Wouldn't population control to an extent help slow the rate of emissions? Caps on births or higher taxes on family sizes, etc.
I know political/moral/ethical issues would make it impractical but I don't think any potential solution is worth ignoring.
It's worth reducing fertility in poorer countries, but this is best done by carrot rather than stick: education and job opportunities for women, and decent free baseline healthcare with contraception included.
One of the main obstacles to the latter is US religious conservatives.
I should imagine Catholic church's condemnation of birth control is the larger political issue in countries that are not US.
I don't think the problem is the number of people living on earth but how modern society is making people live, for example some big contributors are high meat consumption (cattle methane) inefficient transportation (big suvs with just the driver inside sitting in traffic jams) consumerism that drive all those factories to produce mostly useless products that break easily to be soon replaced etc.
We need to change or habits not our numbers, this is the source of the problem.
Who needs that pesky First Amendment when there's dietary habits to tackle, right?
a) agree with you and GP (though perhaps not to such a dramatic end), and
b) slap on the brakes when discussing constitutionally perilous endeavors that could ultimately harm us more than this discussion can forecast; what else can I forbid or do in the name of existential issues?
That I'm in the apparent minority here based on voting is far more alarming than I'd like it to be. Am I being interpreted as pro meat or something and riling the vegetarians? When I see the words "forbid" and "advertising" next to each other in such proximity I'm compelled to point out it's a bad idea. How am I the only one on this side? I'm all for evolving the Constitution, but fiddling with the First is not where I'd start and suppressing meat advertising has the potential to become much worse. That's my only point and I cannot express to you how alarmed I am that it's controversial.
If you're coming at me this hard that the First Amendment is malleable enough to save us from perceived world doom by forgetting it when it's convenient, let's turn around and have a conversation about the Second, then, shall we? Two can play that game. Either the Constitution is infallible or it isn't. Tell me which it is and I'll debate accordingly.
Cigarettes and prescription drugs may not be advertised in the UK.
I also don't know how to get there constitutionally without somehow differentiating advertising from speech (the Court has declined every opportunity, which should be obvious from the term of art "commercial speech") or relitigating Central Hudson. I also don't know whether yielding on the Constitution in cases like these compromises my values. See where I'm coming from? All it takes is one case of ignoring the First or Fourteenth in particular and getting away with establishing some bad precedent. That's a future that would concern me greatly.
I've seen some folks arguing for jailing fake news authors here on HN. Ignoring parts of our Constitution feels good to think about in order to address a squeaky wheel. The ramifications of where that steers the whole cart over potentially decades must be carefully studied, however, some amendments far more than others (the First being one of those).
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posadas_de_Puerto_Rico_Associa... (I don't really know US constitutional law, but this is linked on wikipedia!) - arguing that advertising can be restricted in the US under some circumstances.
(The extent of US TV censorship should also be considered here, along with the great "community standards" fight over internet censorship way back in the Clinton era)
To be honest, there are probably many Americans who are less attached to maintaining America's legal foundation - and would accept the laws of any other free society - than they are to taking action against climate change. I don't mean this to say to "throw out the constitution", and I agree we shouldn't remove things that grant us stability.. But what does even the totality of the rule of law mean in the face of the laws of physics?
To be fair I probably derailed the thread from the topic of advertising's nonexemption from 1st Amendment protection..
Even the constitution does not consider itself infallible, or it would not include instructions for its amendment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Five_of_the_United_Sta...
That said, forbidding advertising of meat is obviously an extreme proposal, not least because of things like this:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2013/aug/05/synthetic-me...
http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/06/21/482322571/sil...
Please name a single first world nation-state that would be either submerged under water or have their population decimated (i.e. an expected casualty rate of 10%).
I believe that even Netherlands would stay above water by continued investment and extension of their current water control practices. For the first world, any coastal areas that actually do become underwater will likely simply result in an expensive migration, with actual deaths from storms/etc measured in the hundreds at most.
Countries like Bangladesh are in a different position, for them it makes all sense to reduce emissions, but they can't change much.
The expected worst case change in the first world is not impactful enough to warrant major changes in the country regime; if huge reductions of emissions are more expensive than some resettlement (and, generally, won't be enough to prevent the need of resettlement anyway), then we don't reduce global emissions but invest in mitigation of local consequences.
And actually, one answer to "who needs nation-states when they're submerged under water and their populations decimated?" is that the first world would actually want their nation-states to be strong and shield their people from the consequences of other nation-states becoming submerged under water and their populations decimated.
No - the little bit of upset the west is feeling absorbing Syrian refugees should be a wake-up call that we can't just wall ourselves off from other peoples' problems.
Governments all over the first world are clearly more resistant to accepting immigrants than a few years ago.
One can definitely argue that for moral reasons we shouldn't wall ourselves off from other peoples problems, but the first world certainly does have the capacity to try and it seems that it also has the political desire to do so. If you ignore the words of major governments but look at their actions, we are seeing investments in capabilities to do just that, both military capabilities and economic ones - as automation replaces offshoring, the first world is now agains slowly getting less dependant on third world labor.
Solve that problem. Then we get somewhere.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/feastandfamine/2013/12/livest...
I suspect that it may actually be more efficient to skip pesticide applications and harvesters, and use domesticated insects to harvest grains and fly those food calories directly to a local processing facility.
