The human race is a Ponzi scheme. It’s fine at the top of the pyramid.
Shit just look at social security. Not enough GenX to play for the boomer bubble.
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I’m trying to see this view in my own head -
by 2050 o/s we need to reduce our footprint nearly 10x. I guess in the time from now til then a child could be born that invents technology that achieves this, but I struggle to see how any child born today could be anything but adding to the problem.
Yeah it feels tone deaf, when in the midst of an existential crisis for the human race, to say “what about the economy”, but…unfortunately it’s a thing. What’s happening to Japan is pretty much what the future would bring here if we really reined in the birth rate. I don’t know what the answer is, everything sucks.
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Meanwhile Religion is trying to breed to dominance. Worked for the Catholics for a long time (my Mom was 7/13).
We could offset a declining birthrate by allowing more immigration
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Letting COVID run wild was our last best hope of reducing the population.
I guess after years of decline, since covid, the birth rate has ticked up again. go figure, we’re drawing live for apocalypse, let’s have some kids
And just wait until the anti-abortion laws really kick in…
I struggle to see how people could suffer from the lack of imagination and heart that provides this narrow view.
There are absolutely timelines where poc will benefit from a warmer climate.
Committing suicide would have a bigger impact than not having kids, objectively.
Of course, you probably consider it axiomatic to the climate dilemma that suicide is off the table, as the goal is to accommodate your desire to live without frying the world. Got it.
But many people would consider it axiomatic to the climate dilemma that reproduction is inherent to any life and a solution that takes reproduction off the table is not a solution at all.
You need to argue against the value judgement, then, and not the efficacy.
(Naturally, extending access to reproductive rights both domestically and abroad will have a huge, voluntary benefit to climate change and myriad other issues.)
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I mean… this is the shit I studied a lot in undergrad and I immediately paged someone I know works in the field. But fuck me right?
objectively no - if I killed myself today my
carbon impact ends immediately and I’ve only saved whatever the extra would have been had I died of other causes.
if I have one kid that’s their total footprint + potentially infinite more if they have kids of their own.
I am not proposing any solution other than to state I really really doubt this planet can support 8 billion people for any length of time. sustainably it’s probably quite a bit less than that and we’re not going to reduce population that much without war, famine, or disease of an apocalyptic scale, it doesn’t seem at all to me like the problem will just naturally resolve
Was?
We’re on pace for like 400K covid deaths this year, and those are just the ones counted from primary infections that are tested for, and that’s with two big months (Jan/Feb) whereas we’ll probably have at least Oct-Dec with big totals at the end of the year. Plus we’re likely about to surge again. If we do one more big Omicron-type wave this year we’ll likely hit 450K, if we do one now and one in the holiday season, 550K is in play.
Plus the deaths from excess strokes, heart attacks, etc. I wouldn’t be surprised if COVID wiped out 700K-1M people this year all told when we count up excess deaths.
Not exactly saving us from climate change, but it’s definitely slowing down the population growth - I think pre-covid the population grew at like 0.5% per year? Which would be like 1.65M people per year?
Well, climate change increases the likelihoods of war, famine, and pandemics, so…
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Not enough to accomplish what needs to be done. Guess we go back to rooting for world war.
Is Japan a hellscape that I don’t know about?
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If you killed yourself today, you are also deciding not to have any kids. Ergo, it is a bigger impact than deciding not to have any kids.
Also, once again, if you’re arguing about not having kids on the grounds of efficacy, it’s just not a great argument that many people will buy into; much like suicide, it’s highly efficacious, and also totally hopeless and defeatist. That’s probably why you haven’t heard people making it very much.
Just a dangerously aging population, economic deflation, doubts about future sustainability if population keeps shrinking etc.
Imagine if the only way to not have kids was to not have sex. How many people would choose celibacy for the sake of the planet?
ok I didn’t see those decisions as so binary, I see what you’re saying - in my head if I had killed myself in this hypothetical I also wouldn’t necessarily not be having kids - but in the scenario you just proposed, yes that is the least impact.
I don’t think it’s defeatist to suggest this planet can’t sustain this many people in the next 75 years. we’re still talking like 2 celsius in 2100 is still preventable - it’s 0.0% and we’re probably easily drawing to 3+ right now. people really underestimate how bad 2 alone is, hell even 1.5.