Biffer wrote: Fri Mar 24, 2023 11:16 am
inactionman wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 10:09 am
Biffer wrote: Thu Mar 23, 2023 9:55 am
Of course, the other, more insidious side of the population argument is what do you want to do to resolve that? Because there are two choices
1. Kill people
2. Reduce birth rates
If it’s number 1, please tell us how you want to do it and how many you want to kill
If it’s number 2, again, how do you want to do that? Forced sterilisation, or developmentally with increased education? Another method? And then tell us how that’s going to achieve any population reduction in the next 100 years. By which time we’ll be fucked anyway in terms of climate.
The population argument is just another ‘blame the poor’ piece of bullshit that is promoted by anti climate science / fossil fuel enthusiasts. It can have no effect without mass murder, and the people who have fallen for this line because it means they don’t have to take a long hard look at themselves, don’t even realise what they’re advocating.
It's possible to think that we're overpopulated and that we're over-consuming, they're not mutually exclusive positions.
Many significant driver of population increase are starting to dissipate - I list a few but not exhaustive: no need for kids to help with work, reducing impact of church bans on contraception, the sheer financial and life impacts of raising kids as extended families become more geographically dispersed, frankly the societal expectation has shifted.
There's also a number 3, btw - have children later in life. This extends the gaps between generations. I'm only going anecdotally but this is one of the most significant changes I've seen in UK over my lifetime. My parent's generation had kids in their 20s, almost universally. Of my 3 closest schoolfriends, one had kids in his early 30s, one at 37 and both me and the third friend had kids in our 40s.
Anyway, I agree that the drivers for consumption do not seem to be significantly dissipating, and as you state, this is something we can look to deal with in the shorter term.
Yeah, they're not incompatible, but there are too many people who just have the attitude 'well, there's so many people there's nothing I can do that'll make a difference, all these extra people in Asia and Africa, that's the problem' when they're consuming more CO2 than 50 or 100 people in those countries. They're also relevant on very different timescales. We can do something about amount, methods and technologies of consumption over decades. Population won't be reduced significantly over centuries.
You're right about kids in later life but I think technically that'd be a corollary of number 2; if you have kids later in life you tend to have fewer, so reducing birth rates.
I'd agree any action (in as much as there is action to take) on population will definitely only bring results well outside of any timeframe where we might evade the worst of man-made climate change, but I'd say it still plays a role in sustaining required emissions levels - climate change is driven ultimately by the sum of all emissions and it's no real long-term success to reduce emissions per head by half and then doubling the number of heads.
Of course, the goal is more than halving current, it's to reduce by orders of magnitude per head. As you say, that requires behavioural and technological change, no two ways about it.
I still think that. when push comes to shove, we can't rely on the good intentions of people, we need to start pricing things on true costs. We're doing bits of it already but it needs to be amplified. And stop fucking linking the costs of wind-farm produced electricity to gas prices - make such electricity overwhelmingly cheaper so more people naturally use it.
It's worth noting that overpopulation will cause a number of other problems that will magnify climate change -water shortages (e.g. can cause desertification with attendant reduction in flora, which are carbon sinks), and removal of forest for grazing, food etc.