Certain species are already natural grain harvesting machines. Certain species are already natural pest predators. Those could be exploited and bred for a purpose. Humans plant the corn. Domesticated insect-predator insects patrol the fields and protect the corn from unauthorized eating before it is ready to harvest. They return to the hive, breed for the next season, and get eaten. Domesticated harvester insects then mature, fly out to eat the corn, and then fly back to the hive, breed for the next season, and get eaten.
Whatever is not eaten directly by humans can be fed to farmed fish or poultry.
Seriously though - I suspect the majority of american calories already comes from a grass (corn & derived products)
As for meat replacement alternatives to help people adjust to a diet with less/no meat: Plant-based meat substitutes (these have become a lot better in recent years), in vitro meat production (still a few years off), or just more beans/lentils in the diet to replace the lost protein.
Anyway consumers would stop purchasing organic meat or meat from places that cared about animal welfare before they stop eating meat.
On the other hand, this analogy (and others) are pretty useful. Makes me think sociological discourse would benefit from using logical systems as a frame of reference.
So you say, doesn't make it true. The source of the problem is every person; increase the number, worsen the problem.
Just look at airlines. As a random example, Qantas Airlines, in the 2015 financial year, burned $3.9 billion AUD worth fuel! (About $3 billion in USD).
Source: page 15 of their annual report: http://www.qantas.com.au/infodetail/about/corporateGovernanc...
A reason could be that in some statistics, only domestic flights are included, and international aviation belongs to no one's statistics.
I suspect there is a lot more to it than just limiting the numbers of babies born. If there are more resources per person (a consequence of fewer people) then we will likely see the resources used per person go up.
Anecdotally - American cars are terribly inefficient with respect to fuel consumption. This is I think partly due to the low cost of fuel. In the UK, however, the cost of fuel per litre is almost double that of the US, and consequently people gravitate toward much more efficient vehicles.
Additionally - China has been a huge polluter for quite some time despite one child policies though admittedly it's partly because the global economy outsourced their pollution to China to a degree.
Only a philosophical shift brought on by a serious downturn in circumstances would cause people to reconcile their presuppositions of reality with actual reality and by then who knows if the problem would be reversible.
How likely is that to happen, especially in Trump's America?
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
I don't think there's a rule for that. Is it in the Scripture (because I know that less well)?
In a globalized system, where these extractive activities are global commodities, it seems to make sense to index emissions/extraction against economy size. Otherwise you get the unhelpful result that Bahrain and Qatar are the source of the problem (in a material sense they are, but not in a useful sense). This [1] list of emissions by GDP is a nice start, and it seems that Canada and Australia, the other two members of the wealthy New World Anglosphere, are neighbors to the US on this metric.
Is there a good way of accounting for national economy specialization when assessing contribution to the emissions problem? China looks very inefficient according to this metric, but much of the world is essentially outsourcing its emissions to China. Is it useful to compare China to a country whose GDP is based largely on financial services? Which nations give the best bang for the buck in dirty industry (my suspicion is that Germany does well here)?
1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_ratio_of_...
The limit will not only be because of CO2. There are other situations that need to be managed.
Population is increasing, and the lifestyle of individuals is rising, making each person have a larger cost on the environment.
Topsoil, the soil we grow our food in, takes long to regenerate and we are depleting it faster than it regenerates.
Overfishing cannot be stopped. Fish will be gone soon, and we largely depend on it. Fish as food, fishmeal for animals and fish oil as fertilizer (fish emulsion).
Greater wealth seems to also have discourage people from having children if the birth rates in wester countries are any indication.
I think we can do more to tackle the specific problems you mention through regulation and better policy, whereas a falling global population on its own would do little or nothing to combat them.
It is reasonable to expect growth rate will decline. Right now a billion people is predicted to be added every ~13 years. Even if the growth rate declines, population cannot continue to grow forever.
Ocean acidification from CO2 absorption, plastic pollution (including microplastics), overfishing, the destruction of the species that influence the oceanic carbon cycle and the overall increasing frequency of harmful algal blooms...
Not a good forecast for the continued survival of fish.
A lot of the waste in America comes from sprawl, causing everyone to build bigger houses and own bigger things, but most importantly, rely on fossil fuels just to get around every day.
Of course converting the US to high density is probably too late.
The US is also the biggest target market for Chinese made goods, which means a lot of the non-fossil fuel pollution you see in China is really just externalizef American pollution.
This is certainly not true on a regional basis, and I can hardly say with confidence that stagnating population levels in Europe really warrant African families having upwards of 10 children on average when the land can hardly feed the current population as is.
We are talking about huge numbers here if African population really does increase by 3 billion during this century. FWIW, I'm not going to stop driving and start walking so someone else's children can do the pollution instead of me and it levels out.
Fortunately, it's a global problem.
As to the rest of your comment, I understand that people have fewer children when they trust that their children aren't going to die young, and that's the direction we're headed in.
The insane optimist in me tends to think that as we develop cost-effective methods of generating electricity without the co2 we will also have greater capacity to aid economic development in third-world countries. So on the upside, there seems to be a 'virtuous cycle' in here somewhere.
Just check the distribution of growth rates across the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_populatio...
[0] -https://www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2015/oct/29/impac...