The world has reached 8B people but soon we'll hit a decline we'll never reverse
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
It seems like women in pretty much all cultures where women achieve financial independence and have control over how many children they have, choose to have 0, 1, 2, or rarely 3. Which makes sense given the risks and costliness of childbirth for them.
So I would guess that any culture that results in population explosion would have to either have medical advances that address the risks and costs of childbirth, or go backwards on women’s independence. Or really sweeten the deal in terms of financial and other incentives, but I don’t imagine that would fare very well.
We have research papers with animal fetuses being grown in artificial wombs. Never know, could be some technology developed for humans during the next 100 years.
We all batteries in 100 years
There’s tons of alternative research paths going untouched that leverage information theory to hack “reality” directly rather than hack on synthetic computers and software within an enclosed time-space vacuum constrained by known hardware limitations.
Metaverses running on synthetic machines seems way more prosaic than a metaverse in my own head I might be able to switch on off with a pill.
That rumor of producers changing it to batteries started because Neil Gaiman thought the battery thing was dumb so when he was hired to do a promotional wrote Matrix short story he changed it to the humans being used for computer processing.
I'm really not sure what's so outrageous about the situation. Most adopted (or fostered) people manage without psychosis.
We already have surrogacy, which is when one human volunteers use of their womb to carry somebody else's child (that is, egg comes from person A, sperm from person B, A+B = new human life => fertilised egg is implanted in person C, the surrogate). I know two kids who were born this way, they have loving parents, the eldest will be aware that something is a bit unusual - any other mummies she knows who had a second kid the baby was obviously inside them, whereas her baby sister was inside this other nice lady who just showed up for a few weeks and she's been told that's how it worked for her too - but obviously the tricky details aren't going to be worth explaining to a pre-schooler once they're satisfied with any immediate questions (e.g. is this new baby my sister? Yes. Does the nice lady mean I get extra birthday presents? No)
An artificial womb potentially makes surrogacy an option for larger numbers of people. Some people find pregnancy pretty good really, and their main reason to stop after one or two is economics or practicalities, so this innovation changes nothing for them - but others don't want to risk a second pregnancy after discovering how badly their body reacted the first time, so such technology (if cheap enough) would mean they could have a second or third child.
This also changes the calculus for government intervention. Hiring women to be impregnated is a much more difficult proposition than hiring nursery or orphanage staff. An artificial womb would mean only the second is needed.
Much like now.
Now the social pressures of being a “machine baby” vs “natural womb baby” would be a different thing.
If we invent artificial womb's the egg is still coming out of the mother's body.
The egg still get inseminated by a father.
Why should anyone care whether the mother painfully forced the baby out of the vagina after 9 months?
>medical advances that address the risks and costs of childbirth
Raising the baby is the hard part, and no one's lining up to make that easier.
If you don't believe me, look at history. Plenty of times in history there have been great civilizations that grew and grew until they collapsed, or periods of great societal progress followed by periods of great strife, or periods of great feast followed by famine. Some of these periods lasted hundreds of years. Even today there are nations that forcibly control population whereas others do not. Some developing nations starve due to international trade policy while others grow to provide most of their needs. Some become more radically conservative while others grow more liberal. Some countries collapse economically while others become burgeoning super-powers. And all this in the face of global climate change on a scale not seen in millennia.
Which all are taken into account, by the financially independent woman choosing to get pregnant (because they have access to very effective birth control and are not being forced to have sex, and have abortion as an option).
>And all this in the face of global climate change on a scale not seen in millennia.
I think the biggest thing that has not been seen regarding population dynamics is women having complete control over if, when, and how many children they have.
Hell, just look at the USA. A woman still can't choose when she can or can't have a baby, regardless of her wealth. This being one of the supposed "civilized nations"; other nations are far less subtle with their societal controls.
Then I would say she is not financially independent, since she cannot afford to hire sufficient security to protect her from rape.
>Hell, just look at the USA. A woman still can't choose when she will or won't have a baby, regardless of her wealth.
