Why is depopulation not even a consideration as a solution for climate change?
Surely there are ethical ways to implement it.
Or do the world's largest and wealthiest nations only care for their hold on economic power?
Surely there are ethical ways to implement it.
Or do the world's largest and wealthiest nations only care for their hold on economic power?
" . The richest 10% of the world’s population (c.630 million people) were responsible for 52% of the cumulative carbon emissions – depleting the global carbon budget by nearly a third (31%) in those 25 years alone (see Figure 1); • The poorest 50% (c.3.1 billion people) were responsible for just 7% of cumulative emissions, and used just 4% of the available carbon budget (see Figure 1); • The richest 1% (c.63 million people) alone were responsible for 15% of cumulative emissions, and 9% of the carbon budget – twice as much as the poorest half of the world’s population (see Figure 1); • The richest 5% (c.315 million people) were responsible for over a third (37%) of the total growth in emissions (see Figure 2), while the total growth in emissions of the richest 1% was three times that of the poorest 50% "
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3073853/ [2] https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10...
It turns out you don't need to implement a one child policy: people implement it themselves when the cost of living gets high enough.
I'm just demoralized that low birth rates are stigmatized as they are correlated with lower GDP, when low birth rates are somewhat of a godsend in times like these.
Then nations with low birth rates scramble to find ways to up the birth rates despite understanding the C02 cost.
It's ironic, really.
You have this backwards
Japan wants to be like China and the US, not like Qatar or Switzerland.
GDP is not GDP/Capita
I believe you have this backwards.
Low birth rates are correlated with higher GDP/capita; concerns are raised about them because they have a (decades delayed) effect of population aging producing a drop in the ratio of workers to those two old and infirm to work.
"In 2022, Earth is overpopulated and totally polluted; the natural resources have been exhausted and the nourishment of the population is provided by Soylent Industries, a company that makes a food [...]"
[...]
> Or do the world's largest and wealthiest nations only care for their hold on economic power?
It would be very easy for depopulation to be suggested as a solution for climate change without adversely impacting the wealthiest nations (well, I mean, if it was implemented as suggested—actually suggesting it might provoke damaging blowback.)
(An alien invasion story where there's no fighting back like in Independence Day)
I am now curious what graph of age vs. CO2 emissions looks like for various populations…
Are you serious that to reduce CO2 "enough" world population would have to be under 8 million people?
When the Industrial Revolution started, mid 1700s, world population was something like 800 million, wasn't it?
Why would it be necessary to return to the world of 4000 BC, which is what I believe 8 million corresponds to?
This is also why I think the solution is to focus on the CO2 itself and not on the people. Green power, green sources for chemical feedstocks, are much faster and less violent than population limits; and also lower population doesn’t itself guarantee lower greenhouse gases because everyone might just use more.
How would two more orders of magnitude reduction make things better?
We don't want to go back to the 1700s, so going back to the dawn of history is better?
What would North Korea be able to produce without 2/3rds of its population and without China?
This is entirely possible, mostly by no longer burning fossil fuels, which is the prime contributer to the problem.
It is not practical or possible via population growth reduction, which has basically already happened (people live longer so there's a delay in the result being seen, but we've basically peaked already).
Unfortunately, it's politically tricky to stop burning fossil fuels, because people with financial interests in fossil fuels would prefer to destroy human civilization instead. And one of the many ways they do that is by encouraging people to believe that modern life is impossible without burning fossil fuels and so we should kill billions of poor people instead of just using cheap renewable power.
I don't understand the use of "roughly" here. A reduction can be and often is, expressed as a ratio.
Is 90% roughly 100%? Is 99%? Is 99.9%?
As ratios, these are reductions of 10x, 100x, 1000x, and as ratios they can increase without limit. So what is roughly 100% and why is it necessary?
If you want to achieve this reduction just by population reduction — and not via technology, lifestyle changes, or any other solution — then you need a 99.9% population reduction.
If you want to solve it by enforcing lifestyle changes and no tech etc., then you have to wind the clock back to before the industrial revolution, before we could even mine so much fossil fuels in the first place.
The 1750 population of 760 million [0] was (with regards to CO2) sustainable, but the tech back then limited both the population and the emissions.
It’s like the correlation between shark attacks and ice cream consumption: Hot weather makes you eat ice cream and go swimming. Icecream-to-Sharks isn’t directly causal, and neither was the population in 1750 the direct causal reason that CO2 emissions were sustainable.
