6 ms·

I think there's 2 topics that need to be held apart here: 1) Limiting number of children in rich countries. This is what your links talk about I think. Yes, pe

by dagss 3y ago

I think there's 2 topics that need to be held apart here: 1) Limiting number of children in rich countries. This is what your links talk about I think. Yes, perhaps there is a taboo in place here. Is that relevant to sustainability crisis though? Population is already declining in rich countries, quite naturally. 2) Limiting number of children in poorer countries. Well, as in the article pointed to in a sibling comment, "Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%"... So by saying that overpopulation is the root of the crisis -- are you not saying that it may be better that 10 poor people are not born, than for rich people to do minor changes to their lifestyle?

mytailorisrich 3y ago
The issue is the global population. Obviously, that's the metric that matters for global issues like the climate and environment. The global population is still increasing. Furthermore, as poor countries develop this is compounded by increased consumption (both resources and energy) per capita. In that respect, "richest 1% account for more emissions than poorest 66%" should be interpreted as very worrying when the poorest are getting richer. Ultimately we don't anyone to be poor. At current population levels this would probably mean a total collapse of the environment. Overall, the global population is indeed the root cause of our problems.
- vasco 3y ago
  I never understand this argument of overpopulation. How can you be OK with reducing population but at the same time worry about global warming? To have that position you basically need to reconcile two positions that to me aren't really compatible, unless someone explains it to me. Either it's fine for Earth to not have humans and just exist peacefully with the rest of the ecosystem until another lifeform takes over. Or it's not fine for the Earth to have no more humans and so we need to stop climate change from making the Earth uninhabitable for us, but if to do that we want to reduce the humans, I don't get it. To "kill" humans to save humans seems weird. I guess you can slide on the scale of "more people living worse", or "less people living better", but to choose who is not possible in my opinion, so this is not implementable. Because if you care about the Earth primarily, then warming or not doesn't really matter, it's just a geological event like many more gnarly ones over the history of meteorite impacts and so on. But if you care primarily about the humans, then how can the answer be to have less of them? And pick and choose who gets to reproduce?
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    Who ever suggested to kill humans? Your whole comment does not make a lot of sense. Population is already naturally decreasing in a fair number of countries. Let's embrace this instead of panicking and trying to reverse the trend.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - bagels 3y ago
    There will be less people in the future if people reproduce at less than replacement rate. You don't have to have them killed, they will die eventually.
  - strken 3y ago
    Your belief seems to be that the value of humanity scales relative to the number of living humans. I disagree - I don't think one billion humans would be 1/10th as valuable as ten billion humans, provided we got to one billion just by deciding to have fewer kids. Killing humans is morally wrong in everything except weird edge cases, but having two children instead of three is not killing anyone. The bulk of what I value about the future of humanity is our continued existence and collective ability to do beautiful and impressive things together, not the individual existence of some as-yet-unborn hypothetical humans in that future. I don't think humanity's output scales linearly with population and I don't think there's much moral worth to future individuals outside their general contribution to wider human civilisation.
    - jdthedisciple 3y ago
      What you are missing is that to you, "valuable" continued existence means continuing to produce pointless tech gadgets and indefinitely increasing global GDP or something. To somebody else it means just living life. There is no way to objectively argue superiority of one over the other except from a religious worldview.
      - 3y ago
- dagss 3y ago
  > The issue is the global population. Obviously, that's the metric that matters for global issues like the climate and environment. No. "Obviously", the metric that matters is emissions. Or, the integral sum(person * emission of that person). When the emission per capita varies by a factors of 1000x, the distinction matters. Look, what if you could choose between: Option A: The 50% lowest polluting part of the world's population never existed. Would this make a dent towards global warming? No. Perhaps slow the onset by a few years. The overall magnitude of the problem would be the same. Option B: Through reduced consumption and technology, reduce emissions of the 50% highest polluters by 80%. This would have a quite massive impact towards global warming AND also help when the 50% poorest increase their living standards. Given these -- how can you say that "population" overall, without further qualification, is the problem? Another factor here is that population growth isn't something that will continue as/if people are lifted out of poverty -- when people become richer and more educated, the birth rates invariably drops. There are many other good comments on this page now about why you are wrong citing statistics and research reports, I encourage you to read them.
