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Comment by pelasaco | Hacker News Reader

Population control. There is no way that we can fit 9-10 billion people on earth and are still able to be sustainable.

The problem is more nuanced than that and just throwing out "Population control." is completely meaningless.

You could cull three billion people of the lowest emitters and it would have as much of an effect as halving the CO2 emissions of the top 1% of emitters.[1] And considering that to avoid the worst of the climate crisis we need action immediately or as close to it as possible, waiting for people to die away will not help us. If the entire planet stopped having babies today we would wait 65 years to get to half the current population, and half the emissions.

At best, and I would argue even that is a stretch, population control is one small part of a long term strategy. But it is by no means a solution, so throwing it out there every time people talk about sustainability does nothing but derail the conversation.

What we really need is to to make consumption as sustainable as possible and reduce it where possible, especially for the top consumers. That is not only more feasible in the short term, it is probably more ethical as well.

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...

> Population control. There is no way that we can fit 9-10 billion people on earth and are still able to be sustainable.

All BRICs are below replacement already.

This is a done deal for developed countries. All of them are below the 2% replacement rate (many very far below). The places where the replacement rate is at or above 2% (often very far above 2%) are places where non-white people primarily live. Suggesting that they need to stop having so many children smacks of racism so it is politically and socially not something that people are willing to talk about.

It's not about race it's about access to modern medicine and the jobs an industrialized economy brings. The reason access to these things correlates with race in some nations is, said briefly, colonialism and its continuing impact. There are plenty of nations with birth rates below replacement where white people are by far the minority as well.

You’re neglecting per capita resource usage. Population control in low-usage high-birth rate countries has insignificant effects. Reducing usage in high-usage countries has outsized effects, and a low replacement rate is not enough to mitigate them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_...

You need to be careful with this framing and also think about 'Population Pressure' in regards to most developed countries - https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/

I suppose you can just schedule a cron to submit in 10 years the same post with updated number to say 12B :)

Even with population control (suppose we found a way to do it and managed to avoid the large negative consequences of it which would be plenty) the uncontested growing consumption by the current population would do the planet anyway.

Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously.

> Speaking about solutions - until significant part of Sahara desert and the likes aren't covered by solar panels, i wouldn't believe that anybody (who matters) is taking the climate change seriously

I think it is harder than we think, at least for the goals that Europe wants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o

The caveat about population control, is different than how we, humans, do with all other wild-life on planet earth, we cannot reduce the available food and habitat to lower the carrying capacity, compensate for the missing predators by killing individuals in the population, or slow the population's ability to reproduce..

We have to come up with a ethic solution. But people cannot put 3-5 kids or more on earth and don't have the means to raise them accordingly.

> We have to come up with a ethic solution

If you try, won't some people somewhere on the Internet, get angry at the ideas you have, and start writing angry things to and about you?

I know a family that had 13 children. They had "the means to raise them accordingly" (basically they lived in a middle class neighborhood, drove older cars, didn't hire anyone to do work around their house - despite the father having a very high paying chief financial officer position with a large company). So... is it okay for those kinds of people to have 3-5+ kids?

> I think it is harder than we think, at least for the goals that Europe wants: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7OpM_zKGE4o

it seems that the main issue is that some invested in concentrated solar while photovoltaics energy cost fell from being 2x expensive to being 4x cheaper of the concentrated and just beating everything out at $0.03/KWh. As i said - cover the desert in solar panels. Transmission is only 7% loss to Berlin.

Instead Europe is building gas pipelines from Russia and others. Again, money talk, and that clearly shows that nobody takes climate change seriously.

> cron to submit in 10 years the same post with updated number to say 12B

Apparently not, look:

https://www.un.org/en/desa/world-population-projected-reach-...

"World population projected to reach 9.8 billion in 2050, and 11.2 billion in 2100"

It's slowing down. But increasing a lot, in a few countries. (I didn't downvote b.t.w)

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