Hacker News Reader

Comment by npteljes | Hacker News Reader

How could you leave out the one with the biggest impact, which is basically "less humans"?

That's not actionable advice on a timescale that will affect co2 emissions any time soon. Are you suggesting we kill people to reduce the population?

> That's not actionable advice on a timescale that will affect co2 emissions any time soon. Are you suggesting we kill people to reduce the population?

Your second sentence is an overreach. The natural death rate in the United States is about 0.9% of the population. [1]

[1]. https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/deat...

Okay, so how many years would it take to halve the world population through natural death rate, and how do you stop all people on earth from having children without a world war?

> Okay, so how many years would it take to halve the world population through natural death rate

If the natural death rate is 0.9%, the population would decline by about 9% each decade.

The drop doesn’t have to go to 50% - just down to whatever the sustainable limit is.

> how do you stop all people on earth from having children without a world war?

I’m not sure that even a world war would achieve that. And again, it’s not necessary or desirable to go to that extreme. If the goal is sustainability, we just need to rightsize the population for sustainability. The actual population depends on the prevailing per capita emissions from whatever energy technologies we are using at any given time. The more carbon neutral the technology, the higher the population can be sustained, at least with respect to greenhouse gases.

To reduce the birth rate, rather than force everyone to stop, we could just reward those who are willing with tax breaks. X% tax break for zero children. Y% tax break for 1 child. 0% tax break for 2 children. And extra taxes for >2 children.

Just like the idiots vote in a moron, and they kill themselves.

Because most of the developed world (if not whole) is already there. How do you plan to implement it in less-develop states?

No, even not having children has lower impact than not doing these things. Especially that environmental costs of them ramp up slowly.

Humans tend to be on their own barring social pressures carbon neutral. The biggest expenses being food and water, if these aforementioned practices are applied. It gets even better if these young can work to reduce the impact of the warming.

We'll need a lot of manpower to pull off the necessary changes. Just due to the scale of it. Well educated people too. We're on at least one to two generations of lag in education related to physics, chemistry, agriculture, material science, civil engineering, process engineering, general ecology, social engineering... And the old will start to wear down and think in old patterns.

Additionally further down the list is "live together in higher density" and "buy locally made things" bits.

I have a hard time believing that "humans tend to be on their own barring social pressures carbon neutral." Can you find some of these carbon neutral humans in first-world countries to show me, as an example? Or when you say "barring social pressures", do you just mean "if you don't count this whole society thing"?

And what’s your solution to this? And has any study said explicitly the number of humans is the main problem? Or their actions and consumption that’s the problem?

pretty hard to influence for individuals

*fewer

I wonder how much energy we waste on pedantry.

Probably not as much as we waste on resolving confusion caused by playing fast and loose with shared rules/understanding of things.

Sometimes it has its place. Can you imagine a public speaker making errors like this? I think it detracts from the message. Public, and especially popularly read stuff should be as correct as humanely possible. Good grammar is a habit, improved by repeat exposure.

I appreciate this, I want my snappy sentences to be grammatically correct.

Some would disagree with this on the moral point that its basically a call for genocide, whether that is intentional or not is hard to tell.

I'd disagree on the facts though. There's already such a wild difference in carbon intensity between two humans, that it would be ridiculous to suggest that the first step would be to remove humans rather than the activities that make that difference (and are sometimes wasteful, inefficient or counterproductive)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com