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Comment by WhompingWindows | Hacker News Reader

In this case, it's a good thing, because the birthrates declined most for women 24 and younger. Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do, you're literally spawning a lifetime of energy use. Best to do that when you're SURE they will have all the resources they need to be a productive and helpful member of society...not when you're 16 and can't care for them properly.

I do think there is value to having a balanced aged pyramid, however. We don't want a China or Japan situation, where there are far too many old people, which would crush the younger members of society under the burden of caring. The one way to counteract that would be immigration, which has been a hot-button issue and is not a given or perfect remedy for population pyramids.

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how can a human being be simplifed down to a "lifetime of energy use" and a very carbon-intensive action? I know this language has normalized and that we use it with "good" intentions, but sometimes we sound much more soulless and anti-human than even the language of soviet ideology

ecofascism

As long as he does not force you to go along their life choices without a democratic decision, this is not fascism.

once a political view is widely accepted, it starts getting really easy to force it on people

That's true. I'm not saying it's institutional.

But we have fascist political forces in America despite the democracy. Same thing. It's a political thing not a structural thing.

Easily. As a human, based on your country [1], you will emit a certain amount of fossil CO2 over your lifetime. You will have an impact on natural resources. This math is no different than estimating your dollar value for something like a payout in the event you are accidentally killed.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?view=map

Alternatively are you saying that people moving to less carbon intensive economies would also be a “good thing”. Get as many people from the developed world to move to places where they’d have less environmental impact? Though I’m sure there would be massive resistance from the affected people as well as from the destinations as they would upset the order on those places.

The two most crucial focuses would be to decarbonize carbon intensive economies, and throwing massive amounts of money at education and healthcare for women in developing countries.

Developed countries already have total fertility rates at or below replacement rate; it's all population momentum now, so you want to reduce the impact of everyone living a first world life for the remainder of their life span. Less combustion vehicles, less unnecessary air travel, fossil generation plants, meat heavy diets, etc. We're already headed in this direction, we just need to invest more heavily (Green New Deal, ESG funds, etc).

Regarding education and healthcare in developing countries, educated, empowered women with access to robust healthcare have fewer children [1] [2], and this data holds true across the entire world, even in countries that attempt to use generous subsidies to encourage higher fertility rates.

Moving folks from the developing world to the developed world, or vice versa, wouldn't have a meaningful impact IMHO.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#empowerment-of-wom...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attain...

True, but also we need to also do a rethink of how the savings from decarbonization are socialized on the form of higher quality of life available at a lower cost to more people.

If most of the savings of decarbonization go to capital, we will end up just bringing our current issues with growing wealth inequality into the decarbonized economy.

Developed economies should lead the way on this by demonstrating how a high quality of life can be preserved with decarbonization at population scale.

That means not just for the wealthy to build net zero eco-mansions and drive Teslas, but for most regular people's energy bills (for both home and transportation) to drop to near amortized capital investment cost of renewables plus the marginal cost of producing renewable energy, which should be far lower than fossil fuels.

i understand it on theory, my problem is that this language assumes human life is somehow "measurable" and comparable to a random number and that regulations/change of society should follow: this sounds to me like the same way of thinking that eventually did let eugenics become big(later nazism) and later all kinds of communist social experiments to happen (and also sadly leading to many capitalist abuses of society): once our life is mostly a variable in a big calculation, in which stuff like iq/carbon print/social production is more important, you have problems

You can quantify human life while still having respect for it.

but if this changes the way whole societies live, is this really respect anymore? (X respects his life, but is afraid of even having children because Y)

Finite systems don't care about the human condition. Does gravity care about your opinion as you race towards the ground? No, it just is. Such is the consumption of resources in a finite system.

It sounds like you mean for respect to be an acceptance of entitlement. Again, I'm unsure how to reconcile that when resources are finite.

societies after all are groups of people and sadly people can be easily manipulated : no need to go into "finite systems", please

ah, i see what you mean now: anyway, most resources aren't really finite, as many of them are renewable, especially when you have the need and ability of more people

Yes, exactly. It's about bending the population curve down to meet up with the technology advancement curve.

> Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do, you're literally spawning a lifetime of energy use.

Cutting back on energy use is the most regressive way of solving climate change. We will almost certainly use more energy in the future, regardless of the population.

You could also be spawning the person who solves the problem of climate change.

.. or the one who ruins the climate forever? Not sure this how you should be thinking of spawning :D

And you could also be spawning a genocidal maniac.

Right, and that's why the otherwise learned people who have been predicting, incorrectly, for thousands of years, that the earth was at/past carrying capacity have been wrong: more people means more human capacity, and that has outweighed having more mouths to feed.

Except now we have a scientific consensus that the Earth's carrying capacity will decrease. I don't think that's been true before.

Expecting technological advancement to bail us out every time is wishful thinking.

That's not true.

There is no scientific consensus on the impact of climate change on total food production (there is a significant school of thought that it will increase due to increased production in Canada and Russia), and there's no consensus at all on what the carrying capacity of earth is.

Check the IPCC report:

For the major crops (wheat, rice, and maize) in tropical and temperate regions, climate change without adaptation will negatively impact production for local temperature increases of 2°C or more above late-20th-century levels, although individual locations may benefit (medium confidence). {7.4, Figure 7-4} Projected impacts vary across crops and regions and adaptation scenarios, with about 10% of projections for the period 2030–2049 showing yield gains of more than 10% and about 10% of projections showing yield losses of more than 25%, compared to the late 20th century.

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg2/food-security-and-food-pr...

Note how the projections are mixed between decreased and increased production?

Don't claim consensus when it's not there.

We have solutions to that. The biggest remaining problem right now is a few vested interests who don’t like the solutions we have because their wealth is tied to lots of people burning lots of stuff.

There are other reasons not to follow this path, but that isn’t one of them.

I heard this argument many times. Has anyone ever actually done that? IMHO it's just a generational procrastination.

Well consider Jean-Joseph Pasteur and Jeanne-Etiennette Roqui for example.

I don't understand what argument are you trying to make.

Rebuttal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery

Sure, but all those simultaneous discoverers have parents too.

>Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do, you're literally spawning a lifetime of energy use.

This feels like a very odd view because the reverse is near profane thought.

>Best to do that when you're SURE they will have all the resources they need to be a productive and helpful member of society...not when you're 16 and can't care for them properly.

If it is okay to accept this logic based on age, what about other factors? For example, income level?

Japan gets talked about a lot but Taiwan and SK are doing worse if you see TFR. TFR of SK was below 1 in 2018, replacement level being 2.1. It would be interesting to see how this plays out in the next two decades over there considering the high life expectancy.

Interestingly both have major geopolitical disputes which are a critical part of their national discourse in addition to being highly developed economies and associated drop in TFR .

The phrase "population pyramid scheme" comes to mind.

if your birthrates and deathrates at roughly equal, I don't think this conclusion holds up

> Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do

This is a bold blanket statement that I can't agree with. It all depends on how this new person will live their life. I would argue that creating 10 new persons in a third world country doesn't hurt the environment as much as 1 single person in the US or in Europe.

> Creating another person is one of the most carbon-intensive actions anyone can do [...] Best to do that when you're SURE they will have all the resources they need to be a productive and helpful member of society...

I totally get the sentiment, but history stubbornly is full of people born into abject poverty who somehow rise to the occasion. Take a look on Wikipedia at inventor profiles. Our best, life changing inventions came from people who were born into less-than-ideal situations. In many ways the impact people have on the world is a dice roll and not a matter of proper financial preparation.

Have you ever heard the saying "exception that proves the rule"?

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