  - mytailorisrich 3y ago
    Emissions are only one of the problems, the other being use of resources. And both are a function of the population and are people get out of poverty use of energy and resources per capita only increases, compounding the overall impact, as already said. If we were 500 million globally, for instance, we would not be having this discussion because there would be no problems. I am not wrong, this is just a statement of fact. I am always surprised by this ostrich syndrome many have in absolutely refusing to consider that population is an issue, the key issue, even.
    - dagss 3y ago
      > If we were 500 million globally, for instance, we would not be having this discussion because there would be no problems. I think even 500 million is too much with current lifestyles. Given that a very large proportion of current emissions are caused by 500 million. But this aside, let's assume you are right. Which 500 million would you preserve? How would you get there before climate change is irreversible anyway due to melting tundra etc? Especially given that a lot of human history can be summed up as "wars to determine WHICH one will be the surviving set of humans to survive on limited resources". So which billions do you think will go willingly? -- Yes, of course, assuming that this magically just happened it would solve the problem. So would a number of other unrealistic solutions that has nothing to do with population control. Are we going to discuss which one out of a number of completely unrealistic uptopias are best? I see your 500 million inhabitant world, and raise with imagining a world with a population of 20 billion, with a million nuclear plants, no use of fossil fuels, LED-powered vertical farming, centralization of populations in big cities to let wildlife grow back and focus all efforts in responsible, non-disruptive mining of the resources needed. Which one of those is more or less preferable or realistic is pointless, and distracting from possibilities that may be within reach.
junaru 3y ago
> are you not saying that it may be better that 10 poor people are not born, than for rich people to do minor changes to their lifestyle? I definitely would say that and would argue it needs to be way more than 10. If you want to solve manmade climate change you need to solve the demand for goods that cause it. You lower demand by increasing the the supply (can't do that because that increases the emissions you try bringing down) or you increase its price making only the very rich able to afford it and delaying the problem for a decade till population catches up. We already see it with migrant crisis all over the west - both Europe and US. You do this decade after decade, again and again each time creating more and more privileged cast that can afford it (current policy) and in essence pushing the rest of the civilisation further and further into poverty as they will never catch up and if they do - new legislation will bring them down again to mask the issue once more. An example of that would be farmers in Europe protesting removal of diesel subsidies or just in general people being able to afford smaller and smaller cars due to taxation in Europe every year. The problem with these "minor changes to their lifestyle" is that they need to accommodate exponentially growing population that already is a magnitude or more higher than persons who need to adjust. We are talking about 90%+ reduction in what you call "minor changes" to achieve emission equilibrium to begin with and add that with exponentially growing population and its simply not feasible not due to lack of compassion from top percentile but because changes like these would completely anihilate the modern human civilisation and bringing it back hundreds of years. As an example theres a very informative video on what happens to country and infrastructure when 4 million people join the power grid in a decade [1] Imagine that scaled to 4 billion and the extreme worldwide devastation. Population control is the only way to solve climate change and it needs to be reduced everywhere but especially in the undeveloped nations as they have the most potential of bringing everything down. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiny1GrfhYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiny1GrfhYM
- brigandish 3y ago
  > You lower demand by increasing the the supply Jevon's Paradox[1] states that as efficiency increases (which itself is a form of supply increase), demand increases. My own view is that the paradox makes the idea of population reduction moot, those remaining humans would simply use more energy because supply has gone up and demand (through lack of competition) going down to levels below supply would, again, drive prices down. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

