8 ms·

Pointing out differences in age of first child for different groups (race, class, etc.) is not necessarily classist. It's the part that so often comes next, "th

Pointing out differences in age of first child for different groups (race, class, etc.) is not necessarily classist. It's the part that so often comes next, "therefore, we should..." that causes offense. Anyway, what's wrong with having 6 kids? People used to do it all the time and society was fine. Why shouldn't we set up our society in a way that allows this as a reasonable possibility?

titzer 3y ago
Because of ecological overshoot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot), which is a real problem (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-day/#:~:text=Earth%20Overshoot%20Day%20marks%20the,We%20are%20operating%20in%20overshoot https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-da....). Gradual population decline through declining birth rates is the least jarring and least fascist way of getting human population down to sustainable levels.
- cool_dude85 3y ago
  "Number of kids you have" is a strange place to focus on environmental impact, don't you think? A modest household with 6 kids, even one that lives to developed-world standards, has much less of an environmental impact than a single billionaire with a private jet. Like, orders of magnitudes less. If the family has one car and doesn't eat a lot of beef they probably have less of an impact than a family with 2 kids and 2 cars that goes to McDonald's a few times a week. Basically, the environmental impact of having more kids is sort of drowned out by various consumer choices, which are in turn drowned out by societal choices that no one family can impact at all.
  - MauranKilom 3y ago
    FWIW, "number of flights you take" also drowns out your eating habits in environmental impact. Compared to how much they cost, flights have stupid CO2 equivalents. However, I don't know why you are comparing a single billionaire vs a single X kid household. Like, the number of each (or even of private jets) are not even _remotely_ in the same ballpark. Which is why "number of kids" is not at all a strange place to focus on environmental impact, but "billionaire lifestyle choices" is.
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  Some see people as burdens, some as assets. I think this is a very important world view conflict.
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    The situation can be far more nuanced than this. It's not the people, it's the cars, cows, planes, land, and fuel they consume.
    - hersko 3y ago
      Earth can sustain a far larger human population. More humans is absolutely a net-good.
    - BurningFrog 3y ago
      For most of those things, people produce as much as they consume. So more people doesn't make things worse. Fossil fuels are a bit of an exception, but the transition to non fossil fuels is in full swing, and will be complete long before the oil runs out. Land is a better argument, though multi story buildings is a partial answer. Either way, we are very far from running out of land.
      - CalRobert 3y ago
        Land for housing isn't the concern, land for livestock the person eats is.
- anonym29 3y ago
  A vast supermajority of the entire inhabited human planet is so far below replacement-level fertility that human extinction is now closer than the ice caps being completely 100% melted. This has been the case for several years and is a trend that still accelerating. Fun fact: human fertility per person is shrinking faster than GHG emissions per person are growing. Even with a handful of countries still breeding like rabbits with 6.0+ TFR, the world population is set to peak before 2100 before entering a prolonged decline. Ecological overshoot is a bunk idea. From wikipedia: "Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can provide through its capacity for renewal." Earth's capacity for natural resource renewal is routinely increased by human activity. For instance, when humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, earth's capacity for natural resource renewal rose rapidly as many new reccuringly-planted crops sprung up in places they never had before. Another example, the invention of fertilizer. Food scarcity used to be a real problem for large swaths of the planet. It isn't a problem for most of the planet now, in spite of the fact that demand has grown, and demand growth accelerated by orders of magnitude relative to e.g. 1000 AD. In fact, human activity has made the renewal capacity for earth so much greater that we now have an entirely different problem: for the first time in human history, there are more people consuming too many calories than there are people consuming too few calories. Clearly, food isn't the problem. The sun provides enough energy to desalinate every ocean on the planet hundreds of times over even with our current rudimentary PV technology with efficiency rates in the ballpark of just ~20%. Water isn't the problem. While fusion may still eternally be 20+ years away, we've had fission for decades now. You can power the global electricity needs of twice the population of today's planet with reactors taking up less space than Rhode Island. The waste can be permanently and safely disposed of continuously by launching it into the sun for something like 0.000001% of the annual global GDP. Of course, the sun is also blasting us with the product of nuclear fusion constantly, so we could just massively scale solar to humanity-sized installations. Imagine using a bullet train to get from one side of the humanity-scale PV installation because driving takes too long. So ultimately, electricity isn't the problem. In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling. I must be missing something here because it seems like we have pretty straightforward roadmaps to meeting the water, electricity, and food needs of a population 2x the current global population - just what demands are being made by humanity that our solar system is incapable of meeting, when combined with human ingenuity giving us the stream of groundbreaking technological improvements that pretty much everyone on earth is not only accustomed to, but continuing to expect more of?
- CalRobert 3y ago
  I generally agree, but a key issue here is fairness. Telling someone in India they can't have three kids because Johnny techbro wants to feel ok about flying 100,000 miles a year isn't great.
nemo44x 3y ago
There's nothing wrong with having 6 kids but I think more people used to because effective birth control didn't exist. People had lots of sex back then too and wife's were getting knocked up frequently and at a younger age when vastly more fertile. My mother had ~40 cousins. I have 12. My kids have 4. It's no shock that the birth control pill was invented between the time my parent were born and started a family. Throw in the 64,000,000 abortions in the USA (and the ~70 millions per year globally!) since it was legalized and this is why we don't have big families anymore.