Unless one is being held captive, one’s wealth should allow access to IUDs and travel to jurisdictions where abortion is legal. At the least, there is sufficient rule of law where the societal norm is that rape is completely unacceptable.
Although even on that front, it is, well, just completely insane to insinuate that a woman needs to be rich enough to hire a body guard to prevent her from being raped. I can't believe I had to type that sentence.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/09/politics/abortion-rights-2022...
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/birth-control-benefits/
Also, I am using the term financially free to mean a person who not only has civil rights that would prevent them from ever becoming pregnant without their permission, but also someone who cannot be coerced, such as a woman with sufficient assets or income to sustain (and protect) herself.
>just completely insane to insinuate that a woman needs to be rich enough to hire a body guard to prevent her from being raped.
Yes, unfortunately, some women are born in societies where the concept of rape is not completely rejected.
In reality abortion is readily available until birth in many jurisdictions.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b... [2]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/06/24/what-the-da...
This is what I mean. Not that each woman is explicitly evaluating all of those factors, but implicitly, they all culminate in an environment where a woman may or may not choose to have x number of children.
I’m not convinced that how we do things now is the best balance of the interests of children and parents. As one example, on weekdays, a parent’s morning time with children is dominated preparing them for school while getting ready to work, and the evening time sees tired post-work parents doing the school run, sorting homework, preparing dinner, extra-curricular, etc.
"Oh I see you have a 15 year gap in your CV" LMAO.
In the village where I was raised, all families had kids until the wife cannot have them anymore or dies because of that. And because of the rapid decline of religion over there, it was pretty much inbreeding as there are not many candidates that want a life like that outside these families, so always some of them have massive defects (my neighbour had a son born without a left arm, a blind daughter, a son with a disabling low iq, and more like that).
You mean it's not 100% genetic... very little is. But very little is 0% genetic
Twin study has .35 correlation between identical twins but .21 for non identical
American women say they want closer to three kids than two kids: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility... (average 2.7). Half of women with kids, and even 30% of women overall with a college degree, would prefer a homemaker role to working: https://news.gallup.com/poll/267737/record-high-women-prefer.... These women would probably have more kids if it was easier to have a single income household.
I suspect “logistics” has more to do with it than “independence.” Our education system and economy, in particular, causes people to spread out and move away from family. Raising kids without family around is much, much more difficult.
There is also the fact that the feminist revolution stalled in this weird place where women have freedom to pursue careers--but only if they can shoehorn themselves into existing roles designed for men. Want to grind through your 20s in Big Tech or Big Finance seeking promotions? Fine. Want to take time off to have kids at an age when it's the lowest risk and you have the most energy for it? Then you're off the career ladder forever! That's not some unavoidable consequence of "women's independence." Our retirement and pension systems are very much designed around the biological reality of men's bodies working strenuous industrial jobs. But our career ladders haven't changed one bit to accommodate the biological realities of motherhood.
You might as well talk about how women might raise their children on Mars. Outside the Amazon jungle, for the past 10000 years women have been raising children under class-based society under class-based relations of production. The ruling class makes decisions about production, that's the point of a class-based society. Thus the world is turning into a place where the purpose of women's fertility is reproduction of labor, not an increase of it. The ruling class prefers two educated, productive children to three or four less educated, less productive children.
It doesn't matter what working class women want in terms of children, because this is a class-based society, and the ruling class has things aligned to what is good for them, not her.
[edit: at this point I just assume that folks on HN don't have any concept of the demographics of reservations and how many children are being born. If you mention lack of Hispanic population but don't mention the Native American population then you are skewing the point.]
I experienced this first hand. I moved to follow career with my wife, who also has an extraordinary career compared to median. We delayed and struggled to find the right time to start a family. The whole dynamic of planning the start of your family was self defeating. There's no good time to have kids while prioritizing career...
So we took the plunge, had kids, made it 6 months, and moved back to be near our family.
In retrospect it is obvious that the narrative of success being concentrated in gross salary was poisoning our lives and forcing us to make unhealthy decisions to live in awful situations. We're "richer" in our hometown by a long shot, when you calculate the slush money left over after cost of living, babysitters, day care, housing, even cars. Not to mention the joy of having a big family that the kiddos can play with all the time.