by dagss 3y ago

mytailorisrich 3y ago

The issue is the global population. Obviously, that's the metric that matters for global issues like the climate and environment. The global population is still increasing. Furthermore, as poor countries develop this is compounded by increased consumption (both resources and energy) per capita. In that respect, "richest 1% account for more emissions than poorest 66%" should be interpreted as very worrying when the poorest are getting richer. Ultimately we don't anyone to be poor. At current population levels this would probably mean a total collapse of the environment. Overall, the global population is indeed the root cause of our problems.

vasco 3y ago
I never understand this argument of overpopulation. How can you be OK with reducing population but at the same time worry about global warming? To have that position you basically need to reconcile two positions that to me aren't really compatible, unless someone explains it to me. Either it's fine for Earth to not have humans and just exist peacefully with the rest of the ecosystem until another lifeform takes over. Or it's not fine for the Earth to have no more humans and so we need to stop climate change from making the Earth uninhabitable for us, but if to do that we want to reduce the humans, I don't get it. To "kill" humans to save humans seems weird. I guess you can slide on the scale of "more people living worse", or "less people living better", but to choose who is not possible in my opinion, so this is not implementable. Because if you care about the Earth primarily, then warming or not doesn't really matter, it's just a geological event like many more gnarly ones over the history of meteorite impacts and so on. But if you care primarily about the humans, then how can the answer be to have less of them? And pick and choose who gets to reproduce?
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  Who ever suggested to kill humans? Your whole comment does not make a lot of sense. Population is already naturally decreasing in a fair number of countries. Let's embrace this instead of panicking and trying to reverse the trend.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- bagels 3y ago
  There will be less people in the future if people reproduce at less than replacement rate. You don't have to have them killed, they will die eventually.
- strken 3y ago
  Your belief seems to be that the value of humanity scales relative to the number of living humans. I disagree - I don't think one billion humans would be 1/10th as valuable as ten billion humans, provided we got to one billion just by deciding to have fewer kids. Killing humans is morally wrong in everything except weird edge cases, but having two children instead of three is not killing anyone. The bulk of what I value about the future of humanity is our continued existence and collective ability to do beautiful and impressive things together, not the individual existence of some as-yet-unborn hypothetical humans in that future. I don't think humanity's output scales linearly with population and I don't think there's much moral worth to future individuals outside their general contribution to wider human civilisation.
  - jdthedisciple 3y ago
    What you are missing is that to you, "valuable" continued existence means continuing to produce pointless tech gadgets and indefinitely increasing global GDP or something. To somebody else it means just living life. There is no way to objectively argue superiority of one over the other except from a religious worldview.
    - 3y ago
dagss 3y ago
> The issue is the global population. Obviously, that's the metric that matters for global issues like the climate and environment. No. "Obviously", the metric that matters is emissions. Or, the integral sum(person * emission of that person). When the emission per capita varies by a factors of 1000x, the distinction matters. Look, what if you could choose between: Option A: The 50% lowest polluting part of the world's population never existed. Would this make a dent towards global warming? No. Perhaps slow the onset by a few years. The overall magnitude of the problem would be the same. Option B: Through reduced consumption and technology, reduce emissions of the 50% highest polluters by 80%. This would have a quite massive impact towards global warming AND also help when the 50% poorest increase their living standards. Given these -- how can you say that "population" overall, without further qualification, is the problem? Another factor here is that population growth isn't something that will continue as/if people are lifted out of poverty -- when people become richer and more educated, the birth rates invariably drops. There are many other good comments on this page now about why you are wrong citing statistics and research reports, I encourage you to read them.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  Emissions are only one of the problems, the other being use of resources. And both are a function of the population and are people get out of poverty use of energy and resources per capita only increases, compounding the overall impact, as already said. If we were 500 million globally, for instance, we would not be having this discussion because there would be no problems. I am not wrong, this is just a statement of fact. I am always surprised by this ostrich syndrome many have in absolutely refusing to consider that population is an issue, the key issue, even.
  - dagss 3y ago
    > If we were 500 million globally, for instance, we would not be having this discussion because there would be no problems. I think even 500 million is too much with current lifestyles. Given that a very large proportion of current emissions are caused by 500 million. But this aside, let's assume you are right. Which 500 million would you preserve? How would you get there before climate change is irreversible anyway due to melting tundra etc? Especially given that a lot of human history can be summed up as "wars to determine WHICH one will be the surviving set of humans to survive on limited resources". So which billions do you think will go willingly? -- Yes, of course, assuming that this magically just happened it would solve the problem. So would a number of other unrealistic solutions that has nothing to do with population control. Are we going to discuss which one out of a number of completely unrealistic uptopias are best? I see your 500 million inhabitant world, and raise with imagining a world with a population of 20 billion, with a million nuclear plants, no use of fossil fuels, LED-powered vertical farming, centralization of populations in big cities to let wildlife grow back and focus all efforts in responsible, non-disruptive mining of the resources needed. Which one of those is more or less preferable or realistic is pointless, and distracting from possibilities that may be within reach.

junaru 3y ago

> are you not saying that it may be better that 10 poor people are not born, than for rich people to do minor changes to their lifestyle? I definitely would say that and would argue it needs to be way more than 10. If you want to solve manmade climate change you need to solve the demand for goods that cause it. You lower demand by increasing the the supply (can't do that because that increases the emissions you try bringing down) or you increase its price making only the very rich able to afford it and delaying the problem for a decade till population catches up. We already see it with migrant crisis all over the west - both Europe and US. You do this decade after decade, again and again each time creating more and more privileged cast that can afford it (current policy) and in essence pushing the rest of the civilisation further and further into poverty as they will never catch up and if they do - new legislation will bring them down again to mask the issue once more. An example of that would be farmers in Europe protesting removal of diesel subsidies or just in general people being able to afford smaller and smaller cars due to taxation in Europe every year. The problem with these "minor changes to their lifestyle" is that they need to accommodate exponentially growing population that already is a magnitude or more higher than persons who need to adjust. We are talking about 90%+ reduction in what you call "minor changes" to achieve emission equilibrium to begin with and add that with exponentially growing population and its simply not feasible not due to lack of compassion from top percentile but because changes like these would completely anihilate the modern human civilisation and bringing it back hundreds of years. As an example theres a very informative video on what happens to country and infrastructure when 4 million people join the power grid in a decade [1] Imagine that scaled to 4 billion and the extreme worldwide devastation. Population control is the only way to solve climate change and it needs to be reduced everywhere but especially in the undeveloped nations as they have the most potential of bringing everything down. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiny1GrfhYM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiny1GrfhYM

brigandish 3y ago
> You lower demand by increasing the the supply Jevon's Paradox[1] states that as efficiency increases (which itself is a form of supply increase), demand increases. My own view is that the paradox makes the idea of population reduction moot, those remaining humans would simply use more energy because supply has gone up and demand (through lack of competition) going down to levels below supply would, again, drive prices down. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox