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Comment by ArkVark | Hacker News Reader

The top 10% is people who earn over $18,000/year, which probably includes most of HackerNews readers:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/business/global...

Keep in mind that this richest 10% contribute the majority of humanity's value-added commerce and production, cultural output, and scientific output.

For example, Romania has an equal scientific output to Pakistan: https://www.natureindex.com/country-outputs

Despite Pakistan being 212 million people vs Romania 19 million. Pakistan emits 178mt of Co2, vs Romania 79mt (2016). Pakistan's CO2 output is 2.2x greater, but their total GDP is only 1.31x bigger.

When you look at emissions against output, its clear that the West and East Asia are substantially more efficient than other regions on the planet.

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Efficiency is something I can get behind, but of what? Forgetting dollars and cents for a moment, what if we measured the health and happiness of a population. Using those measures times the population would be the plus side with environmental impact on the minus. This only works for a closed system and import/export and sharing of scientific results plays a part.

I guess my point is if Pakistan were able to keep their population healthy and happy with less GDP per capita, scientific input or output, and less environmental impact per capita than Romania, I'd say they were doing alright.

I don’t know if Pakistan is quite comparable with Romania on the healthy and happy metrics, but the real efficiency comparison is between Pakistani and Indian Punjabs on groundwater depletion and tube wells. Indian Punjab may be better at getting the groundwater out and irrigation intensity but at what cost to the aquifer? (This is not saying Pak doesn’t need to move away from wasteful canals and build water storage for rain - they do)

I was only using Pakistan and Romania since they were in the original example. The important bit was to not optimize a proxy for a thing without recognizing that it's a proxy and may lead to undesirable conclusions or actions.

What is your point? Yes, HackerNews readers, including you and me, bear extra responsibility.

The point is that instead of looking to reduce the population of the West and East Asia, which will have an impact on humanity's economic, cultural, scientific output, we should look at reducing populations (though education and family planning for women) in less-productive areas.

Look, even if all countries except of say US suddenly magically disappear tomorrow, the planet will still keep warming up. Even if you reduce the world population to whatever your acceptable level is, you still need to build zero carbon infrastructure/industry for the people that remain. Net zero per person is net zero per person. Doesn't matter how many people there are. And right now, that building is not happening. Or at least not fast enough.

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