If we had realized this in our 20s, I'm sure we would happily have had 4 or more kids and accepted half the money overall for the same net takehome.
Men and women are fundamentally different on biological and emotional plane. They complement each other. But instead they are being forced to compete. It's time to recognise and change this.
This is similar to people saying trans people have never existed. Instead of seeing the western world as abnormally sexist, homophobic, and transphobic. IE the way the British treated hijras (men identifying with feminine traits) when they took over India in the late 1800s. Before and since then (though this is affected by how awful the British were), hijras weren’t treated equally, but much better than the abusive and bigoted Europeans.
I am aware of status of women in my own country India before invaders came.I won't go into the ancient history. But women like Ahilyabai Holkar, Laxmibai existed not too long ago.Both of them rose to the occassion. But my point stands that women generally do not enjoy these types of roles. Love, affection, child rearing, and home making comes more naturally to them then going out and picking fights.
Being a house husband doesn't bode well with psychological traits where the extremes sit in the male population (which are responsible for things like men doing all the dangerous jobs, men being most of the inmates in prisons, men being the ones most likely to die in war).
I certainly hated my paternity leave and, anecdotally, I've heard from many peers who would have preferred to just work over taking care of their children. It's fine for a limited amount of time, but I can't tolerate that full time.
Do you think a post bellyaching about simply having a family makes you sound masculine?
Men wanting propagation of life by desiring offspring makes them not men?
Throughout the history men have fought war and died in wars. How many wars were fought by women?
In modern times women are in the defense forces, how many women have chosen combat duties and made supreme sacrifices?
Ofcourse there are exception.
Are you a man and should I assume you signed up for every war, as your Y chromosone dictated?
> Are you a man and should I assume you signed up for every war, as your Y chromosone dictated?
Are you arguing men aren't predisposed to solve their problems physically? If this behaviour is uniformly distributed across men and women then why you don"t see equal number of crimes by either genders.
Also we were talking about what men want.
Does the fact men fought in wars imply they wanted to fight in wars?
Did men in history during times of peace sit around saying to themself 'I hope someone starts a war so I have an excuse to stab a guy and get away from my wife and kids?'
"Are you arguing men aren't predisposed to solve their problems physically?"
Assuming you are a man... unless you are Tony Soprano and you go around hitting people with a baseball bat you probably don't "solve your problems physically".
So why write a sentence like "Are you arguing men aren't predisposed to solve their problems physically"
This makes it sound like the world would be better off if all the men stayed home raising the kids and away from things like international relations while having the women take care of all the larger societal functions
Issue with recent activism is two folds. Tendency to demean the motherhood and also make men feel guilty for being their natural self. This is I do not want.
[0] https://www.thebetterindia.com/292468/brave-indian-queens-in...
Most of my rich friends in tech who take CNN seriously, don't want kids.
Whether it's to save the environment or because having kids has been painted like the ultimate martyrdom and having casual sex until you're 50 as the best thing in the world.
2.5%. That is nothing of nothing. It is a non-event, and dwarfed by “I just don’t want kids” or “financial reasons”. Now that’s not “why do you have 2 kids instead of 3” but yeah.
Many many countries recently went this path. Look at USA or Poland where abortion was forBiden.
If you read the article (I know, I know...) it's extremely honest about the accuracy of population modeling as it reaches into the future, and fully admits that projections past 70 years aren't good. It even does so relatively close to the beginning.
“Demographic projections are highly accurate, and it has to do with the fact that most of the people who will be alive in 30 years have already been born,” the UN’s population division director, John Willmoth, says.
“But when you start getting 70, 80 years down the road, there’s much more uncertainty.”
I think the Population Bomb scenarios have done better than people give it credit for. The authors are also still active in public discourse, see eg https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-po...
I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...
The problem is usually the media rather than the science. Journalists turn everything into sensationalist claims.
