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Comment by rocknor | Hacker News Reader

Bullshit.

Can clearly see your bias here. Why are you ignoring the emissions by the rich 1B people, they are the ones that can actually do something about it (reduce consumption and invest in research) thanks to their relatively luxurious lives. The others are just trying to survive - for them, consequences of climate change are still much better than the current state of poverty.

The rest of the world has a very low carbon footprint per person, just that the population is much higher. How do you propose reducing the population, birth rates have already been dropping drastically across the globe and human population will peak at ~10B. Do you want to kill them off? Do you feel your life is more important than theirs?

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I am very biased. But in this case, if the 1 billion "rich people" drop their emissions down to below average then the majority of the problem will still be here. And now there will be 1 billion less wealthy people for no particular net gain.

> The rest of the world has a very low carbon footprint per person, just that the population is much higher. How do you propose reducing the population, birth rates have already been dropping drastically across the globe and human population will peak at ~10B. Do you want to kill them off? Do you feel your life is more important than theirs?

I advocate the radical approach of encouraging people to have less children. If poor people had 0.5 children on average, then poverty would be eradicated quite quickly. An ever increasing population isn't necessary to have a comfortable life. And we could all emit more pollution per capita while living in a cleaner world.

> if the 1 billion "rich people" drop their emissions down to below average then the majority of the problem will still be here.

True. But the "majority" is not as big as you think.

> there will be 1 billion less wealthy people

Just wrong. There are lots of ways to reduce emissions without any effect in wealth. Eating less meat is one example.

> for no particular net gain.

Very wrong, there are huge gains: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/21/worlds-r...

> I advocate the radical approach of encouraging people to have less children.

I knew you would say this, I was just waiting for it. Global birth rates have been in freefall for decades now, it's tragic that people don't know about it. You'd assume that supposedly "better" education in western countries would make people more aware, but western governments are only concerned with maintaining global western hegemony which requires falsely accusing the rest of the world and keeping their citizens ignorant. Also, you can't force people to have less children, that's inhumane. I suggest you go through the following links.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QsBT5EQt348

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

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

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34890015-factfulness

> True. But the "majority" is not as big as you think.

Are you suggesting the majority of a problem is smaller than half?

Eating less meat is pretty stupid as strategies go, it doesn't tackle the root cause (which is too many people).

I'm not clear on what your point is about birth rates trend down in wealthy countries, but that is actually a well known fact. Quite an encouraging one.

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