And yet people still having kids. The worse affected regions still have the highest natality rates.
The same regions have the lowest per-capita carbon output. Perhaps we should tie reproductive rights to carbon footprint, to increase the proportion of low-pollution individuals. I'm only being half-sarcastic.
Largely irrelevant. Every country aspires to increase their quality of life, burgeoning populations still living in the mud are just carbon time bombs. So, relevant in the negative sense of their per-capita output has nowhere to go but up, with a huge multiplier.
It helps to view "third-world" as simply arriving in third place at the finish line of modern living; on a long enough timeline, there are no more mud huts.
In the film Before the Flood, there's a part focused on India which states they have ~300M people living without electricity. A population roughly the size of the USA. In the same part, representatives from India's government make clear that India has vast coal reserves and no intention of leaving those 300M people without electricity. You're looking at an overnight arrival of the US population from the dark to using lights and refrigerators.
It's not like populations with low carbon output have all mastered some kind of low impact living. They're just poor and lagging behind the more wealthy nations, don't mistake it for a lack of intention to join the first-world.
This is reductive, and possibly wrong. Developing countries do not have to follow the paths of developed ones; they can simply skip over the less useful bits. As an example, most developing countries skipped large-scale POTS networks and went directly to wireless (GSM). The same is happening with solar and wind energy; because the sparse electric distribution networks are sparse, energy is generated at its point of use, which favors solar and wind.
Our "legacy" countries are the problem because we cannot wean ourselves off pollution without taking a hit in our lifestyles. The problem is in the here and now, not some future "time bomb", and it's not solved by tweaking at the margins by limiting population growth of those that live the greenest lifestyles. The problem with the climate change "debate" is that nobody wants to make changes - it's always the other who has to make sacrifices.
But yes, I agree that if a tech is freely available there is opportunity for countries to build out with what's the best available then legacy tech, the same way China has 4G/5G everywhere because its all new infrastructure, they never bothered putting up a 3G tower.
Physical infrastructure like housing, roads, bridges, are where the real challenges lie. Cement production alone is a huge co2 problem.
Even if all the vehicles of the future are EVs, there's a huge amount of resources put into manufacturing, delivering, sheltering, and operating those per-capita. Despite its vast HSR network, China has still exceeded US car sales every year since 2009 [0].
[0] https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-car-sa...
Nothing I said cast arriving at the finish line as following in the exact footsteps as the predecessors to get there.
Obviously the definition of and means of achieving "modern living" is constantly evolving.
Our most recent example would arguably be China, and CO2-free automobile-free utopia it very much is not.
It will be interesting to see what form India arriving in the first world will take. I'm hoping for solar panels on every home and skipping a coal-fueled power grid much like the cell network you mention, as it does appear to be the obvious wireless equivalent for power. I don't think that alone is sufficient though.
> This is reductive, and possibly wrong
Everything is "possibly wrong", what a pointless thing to say. What's probable?
These days, is it still realistic to hold on to a Whig view of history?
You can keep cutting the cake in smaller and pieces, for sure, but that means everyone keeps getting a smaller and smaller portion until everyone is hungry. That doesn't even factor in the fact that the cake is effectively shrinking from overfishing, droughts, and so on.
You keep expanding the human population. It'll be fine. It's probably too late to course correct anyway. Might as well do what makes you happy.
The cake isn't a fixed size. Our agricultural innovations continue to far exceed population growth. We can produce virtually infinite energy with Renewables and Nuclear Energy. The Earth is 70% water, and that too is a renewable resource; there's more than enough for the next million years.
That's not even getting started on the fact that these sorts of prediction have been wrong repeatedly. The average world citizen has a vastly greater standard of living than they did 50 or 100 years ago, despite the increase in population. So the population is going up, and the standard of living is going up even faster.
Most of our modern agricultural processes are about as sustainable as strip mining. They erode the top soil at a staggering rate, and that takes a very long time to regenerate, and that's not even considering the impact of climate change on the amount of arable land.
There is no process for turning energy and water into nutrient rich food. You can make macronutrients (especially carbohydrates) easily enough, but that alone just makes us sick.
There's a lot to be done with just the tools we have now and a lot of things that we're working on that may help.
Rezoning cities for instance making them more walk able or usable by e-bikes, etc, and encouraging people to live near where they work or work remotely at least part of the week can help. Conversion to solar, nuclear, wind, etc. I watch YT videos of third world ppl creating solar powered energy sources. I've seen articles about people developing plants that can be converted into bio polymers that capture 80% of carbon that gets turned into plastic that captures carbon and when it inevitably gets buried in a landfill, its a good thing, because that carbon was removed from the atmosphere and captured in the ground in the course of creating a disposable product.
I currently give $50 a month to cotap.org because its helping somewhat reforest the planet, which I know isn't much in the grand scheme considering how much sealed carbon we're releasing but its something, even if its just spitting in the ocean. But systemically you not having a kid isn't going to fix it any more than me. You act like someone won't just immigrate in from a less developed country to yours or someone socially conservative or traditional won't just have 5 kids, and offset whatever good you did. Honestly, raising a kid whose more environmentally conscious and equipped to handle the upcoming challenges is probably far more productive.
It will take a lot of effort, and the sooner we get on it the better. Personally, energy generation and car dependence for me are the two biggest challenges to conquer.
Historically it hasn't really mattered, as human agriculture has been small compared to the rest of the biosphere, but right now we have so much cultivated land it covers a significant chunk of the planet. At this scale, nutrient depletion absolutely does matter. Nutrients don't just appear from nothing in the ground.
Go on Google maps if you will. Pan over to somewhere in middle of the United States and look for anything that isn't a city, a desert or cultivated land. Forests do exist, but they are really not common.
It takes time sure, but we compost and recapture those nutrients every day. Every time we flush our waste down the toilet, lots of those nutrients end up being recycled and processed in a water treatment plant and dumped into rivers and used by nature. We might need to stop flushing nutrients into rivers, or figure something out, but given how much food currently gets thrown out and overstocked grocery stores stay, I know there's opportunity for adjustment. Going to a more JIT system for groceries might be better, where a grocery store doesn't need to stock 50% more produce then it plans to sell. Food waste is a huge problem. We can start composting it at least and returning it back to the soil.
Yes. I'm not sure why people come to any other conclusion.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/please-dont-give-up-on...
Besides that, all of the arguments that are presented seem to start from the perspective that having children should be the default. The author makes no claims that the world will be a better place for them, and therefore I see no reason why anyone would want to bring more suffering into the world, and cause more harm.
For instance, Russia is expected to half their draft able males in the next 5 years and many of their educated engineers and technicians are older since they were mostly educated during USSR days, and be retiring age soon, which as reason why many think Russia is making moves now, while they still can.
Shaming people for having kids is sheer idiocy at this point. Every person having 2 or more kids isn't even making up for the 5-10 people having 0-1 kids. The eventual conclusion of your reasoning, everyone is better off swallowing a bullet for the good of humanity.