In exchange for sacrificing what many people feel is a vital component of life you could have a completely insignificant impact on the environment!
Also, compare the birth rate per woman in the US (1.73) to somewhere like Niger (7). Getting Western populations to decline faster will not have any meaningful effect on total human population.
The average American's carbon footprint is 190x that of the average Niger citizen. Until that changes, population growth in Niger isn't a worry from a climate change perspective. Though it could still cause geopolitical instability in that country and its neighbors.
Unless you think that Niger will persist in poverty forever, or that people born in Niger never move to the US or Europe, then yes, it's still a worry.
It's pretty well-established that a nation's fertility reduces as it grows richer. So Niger will either remain poor but irrelevant to climate change. Or it'll leave poverty behind, but also cut its birth rate.
Either way, only what developed countries (and China, India, Brazil, maybe Nigeria and Indonesia) do today matters in the fight against climate change. There's no one else to point fingers at, unless you're looking for an excuse to do nothing.
As a percentage of total population, the number of people who emigrate from a poor country like Niger to a developed country is quite small. And they'd likely be poor there too, and consume fewer resources on average.
By the time the developing world develops and slows their birth rate they'll have a massive population. They have a big population now and are growing fast. If we don't actually solve global warming the addition of billions more wealthy people will be a huge environmental burden.
I think "doing nothing" is what people who advocate reduction of consumption and having fewer kids are doing. Those plans won't be implemented and they won't work. What I'm advocating is technological development to solve the problems related to global warming.
> I think "doing nothing" is what people who advocate reduction of consumption and having fewer kids are doing. What I'm advocating is technological development to solve the problems related to global warming.
You may think so but that's not the case. I don't know of too many vegan-organic-bike-riding-hippy types who think we shouldn't invest in grid-scale storage, renewable power, carbon capture, or more efficient heating & cooling, manufacturing, or transportation systems. Arguably the only tech many of them oppose is nuclear power.
We need both - reduction of consumption and technological development. People who think just one or the other will be enough are deluded.
(Voluntary) reduction of consumption has the side-effect that the electorate becomes more agreeable to measures such as carbon taxes. An SUV and burger-loving electorate will never vote for them, because they would make SUVs and burgers more expensive. Without carbon taxes, there's no market mechanism to control emissions. And there's less funding for technological development or subsidies to green tech.
Bitcoin is closer to a deity for which people sacrifice their electricity as an offering. Meanwhile Americans are merely fulfilling their selfish desires. Bitcoin can work with 1 KW of power just as well as it can work with 1 TW of power.
And what about all the crap America imports from all over the world? (I use "America" as a shorthand for the entire developed world. We're all responsible)
I keep being told that America doing anything to reduce emissions is pointless "because China builds a new coal plant ever hour" or something factoid like that. But China does a substantial portion of the world's manufacturing. So if you're giving America's emissions a pass, you should give China a pass as well, right?
My point is that we are actually under-counting our CO2 emissions (if we simply go by emissions per capita) because we consume more imported goods from other countries that have expended CO2 to produce them than we export.
Niger is actually a great example for illustrating that better health (e.g. infant mortality rate) and economic outlook results in dramatically falling birth rates. Current birth rate is 6.7, but it was 7.5 only ten years ago: https://knoema.de/atlas/Niger/Fertilit%c3%a4tsrate
In my view the people of the developing world have their challenge - figuring out how to make their people wealthy, healthy, educated, and safe. People in the developed world have the challenge of figuring out how to scale. The answer to scaling cannot be "Maybe we'll just have fewer people or be poor."
While I don't agree on the premise here. There's never gonna be the one thing solving the whole problem. It's gonna be the sum of a million little things. Don't let good be the enemy of perfect.
That’s a weird argument to make. When people care about “the environment” they usually mean something like “keep the planet pleasant for humans”. Sure the humanity can commit collective sacrificial suicide to “preserve the environment”, but to what end? The cockroaches will do just fine either way.
I just find it amusing that the very source of the problem (humans) are themselves positing that they are also part of the solution.
Why kid ourselves? 8+ billion humans are going to consume, and keep consuming, endlessly. The ONLY actual solution that involves humans is expansion. We either expand to another planet / galaxy, or we ride this one out to its (and our) death.
That's why we should prioritize science more as a collective. We need more Elon Musks with giant aspirations to really move the needle.
The so-called problem is only a problem because humans deem it such.
Does the earth differentiate between malaria and kelp forests? No. Humans differentiate between them, actively trying to eliminate one and wringing our hands and trying to prevent the destruction of the other.
To call it “a problem” is to implicitly assert dominion over the land, sky and sea while pretending that you are not.
That's quite deluded. Elon Musk has done less than nothing to make moving to another planet feasible, despite all his grandomania dreams. We are thousands of years away from any notion of expansion beyond Earth. Even if he were to magically get a handful of people living on Mars (he won't) that is not going to bring us even an inch closer to something like a sustainable Mars colony.
And no, human beings do not naturally "consume and consume endlessly". In fact, the vast majority of those 8 billion people (say, 7.9 billion of them, or maybe 7.5 billion if you want) are consuming a fraction of the total resources. The vast majority of climate change is due to the richest ~10-20% in the richest countries on Earth. One way or another, this state of affairs will end in the next 50 years at most. Hopefully it will end in a more egalitarian society that respects the environment.
A race that can conceive of no other good than itself is locked into a certain kind of death spiral, as it will destroy everything around itself to make more "good". With our global reach and our local incentives spurring ever more consumption, we are headed for a very stark reckoning with the finite resources of our planet.
This is commonly done under the assumption that your kid is an average polluter and that you cannot teach your kid to cause less pollution. For many people that is true. I kind of doubt that it is true for me.
Does nature and beauty matter if there are no sentient beings to observe it?
When many (most?) people talk about mitigating or reversing climate change, their main goal is the benefit to humanity. Sure, there is some level of empathy and caring for the species going extinct every year, but even part of that is only as far as how a healthy, diverse biosphere better supports human life.
Global civilization has a long history of emptying pristine environments of sentient beings and not realizing what it has done...we have no monopoly on sentience or beauty. We are just a small part of nature.
