of "roughly" here. A reduction can be and often is, expressed as a ratio. Is 90% roughly 100%? Is 99%? Is 99.9%? As ratios, these are reductions of 10x, 100x, 1000x, and as ratios they can increase without limit. So what is roughly 100% and why is it necessary?
      - ben_w 5y ago
        Given how long CO2 remains in the atmosphere, any reduction in CO2 emissions by less than 99.9% of the current emission rate sustained for less than a millennium is likely to result in severe negative consequences. Likewise, because the damage is done by the quantity in the air rather than the instantaneous rate of emissions and absorption — the former being the integral of the other two — we need to make these changes much faster than the gradual reduction over one human lifetime of non-reproduction. If you want to achieve this reduction just by population reduction — and not via technology, lifestyle changes, or any other solution — then you need a 99.9% population reduction. If you want to solve it by enforcing lifestyle changes and no tech etc., then you have to wind the clock back to before the industrial revolution, before we could even mine so much fossil fuels in the first place. The 1750 population of 760 million [0] was (with regards to CO2) sustainable, but the tech back then limited both the population and the emissions. It’s like the correlation between shark attacks and ice cream consumption: Hot weather makes you eat ice cream and go swimming. Icecream-to-Sharks isn’t directly causal, and neither was the population in 1750 the direct causal reason that CO2 emissions were sustainable. So you only get the “benefit” of 1750s population levels if you’re willing to also pay the technological cost. But not just the cost of not being able to grow food for 8 billion: it would be as if the 710 million absolutely worst off today were unchanged, while the other 50 million merely don’t have electricity let alone computers or the internet, paved roads let alone cars or bicycles or public transport, disease-free pressurised municipal water let alone modern flushing toilets or bottled soda or warm and safe showers, etc. Those 50 million would be the super-rich of the new era. And worse, because of the aforementioned long lifespan of CO2 in the atmosphere, you’d need to sustain this for about a thousand years despite everyone involved being much better off if they defect (Nash equilibrium). That leaves green tech. Many purely technological solutions to greenhouse gases are already known. The challenge is to make the green solutions cheaper (because Nash equilibrium) than the polluting status quo for 99.9% of effective emissions. (Effective emissions rather than gross emissions, because some of the technological solutions are to take CO2 out of the air to make other chemicals with, and that’s fine). (ZeroGravitas interpreted me correctly, FWIW). [0] I’m approximating from these numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...

by vba616 5y ago

ben_w 5y ago

Quality of life. We don’t want to live like we did in the 1700s — 95% of “rich” nations back then were subsistence farmers, and even the richest kings were in many ways worse off than minimum wage G7 citizens today. This is also why I think the solution is to focus on the CO2 itself and not on the people. Green power, green sources for chemical feedstocks, are much faster and less violent than population limits; and also lower population doesn’t itself guarantee lower greenhouse gases because everyone might just use more.

vba616 5y ago
I don't understand. How would two more orders of magnitude reduction make things better? We don't want to go back to the 1700s, so going back to the dawn of history is better? What would North Korea be able to produce without 2/3rds of its population and without China?
- ZeroGravitas 5y ago
  He means, CO2 as a problem requires us to reduce our additions to the atmosphere by roughly 100%. This is entirely possible, mostly by no longer burning fossil fuels, which is the prime contributer to the problem. It is not practical or possible via population growth reduction, which has basically already happened (people live longer so there's a delay in the result being seen, but we've basically peaked already). Unfortunately, it's politically tricky to stop burning fossil fuels, because people with financial interests in fossil fuels would prefer to destroy human civilization instead. And one of the many ways they do that is by encouraging people to believe that modern life is impossible without burning fossil fuels and so we should kill billions of poor people instead of just using cheap renewable power.
  - vba616 5y ago
    >roughly 100%. I don't understand the use of "roughly" here. A reduction can be and often is, expressed as a ratio. Is 90% roughly 100%? Is 99%? Is 99.9%? As ratios, these are reductions of 10x, 100x, 1000x, and as ratios they can increase without limit. So what is roughly 100% and why is it necessary?
    - ben_w 5y ago
      Given how long CO2 remains in the atmosphere, any reduction in CO2 emissions by less than 99.9% of the current emission rate sustained for less than a millennium is likely to result in severe negative consequences. Likewise, because the damage is done by the quantity in the air rather than the instantaneous rate of emissions and absorption — the former being the integral of the other two — we need to make these changes much faster than the gradual reduction over one human lifetime of non-reproduction. If you want to achieve this reduction just by population reduction — and not via technology, lifestyle changes, or any other solution — then you need a 99.9% population reduction. If you want to solve it by enforcing lifestyle changes and no tech etc., then you have to wind the clock back to before the industrial revolution, before we could even mine so much fossil fuels in the first place. The 1750 population of 760 million [0] was (with regards to CO2) sustainable, but the tech back then limited both the population and the emissions. It’s like the correlation between shark attacks and ice cream consumption: Hot weather makes you eat ice cream and go swimming. Icecream-to-Sharks isn’t directly causal, and neither was the population in 1750 the direct causal reason that CO2 emissions were sustainable. So you only get the “benefit” of 1750s population levels if you’re willing to also pay the technological cost. But not just the cost of not being able to grow food for 8 billion: it would be as if the 710 million absolutely worst off today were unchanged, while the other 50 million merely don’t have electricity let alone computers or the internet, paved roads let alone cars or bicycles or public transport, disease-free pressurised municipal water let alone modern flushing toilets or bottled soda or warm and safe showers, etc. Those 50 million would be the super-rich of the new era. And worse, because of the aforementioned long lifespan of CO2 in the atmosphere, you’d need to sustain this for about a thousand years despite everyone involved being much better off if they defect (Nash equilibrium). That leaves green tech. Many purely technological solutions to greenhouse gases are already known. The challenge is to make the green solutions cheaper (because Nash equilibrium) than the polluting status quo for 99.9% of effective emissions. (Effective emissions rather than gross emissions, because some of the technological solutions are to take CO2 out of the air to make other chemicals with, and that’s fine). (ZeroGravitas interpreted me correctly, FWIW). [0] I’m approximating from these numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...