titzer 3y ago

Because of ecological overshoot (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_overshoot), which is a real problem (https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-day/#:~:text=Earth%20Overshoot%20Day%20marks%20the,We%20are%20operating%20in%20overshoot https://www.footprintnetwork.org/our-work/earth-overshoot-da....). Gradual population decline through declining birth rates is the least jarring and least fascist way of getting human population down to sustainable levels.

cool_dude85 3y ago
"Number of kids you have" is a strange place to focus on environmental impact, don't you think? A modest household with 6 kids, even one that lives to developed-world standards, has much less of an environmental impact than a single billionaire with a private jet. Like, orders of magnitudes less. If the family has one car and doesn't eat a lot of beef they probably have less of an impact than a family with 2 kids and 2 cars that goes to McDonald's a few times a week. Basically, the environmental impact of having more kids is sort of drowned out by various consumer choices, which are in turn drowned out by societal choices that no one family can impact at all.
- MauranKilom 3y ago
  FWIW, "number of flights you take" also drowns out your eating habits in environmental impact. Compared to how much they cost, flights have stupid CO2 equivalents. However, I don't know why you are comparing a single billionaire vs a single X kid household. Like, the number of each (or even of private jets) are not even _remotely_ in the same ballpark. Which is why "number of kids" is not at all a strange place to focus on environmental impact, but "billionaire lifestyle choices" is.
BurningFrog 3y ago
Some see people as burdens, some as assets. I think this is a very important world view conflict.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  The situation can be far more nuanced than this. It's not the people, it's the cars, cows, planes, land, and fuel they consume.
  - hersko 3y ago
    Earth can sustain a far larger human population. More humans is absolutely a net-good.
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    For most of those things, people produce as much as they consume. So more people doesn't make things worse. Fossil fuels are a bit of an exception, but the transition to non fossil fuels is in full swing, and will be complete long before the oil runs out. Land is a better argument, though multi story buildings is a partial answer. Either way, we are very far from running out of land.
    - CalRobert 3y ago
      Land for housing isn't the concern, land for livestock the person eats is.
anonym29 3y ago
A vast supermajority of the entire inhabited human planet is so far below replacement-level fertility that human extinction is now closer than the ice caps being completely 100% melted. This has been the case for several years and is a trend that still accelerating. Fun fact: human fertility per person is shrinking faster than GHG emissions per person are growing. Even with a handful of countries still breeding like rabbits with 6.0+ TFR, the world population is set to peak before 2100 before entering a prolonged decline. Ecological overshoot is a bunk idea. From wikipedia: "Global ecological overshoot occurs when the demands made by humanity exceed what the biosphere of Earth can provide through its capacity for renewal." Earth's capacity for natural resource renewal is routinely increased by human activity. For instance, when humans switched from hunting and gathering to agriculture, earth's capacity for natural resource renewal rose rapidly as many new reccuringly-planted crops sprung up in places they never had before. Another example, the invention of fertilizer. Food scarcity used to be a real problem for large swaths of the planet. It isn't a problem for most of the planet now, in spite of the fact that demand has grown, and demand growth accelerated by orders of magnitude relative to e.g. 1000 AD. In fact, human activity has made the renewal capacity for earth so much greater that we now have an entirely different problem: for the first time in human history, there are more people consuming too many calories than there are people consuming too few calories. Clearly, food isn't the problem. The sun provides enough energy to desalinate every ocean on the planet hundreds of times over even with our current rudimentary PV technology with efficiency rates in the ballpark of just ~20%. Water isn't the problem. While fusion may still eternally be 20+ years away, we've had fission for decades now. You can power the global electricity needs of twice the population of today's planet with reactors taking up less space than Rhode Island. The waste can be permanently and safely disposed of continuously by launching it into the sun for something like 0.000001% of the annual global GDP. Of course, the sun is also blasting us with the product of nuclear fusion constantly, so we could just massively scale solar to humanity-sized installations. Imagine using a bullet train to get from one side of the humanity-scale PV installation because driving takes too long. So ultimately, electricity isn't the problem. In order for humanity to be able to run, we need to not kill it right after it started crawling. I must be missing something here because it seems like we have pretty straightforward roadmaps to meeting the water, electricity, and food needs of a population 2x the current global population - just what demands are being made by humanity that our solar system is incapable of meeting, when combined with human ingenuity giving us the stream of groundbreaking technological improvements that pretty much everyone on earth is not only accustomed to, but continuing to expect more of?
CalRobert 3y ago
I generally agree, but a key issue here is fairness. Telling someone in India they can't have three kids because Johnny techbro wants to feel ok about flying 100,000 miles a year isn't great.

nemo44x 3y ago

There's nothing wrong with having 6 kids but I think more people used to because effective birth control didn't exist. People had lots of sex back then too and wife's were getting knocked up frequently and at a younger age when vastly more fertile. My mother had ~40 cousins. I have 12. My kids have 4. It's no shock that the birth control pill was invented between the time my parent were born and started a family. Throw in the 64,000,000 abortions in the USA (and the ~70 millions per year globally!) since it was legalized and this is why we don't have big families anymore.