By the way if we reset to the atmospheric conditions of a few hundred years ago this would be a certainty within a period of thousands of years at most. Much of the world’s population centers, agriculture, etc covered in hundreds of feet of ice.
A few papers in the 1980s were predicting global cooling, but those have been shown to be erroneous – sometimes even by the very same authors.
No? It's 2022 and our cities should be sunk in the ocean and we should be boiling or frozen and there should be no drinkable water left and blah blah blah.
https://insideclimatenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/AQ-...
They predicted 1C in 2005, and 2.5C in 2038. We are right on schedule.
They also predict global economic growth to halt in 2025 due to climate change impacts.
That’s plausible, given recent years’ industrial and agricultural climate disasters. However, on that metric, we’re probably a bit behind schedule. Five years, maybe?
The wide scale introduction of systems, required by laws and regulations, that drastically reduced the amount of sulfur byproducts released had a lot to do with that same thing regarding CFCs and the ozone layer.
Put another way, one group conflates the fact of CO2 increases + greenhouse effect with suggested political acrions. Another group counters by conflating not agreeing with political actions with disputing the underlying physics.
At some point we should probably start doing something – and enough – about it to maybe avoid the worst consequences?
Make them buy less because production is hindered due to various reasons and make them pay more for petrol and energy??
Hmm, Im curious whether we could do that on global scale. Maybe if there was some convinient way to tell ppl to stay at home.
Putting money into solving Renewable intermitency (either through large scale storage projects or nuclear) and decommisioning every single coal plant on earth (followed closely by gas plants) would be the single largest step change in emissions that has fuck all to do with 'consumer' behaviour.
"resist climate change" could mean different things. It's true that something like "rising CO2 raises global temperature" is uncontroversial, but agreeing to that doesn't get you anywhere close to implementing climate policy, or to even acknowledge that humans are the leading cause. For instance, you can agree that "rising CO2 raises global temperature", but still think that the warming is totally natural (ie. not primarily caused by humans) and/or that it's impossible for humans to stop. Polling suggests a good chunk of republicans believe in the former[1]. I suspect that most people would characterize those people as "resisting climate change" even if they believe that co2 leads to atmospheric warming.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2020/06/23/two-thirds-of...
The individual inconvenience of not doing that far outweighs the individual cost. Calling that selfishness is being far too generous.
The other side has been stating it as a causal relationship for over 40 years. Their projections have proven correct over that timespan.
Also, your argument about rhetoric justifies voting immorally whenever one side is universally in the wrong. (Examples from history include women’s suffrage, slavery, locking ethnic groups in camps, etc.) I don’t find it to be a useful way of thinking about political issues.
The solution is a strong constitution and independent courts that enforce it, ie liberal democracy.
My guess is that these older people probably think they’ll be gone soon anyway, so why give up air travel, gas guzzling cars etc? It is a problem for younger generations to deal with
I do understand what you’re saying about old people being tired of apocalyptic predictions that come to pass. Even I remember being taught about Peak Oil and how the world would grind to a halt as we ran out of oil in the very near future. I remember being very worried about it as a child and wondering why none of the adults were equally concerned.
I wish there was a better way to convey the difference between widely corroborated, slow-moving concerns like climate change with the overly sensationalized short-term apocalyptic concerns that crop up every few years.
Europe is silently happy about UA war because it will in the end stimulate economy. Qnd if few mil more ppl leave UA for Germany perm, they will be happiest than ever…
World is ugly and how elites treat normal ppl is ugly.
Sure, if you're away from the areas of destruction, you can perhaps make money selling weapons to the belligerents, but I think today one would be foolish to think that a major war can't possibly affect you, where ever you may be.
While this is true, you're dismissing that the claims around climate change have been wildly wrong. The world should have ended a dozen times by now if we look at past predictions by "experts".
I'm not denying climate change at all, and we definitely need to take actions to curb it. But I understand where the skepticism is coming from.
Can you give some references where international panels of scientists have predicted the end of the world? We can't put entities such as IPCC at the same level as some random doomsayers.
Edit: it was a report by James Hansen in 1988.
