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Comment by Udik | Hacker News Reader

> India and parts of Africa have the worst problems.

So much so that Africa's population is projected to increase by 1 billion, doubling in the next 30 years. Any environmentalist would like to elucidate us on the consequences of this? Those who are worried about the impact of climate change on water availability or conflicts might want to have a word about the consequences of adding 1 billion people in 30 years in the poorest and most conflictual continent of the world. Yet I hear no one speaking, I see no headlines, why is so?

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I went to a TED talk at UNGA week a few years ago, and the presenter talked about various things that can be done to limit climate change. At the top of the list was women's education/empowerment. This got a lot of applause from the audience, who were excited to clap for preventing climate change and empowering women at the same time.

The presenter did briefly mention the reason that these two laudable goals coincide, which is that women who are empowered and educated have fewer children. I don't think the presenter would have gotten quite so much applause if he had said "the number one thing we can do to prevent climate change is to make sure women in developing countries don't reproduce quite so much". And to be sure, he wasn't saying we should just fund birth control and abortions — he was framing that as a result of educating and empowering women.

But it's no coincidence that the Gates Foundation has dedicated hundreds of millions of dollars to their Family Planning initiative in Africa. [1]

So it may not be in the headlines, but the UN and others are surely aware of the impact of population growth.

1: https://philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-com...

Your presenter is obviously wrong.

The US ans Europe with far smaller populations have significantly greater climate footprints than China and India, for example. And that’s before we adjust for the fact that a lot of China’s footprint is US/European footprint outsourced to China.

Indians having fewer kids will do nothing to reduce the already too large impact of the existing US/European populations.

Also the idea that women empowerment will help with reducing kids is decades old. If your audience was surprised by this, then they are clearly not well versed in any related topics.

> The US ans Europe with far smaller populations have significantly greater climate footprints than China

That was true twenty years ago. After two decades of decarbonisation in the west and the opposite in China, China emits far more CO2 than the US and the EU taken together.

And even per capita, China has been emitting more than the EU for the last 5 years or more. (Yes, the US emissions per capita are still ridiculous.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

It wasn’t “decarbonization” that caused the shift, it was the “deconstruction” of the Western manufacturing complex.

China assumed the environmental pollution of the previously significant manufacturing industry of the United States and other countries that succumbed to the short-sighted leaders of manufacturing companies who were riding the globalist wave of the last 30-40 years.

What was the presenter wrong about?

And can't both be true? Developed countries need to reduce per capita emissions and developing countries need to reduce capita increase. 1000 * 1 = 100 * 10 and 2000 * 1 > 100 * 10.

Also on the plus side, reducing excessive population growth will reduce local resource need and thus local resource wars.

Per-capita pollution in America is the highest in the world.

1 American produces 16.5 tons of CO2 on average, 40 times of that of Uganda, Rwanda, Chad & Somalia combined

America has about 330 million people. Convert that into a population normalized for polluting capacity, it's population will be Billions.

It's time developed countries take responsibility and lead in tackling climate change. Because they are responsible for the bulk of it in the past 10 decades.

Edit : Per-Capita pollution from India is 1.7.

Normalizing Indian population for polluting capacity, it is just about 120 Million.

https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/10296/economics/top-co2-p...

edit 2: To clarify a bit, the per-capita pollution for whole of sub-saharan Africa is about 0.834. Thus on average, normalizing Americas population to match Africas per-capita pollution levels, population of America will be 6 BILLION.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...

My point is that if you are worried- or tell me to worry- about climate change because of the negative impacts it's going to have on societies (especially the poorest ones) because of how it affects basic resources (water, agricultural yields) causing conflicts and migrations, then you should be much more worried about the direct impacts of a doubling of population in those societies.

Instead you measure the impact of climate change in terms of negative impacts on society, but when you are put in front of something else that has huge, obvious and direct negative effects on those same metrics, then you seem only interested in how it affects climate change!

Ah, and as an aside: sure, one billion more Africans are no problem for the climate, as long as they remain shit poor. I assume you have a plan to ensure that too, in the next thirty years.

https://archive.is/mPsqz

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