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Comment by ponzored | Hacker News Reader

I think its a general cultural disdain for the environment within some cultures.

Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.

This is why arguments from educated, intelligent and responsible Westerners that they themselves shouldn't have children in order to reduce the impact on the planet are flawed.

If not for their children with the same skills and views, who else will reign in the Asians and Africans who are busy destroying their environments?

The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level. This means hugely reducing fertility in some developing countries, mostly by making sure contraception is widely available and that women are educated enough to know how to use it.

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> Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.

Well I've been to a lot of places with plastic pollution problems and I picked up gobs of that shit off the world's beaches. I can tell you that despite their prevalence, plastic bottles, chip bags, straws, flippers, lids, cups, forks, and knives don't spring out of the ground. They don't grow on trees. Most aren't made in local factories. They are manufactured elsewhere, shipped there, and sold to the locals, each hand in that supply chain extracting a little bit of profit, a huge portion of which is sent overseas, stolen from the local economy.

You can blame locals for being trash monkeys if you want--and they absolutely are--but absent outside influx of these one-time plastic use goods, they'd be piling up paper and wood and banana peels since they have since the beginning of time, and nature would be taking care of it using age-old biodegradation.

Plastic is our mess and its global reach is absolutely due to Western greed.

It's possible - just perhaps barely possible - that you might get a better reception from a more friendly audience if you didn't describe trade as theft. In the eyes of many, it robs your truthful, necessary, utterly critical message of credibility to the people who most need to internalize it.

It's not so much cultural disdain as weak governance and a current priority for jobs and economic growth over environmental protection. If 'enlightened' western countries really cared more about the environment perhaps they would impose more restrictions about the goods that they allow to be imported into their countries.

Britain or France in the 1800s was equally if not more egregious in terms of disdain for the environment, though they didn't have the size or technology to wreak as much impact as modern technologies allow us to do.

> The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level.

We need to stop making non-biodegradable garbage. Period. You can blame the last hand to touch it, but the whole pipeline should just not exist. Population will take the better part of a century to stabilize--we need to fix our waste problem no matter what population does, and we cannot wait for some mythical world with fewer people.

An average US citizen contributes far more to pollution than the average African or Asian.

The Philippines are catholic so birth control might actually be illegal, if the Catholic Church is concerned about the environment they need to promote birth control not present it as a cardinal sin. Countries like this the pope holds a heck of a lot of sway. He talks a good game about global warming but here is where the rubber meets the road. For the sake of the common good they need to shift the focus of sin from sex to wrecking the environment and causing overpopulation.

And what is the solution given that these people exist ? Because undoing that seems immoral now, even by non-catholic standards.

I mean the best interpretation of your comment is wishing for an alternate world (in which millions of people would never have been alive in the first place). In the middle the comment is assigning blame for that. At worst ...

I get that dozens of millions of people not being alive would solve your problem ... but I do hope you understand that nobody, especially not those few dozen millions, agree. And that does mean that you'll have to come with a different solution.

He’s talking about the millions of people not yet born.

When you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging.

And what will happen to the country and the economy that sustains them if they "stop digging" ?

We'll have to figure that out, won't we? The Philippines birth rate is somewhere in the vicinity of 3 children per woman. What's a more sustainable number?

Economically, to take care of those ?

How did you come to that number and why do you think a double the replacement birth-rate can be sustained forever?

I would come to the number by calculating how people will support themselves and others, and yet have a reasonable load on them.

That number seems to be at least greater than 3. So 4. Probably it's more like 3.1 or so.

How did you get to the conclusion that the island of the Philippines can't support (from now, and for a VERY long time in the future, even if perhaps not indefinitely) 3 children per woman ?

The first thing the world needs is to wrestle money from these billionaires and fund education for people.

Educated people will understand the impact of their kids, and also have a better chance at making a contribution to society, and taking care of their families they do have.

Huh? Isn't Bill Gates spending his money strategically to best help those people. He's spent over $15 Billion dollars on vaccines. I highly doubt a government will be able to spend that money more effectively.

He is one of the very few oligarchs giving above and beyond the amount required for tax breaks.

It's funny to me because you're bitching about effective govt spending on the internet..a technology developed by the govt.

Id argue government funding has developed more cures for diseases and more technological advances than any other sources of funding in all of history.

NASA put a man on the moon..

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