> Some press reports in the 1970s speculated about continued cooling; these did not accurately reflect the scientific literature of the time, which was generally more concerned with warming from an enhanced greenhouse effect.
That entire article makes it very clear that at the time the only little pushing it were charlatan media orgs, and one guy who very obviously made a career of opposing every single scientific consensus[1]
From your own citation:
> Concern peaked in the early 1970s, though "the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then"
But even if it had been a majority (or even "everybody") your point still completely fails because you are not taking into account why they predicted global cooling.
The predictions were not "we will have global cooling no matter what". They were "we will have global cooling if the amount of particulate pollution in the atmosphere gets too high, which if current trends continue will happen". Particulate pollution has a cooling effect.
But we undertook a massive effort to reign in particulate pollution. We not only stopped their rise but actually greatly reduced their level.
Has it though? What was even the prediction? It seems to me that at some point people just gave up at pinpointing the specifics of the problem and basically decided that the fact that the climate is changing (never really stopped since the ice age) is the problem that needs fixing.
I really fail to see real consistent confirmation that isn't some indirect measurement using unproven models, or stuff like "we found some random farmers journal, compared temperature and crop harvesting dates and it's totes different from now"
Were there any real predictions from the past that came true on this topic?
I think that is mainly true in a few countries where it has become a politically divisive issue
Responding to climate change in a meaningful way generally means making lifestyle choices that are responsible.
This would include driving a small car (instead of a SUV) and driving it at a fuel-efficient speed (not the maxiumum). This would include limiting reproduction. This would include not buying a new phone every n years. This would include buying more expensive, locally grown food. This would include voting for a party that is not about "jobs'n'growth" and "the economy" and "tax cuts for the rich" and one that is more about responding to the existential challenge.
Nobody wants that. They want their cars and phones and their lifestyle and their overseas holidays and their 20 grandkids. We are taught to want that.
From The Matrix (1999):
"You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it."
Most of the actions you list at a societal scale are completely pointless, literally the only action we need as a civilisation (collectively, not individually) is building nuclear.
With abundance of clean energy that nuclear can provide, we can drive fast, procreate a lot, and eat globally.
Billions?
Many people wouldn’t mind being frozen in 1950’s USA (except those with cancer), but probably not 1950’s China or India.
Each kg can produce about 30-70TJ of energy with existing nuclear technology.
Primary energy is about 17TW
Please explain how you can get 17TWy of energy per year from a sum total of <80TWy of fuel.
How many steps there are in this cycle and if actually is a net positive in energy production has not been born out by any research I am aware of. So your skepticism is warranted.
Reprocessing doesn't create new fissile material. You're stuck with the small fraction of Pu239 in the waste (which is about a 7th of the original U235). It buys you very little extra energy at huge financial cost and in the current form releases more radiation than the rest of the nuclear industry combined if you exclude weapons tests and chernobyl -- it even rivals coal in terms of radiation released per joule. Plus there is a hidden amount of CFCs and other extremely potent greenhouse gases involved in the process.
Breeding to close the fuel cycle would be great (if it could be done economically and safely), but there is a laundry list of reasons why it may never happen, and every tonne of fissile material used before it happens is 200GW that can't be produced until a decade is spent breeding it back.
You're thinking only of energy, but the world we live in is more way, way complex than that. Keep that up and we're living on Trantor, or Coruscant, not the Earth.
Anecdotally, and I have no reason to doubt this, 200 species go extinct every day.
Most people only know about 200 people. Imagine if one day you woke up and suddenly everyone you knew -- family, friends, colleauges, aquaintences, the people you see behind the checkout -- was gone. Just gone.
Imagine that happening every day.
Or maybe you have 1,000 followers on Twitter. Imagine every day you lost 200 of them. After 5 days, you don't have any followers.
So: 1,000 species gone every 5 days. Less than a week. You do the math for a year.
And that's just one angle on the problem. Another is that we are poisoning ourselves: plastics are endocrine disrupters. Microplastics are a serious environmental problem. We are using materials in our day-to-day life that haven't been proven safe to actually use. Nobody did studies to see if the things you are using are safe: they just wait until they're proven problematic and then "phase them out" over 5 years ... if you're in a country that does that (some countries still use DDT which is persistant and fucking toxic).