So you only get the “benefit” of 1750s population levels if you’re willing to also pay the technological cost. But not just the cost of not being able to grow food for 8 billion: it would be as if the 710 million absolutely worst off today were unchanged, while the other 50 million merely don’t have electricity let alone computers or the internet, paved roads let alone cars or bicycles or public transport, disease-free pressurised municipal water let alone modern flushing toilets or bottled soda or warm and safe showers, etc.
Those 50 million would be the super-rich of the new era.
And worse, because of the aforementioned long lifespan of CO2 in the atmosphere, you’d need to sustain this for about a thousand years despite everyone involved being much better off if they defect (Nash equilibrium).
That leaves green tech. Many purely technological solutions to greenhouse gases are already known. The challenge is to make the green solutions cheaper (because Nash equilibrium) than the polluting status quo for 99.9% of effective emissions. (Effective emissions rather than gross emissions, because some of the technological solutions are to take CO2 out of the air to make other chemicals with, and that’s fine).
(ZeroGravitas interpreted me correctly, FWIW).
[0] I’m approximating from these numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimates_of_historical_world_...
Given this is true, then there's no particular reason to think that even 100% reduction of emissions would meet any goal.
I think you've just explained why carbon capture on a huge scale and carbon-free power might be necessary.
But if so, then I don't see "99.9%" as being connected to anything.
>So you only get the “benefit” of 1750s population levels if you’re willing to also pay the technological cost.
Here's a misunderstanding between us. I take for granted that "willing" isn't a factor, that 1/10th of the population would be unable to maintain current technology, that most, although not all, of technological advancement has come from increased population allowing more specialization.
>Those 50 million would be the super-rich of the new era.
It seems like something is missing in the previous paragraph, why do 50 million people have something different, and what is it?
There is, but it’s been outside the scope of this discussion.
The exact reduction needed depends on what level of damage your are willing to accept, but 99.9% reduction relative to current emissions is basically the threshold for maintaining static CO2 levels until all the fossil fuels are burned. This still isn’t amazing at current CO2 levels, but as it’s the (approximate) steady-state emissions level, it remains a useful approximation of maximum safe emissions regardless of what the actual concentration is.
More emissions? The concentration drifts upwards from whatever is deemed to be acceptable when you started.
> Here's a misunderstanding between us. I take for granted that "willing" isn't a factor, that 1/10th of the population would be unable to maintain current technology, that most, although not all, of technological advancement has come from increased population allowing more specialization.
We definitely have a misunderstanding, because I’m afraid I don’t follow your argument, and I sense I’m not even aware of what conclusions you’re trying to reach with them.
I will attempt to respond nevertheless.
If we go back to the pre-industrial age, even if you get near perfect buy-in from everyone alive today, nobody is going to think it was a good idea in retrospect, and in 80 years everyone will ignore any pleas from the ancestors in the history books to never return to all we have now. We just go through a hybrid of the Industrial Revolution and the renaissance, which sounds like an awesome setting for a novel but not actually that good for the environment.
By the time the new societies have enough spare capacity to fix what we can already fix, let alone the stuff we can’t, CO2 levels will be much much worse.
> It seems like something is missing in the previous paragraph, why do 50 million people have something different, and what is it?
I was focusing on the negatives explicitly to show why it won’t be accepted by basically anyone if you try this. To focus instead on what the rich will have:
“What” the 50 million have is business, property, pets (rather than livestock), and some limited travel. Might even be able to dig up and reuse old plastic etc. from the before times, but (returning to the negative because I don’t think I’ve fully emphasised how much this will suck) even for the rich, many things trivial in our society simply can’t be newly made at all in the scenario you’re describing, as that is some combination of unacceptable (if you allow modern fossil fuel power stations, the pollution per person is too high, so no aluminium) or simply impossible without ending the scenario (can’t develop a vaccine for a novel virus on a supercomputer because the world economy can’t afford to build the machines that build the machines that build the parts for the supercomputer, but even if it could, the tantalum mine needed for one specific component is both closed and probably in a different continent which is now only accessible by wooden boats and you don’t have any advance warning of Atlantic hurricanes forming).
The “why” is that this was what happened in every historical society of this type that I’m aware of. The rich 50 million is everyone who isn’t literally (in the medieval feudalism sense of the word) a peasant — not a very high bar by modern standards, but not passable without tech that one way or another breaks the scenario.