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How long term do you think this strategy is for the human kind? Does it span more than one generation?

unsupp0rted 4y ago
Long term the population is flatlining and dropping and the price of renewable energy with it. But even if it doesn't and even if we're forced to make hard choices, the hard choice won't be "should I skip my vacation flight?", it'll be "should I skip raising a CO2 machine?".
PeterisP 4y ago
IMHO a voluntary reduction in human population by a few billion through reduced birth is a perfectly viable, sustainable long-term strategy; all the drawbacks and criticisms appear when someone wants to encourage that with various means (i.e. not fully voluntarily) or when it's posed as some solution to things which need a faster reduction than possible this way, e.g. climate change won't be prevented even if we went totally zero-birth for a decade but the current population kept the current emission rates.
- unsupp0rted 4y ago
  It doesn't even have to be voluntarily in the sense of "making a decision to". More like voluntary in the sense of "have no specific need to". In the most developed countries, children are now more of a burden than a gain, which is why women are having fewer of them every generation. Not only because they're expensive, but because they are often born unhealthy (physically, mentally, or both) and are a large, often unrecoverable blow to most careers. Since we don't need children to work on the farm or to let us move in with them when we're old (er, less than previous generations, anyway), it becomes purely a "nice-to-have" decision. And then if somebody does voluntarily have children, they don't have much of a leg to stand on when lecturing others about their impact on climate change.
  - gpvos 4y ago
    You were doing so fine until the last sentence.
  - allendoerfer 4y ago
    I get your point and am on neither side of the fence here, since I do not think, we should rely on individual action at all. I just want to add to the conversation, that somehow your reasoning strikes me as a bit selfish. It is of course true, what you are writing. Still reading it, makes me sad. I am missing some higher meaning. Who cares about a career in the end? A career in our system is just a story of someone, who exceeded at providing value. But for whom, if you do not have kids? I am missing a bit of Kant in there. A little bit of "You get one (life), you give one back." We (including you) just cannot all do it like that, if we do not want to end our lives rather uncomfortably. So again something about ultimate maximes and what they should be.
    - unsupp0rted 4y ago
      What's selfish about not having children? To whom or to what do I owe bringing a child into the world? It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
      - nazgul17 4y ago
        To my children, who will labour to sustain you, too, in your late life.
        unsupp0rted 4y ago
        I don't owe having children to your children, or to you. You can have children if you want, but I'm not requiring that of you. If your children take care of me late in life, it's because they're exchanging their work for money. And the reason they're obligated to exchange their work for money is because that's the economic system into which their parents decided to bring them.

Long term the population is flatlining and dropping and the price of renewable energy with it. But even if it doesn't and even if we're forced to make hard choices, the hard choice won't be "should I skip my vacation flight?", it'll be "should I skip raising a CO2 machine?".

PeterisP 4y ago

IMHO a voluntary reduction in human population by a few billion through reduced birth is a perfectly viable, sustainable long-term strategy; all the drawbacks and criticisms appear when someone wants to encourage that with various means (i.e. not fully voluntarily) or when it's posed as some solution to things which need a faster reduction than possible this way, e.g. climate change won't be prevented even if we went totally zero-birth for a decade but the current population kept the current emission rates.

unsupp0rted 4y ago
It doesn't even have to be voluntarily in the sense of "making a decision to". More like voluntary in the sense of "have no specific need to". In the most developed countries, children are now more of a burden than a gain, which is why women are having fewer of them every generation. Not only because they're expensive, but because they are often born unhealthy (physically, mentally, or both) and are a large, often unrecoverable blow to most careers. Since we don't need children to work on the farm or to let us move in with them when we're old (er, less than previous generations, anyway), it becomes purely a "nice-to-have" decision. And then if somebody does voluntarily have children, they don't have much of a leg to stand on when lecturing others about their impact on climate change.
- gpvos 4y ago
  You were doing so fine until the last sentence.
- allendoerfer 4y ago
  I get your point and am on neither side of the fence here, since I do not think, we should rely on individual action at all. I just want to add to the conversation, that somehow your reasoning strikes me as a bit selfish. It is of course true, what you are writing. Still reading it, makes me sad. I am missing some higher meaning. Who cares about a career in the end? A career in our system is just a story of someone, who exceeded at providing value. But for whom, if you do not have kids? I am missing a bit of Kant in there. A little bit of "You get one (life), you give one back." We (including you) just cannot all do it like that, if we do not want to end our lives rather uncomfortably. So again something about ultimate maximes and what they should be.
  - unsupp0rted 4y ago
    What's selfish about not having children? To whom or to what do I owe bringing a child into the world? It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
    - nazgul17 4y ago
      To my children, who will labour to sustain you, too, in your late life.
      - unsupp0rted 4y ago
        I don't owe having children to your children, or to you. You can have children if you want, but I'm not requiring that of you. If your children take care of me late in life, it's because they're exchanging their work for money. And the reason they're obligated to exchange their work for money is because that's the economic system into which their parents decided to bring them.