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Comment by sykhic | Hacker News Reader

The uncomfortable reality is that 7 billion people can’t all live like Americans (or Europeans). Extracting the resources necessary for everyone to live like Americans would be very bad for the environment. The effective action is to greatly reduce the number of births worldwide. It seems to me all other options are not effective.

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They very likely can, but it would require a massive program of nuclear power plant building. This is unacceptable to environmentalists, who prefer to pretend that people will voluntarily reduce their quality of life.

It’s not just energy production and consumption that is the problem. Resource extraction, pollution, toxification of the environment are all contributing to the creation of a planet that sucks to live in.

Cheap energy goes a long way toward solving those problems. Many "rare" materials are only rare because they're energy intensive to extract, or they might not be needed at all (e.g. rare earth metals in motors and batteries) if we can afford to sacrifice energy efficiency in products. If we can irrigate all the deserts with desalinated sea water then there's less need for intensive agriculture. Pollution control technologies need energy to run and build, so cheaper energy means there's less opposition to using them.

I just read that the warmer oceans are making it hard to cool nuclear plants.

The classic hyperboloid cooling tower works by evaporation, and the latent heat of vaporization of water is high, so a few degrees difference in the temperature of the make-up water isn't going to matter. It only matters with the more environmentally harmful once-through cooling, where the waste heat is dumped directly into the sea.

> The effective action is to greatly reduce the number of births worldwide. It seems to me all other options are not effective.

Good luck with that ;-)

Things like this make me feel that climate change is a lost cause.

Yeah, it’s not a practical solution in terms of implementation. However, if implemented it would work and not require Star Trek levels of innovation. There are simply too many people in the world.

Okay...but how would that work? Where are all these people? China had a one-child policy which they've recently reversed because the ratio of old people/young people has basically reversed. On the plus side it seems that with education and generally societal improvements people tend to have less children anyway. Having said that in some developed countries they're struggling with declining birth rates. Partly because of lifestyle choices and partly due to high costs of raising children...

I mentioned that it's not practical. Forced sterilization - I'm not advocating this - would do the trick. Again, it's not practical to implement just now but I think it's clear that having fewer people would be ideal and would solve lots of problems.

We have a route to that direction, and have made a lot of progress. It involves ending global poverty, providing economic opportunities for women, and ensuring contraception is available.

If you have high child mortality, limited access to contraception, and few employment opportunities for women, they have a lot of children. You change that, and they choose to have fewer. It happened in Europe. It happened in North America. It happened in South America. It happened in Asia (with some draconian policies to help it along). It's starting to happen in Africa: [0] (Check the map tab to see country-by-country over time).

We can do this without draconian policies. All we have to do is work to end global poverty. People think is hopeless, but twenty-five years ago, those same people would have said there's no way we'd cut it in half by now, and we did[1].

(Obligatory plug for the Against Malaria Foundation[2], which is my charity of choice for fighting global poverty, and at the same time, climate change.)

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/child-mortality

[2] https://www.againstmalaria.com/ https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/where-to-donate/against-ma...

I reckon the first step is to price negative externalities into the things we buy for once. The first reason people and businesses consume so much is because they can afford it.

> effective action is to greatly reduce the number of births worldwide.

Unbelievable.

You don't believe that having fewer people in the world would lead to less pollution and less harm to the environment due to human activities? Or you don't believe someone is suggesting that there needs to be fewer people?

It seems clear to me that if there were only 5 million people in the world then human caused climate change wouldn't be an issue. Isn't that obvious? I'm not advocating that we get to that level. I'm just pointing out that there exists a number for the population such that human caused climate change would no longer be an issue. I don't think it's disputable that this is so.

I'm not advocating mass killings or anything like that. Just pointing out an obvious thing. If where were way less people then pollution, etc. would not be an issue.

Given how most polution comes from places where people generally have very little children, I doubt that reducing births in the third world would be an effective measure.

We need to solve for different variables: energy source (we need more nuclear), transportation (we need people to utilize public transportation and drive less cars), and we'd need to work on carbon capture (which is a technological problem).

Solving all these requires policy shift and government enforcement.

If the world's population were 100 million people then pollution would probably not be an issue.

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