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Comment by bookofsand | Hacker News Reader

We are comparing energy / sqmi. US and China have similar landmass. 3.8M sqmi vs 3.7M sqmi. Comparing their total energy consumption is, up to a constant factor, the same as comparing their energy / sqmi consumption.

Countries should decide for themselves if they'd like to be crowded, thus per capita energy poor or sparsely populated, thus per capita energy rich.

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> Countries should decide for themselves if they'd like to be crowded

Uh.. How exactly are countries supposed to decide if they'd "like" to be crowded?

By the way, do you think the matter of simply possessing a large, mostly empty area like Alaska should grant the US an additional "quota" of emissions since it technically reduces US population density?

Speaking of US and China, obvious candidates are immigration policy and one-child policy. Other levers: female education, child mortality reduction, shift in cultural norms towards small nuclear families, access to contraceptives. The entire 'western' world is experiencing population decline, and not for lack of resources.

As a curiosity, I saw a few years ago an article from Africa: 'Meet the Ugandan Businessman with 13 Wives, 176 Children'. I hope we can agree that this kind of reproductive behavior is utterly unsustainable in a world that has learned about its limits (and sadly overshot them already).

https://face2faceafrica.com/article/mustafa-mugambo-mutone

Edit: Of course landmass is an approximation. Of course Alaska / Arizona are not Iowa. On the flip side, Tibet / Xianjiang are not Guangdong either. The core point that given that TotalEmissions = Population * PerCapitaEmissions and the Earth only cares about TotalEmissions. We've got to price for the Population term somehow, lest it becomes an unaccounted externality.

The paradox of the situation is that population levels is mostly correlated with consumption levels. Which means that lowering population by natural means implies much higher emissions in total. Population levels are tied to economic conditions, and it's a false hope to try to control it through policy alone, which can affect it somewhat in the short term but not at all in the long term.

Population control is a misguided concept, and has a grim history, ranging from mass sterilisation in India to the "lebensraum" idea of the Nazis. It's not a sensible path, and is mostly tied to extreme ideologies and Malthusian pseudo-science.

Pointing to Uganda, whose citizens represents probably about 1% of emissions per capita compared to the west is is crazy to me. How can one even excuse ones own high consumption levels while blaming Ugandans for reproducing, when one represents the same amount emissions as that of a small village in some places?

Malthus thesis was that populations grow exponentially, whereas resources grow linearly, thus population will relatively soon overshoot the available resources. Malthus was also an optimist. We are in a situation where we have a hard limit on the amount of (fossil fuel energy) resources we can globally expend. At least according to the Paris agreement. Take your time to internalize the consequences of this hard limit. Hint: TotalEmissions(fixed) = Population * PerCapitaEmissions.

PS. I pointed to one Mustafa Mugambo Mutone. The future that his descendants will inhabit will hopefully see a convergence of lifestyles across cultures and continents.

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