And you're right that our actions alone won't solve the CO2 problem, or most other environmental problems. That needs to happen at a government and corporate level. But it's our responsibility to put pressure on those institutions.
And you can make changes locally that affect your sphere of life. We live on a farm and have planted the landscape back, in places, with thousands of trees. These support birds, insects and small animals. It reclaims a little of what was lost. It doesn't make a huge difference in the broader sense, but it makes a big difference in the lives of other creatures.
Is it? What amount of pressure results in a 100 IQ person making 140 IQ decisions? :)
Same reason Congress never passed a law explicitly legalizing abortion. It was too good a wedge issue.
The Democratic Party (and its more liberal wing especially) are interested in passing policies to address climate change. Imperfectly, but orders of magnitude more than Republicans.
No, no they are not. They are interested in passing laws that increase their power, and make people more dependent on government
Massively redistributed policies, that are anti-business, anti-market in the name of "social" and "climate" "justice" most of which will do little to nothing to impact actual CO2 emissions
If we are expecting the US Congress to save humanity we are all doomed
Government needs to get out of the way and stop trying to pick winners and losers, they are bad at it (see Ethanol )
This is why things like river fires are no longer common.
I will agree that congress is bad at picking winners. They should focus on prohibiting damaging practices.
Although, congress didn't pick ethanol because they thought it was a winner. They picked it because it propped up farmers.
And this is because of US Congress or because of State Governments?
Most regulation around rivers, and other such things are State Government controlled, not federal
I fully support federalism, I fully support State governments doing regulations that are sensible to the people, and conditions of states.
I reject the idea it needs to be a national policy or that such a policy is even possible with out being completely corrupted and authoritarian. Nor do I believe such a regulation is envisioned by the powers granted to the US Congress in our Constitution
If you are worried about corruption and authoritarian tendencies, why do you tolerate them at the state level?
Please lay out your tradeoffs in a way that might make your position consistent.
History has shown that there aren't that many Bell Labs that survive very long. How long will Open AI or DeepMind continue to contribute to public innovation? I'm not going to make a bet on that.
Decades of spending on math and science, embedded into federal spending (though inefficient and wasteful in many ways) has generated many tremendous innovations. It is foolish to rely on one mechanism to generate innovation. I'm not suggesting that government is the only or best way. We need innovations across many timescales.
P.S. The amount of close mindedness among "highly intelligent" people in the tech world is staggering. Step back and look at yourself. Ask if your ego is getting in the way of clear and creative thinking.
P.P.S. For what it's worth, among the people I consider most inspiring in the tech world, very few have their head planted only in computer science. We need more historians, sociologists, lawyers, musicians, and so on. The libertarian faction of tech is indictive of a certain brain tendency -- a desire to simplify down to core principles -- and not one that we need more of.
The drive for simplicity can lead us to interesting theories. It can lead to simpler systems. It can also lead to overlooking the true nature of humanity: what is good? what is fair? what is just?
So "Is simplicity best? Or simply the easiest?" [1]
Please question the value of simple philosophies when you make moral arguments. Human concepts are rarely simple. Neither is language. Or justice. Or fairness. Or innovation.
[1] Depeche Mode
That may be some peoples' interpretation.
But even if true (which I do not think it is) this is hardly the intent.
This is one of the most abused phrases in politics.
Let's back up and talk about some fundamental values. I think most people can agree that we work to live, not the other way around. Businesses exist to serve an economic function. Businesses are not an embodiment of the ultimate good, any more than the barter system was, or indentured servitude. These things are ways of structuring economic activity.
My point is simple: Businesses operate according to the context they are in. The businesses do not define right and wrong. Businesses exploit the conditions they are in if they want to thrive.
Banning dog fighting is bad for the existing businesses AND the right thing to do.
Banninge CFCs was bad for industry at the time, according to some time frames.
Let's recognize the shared foundational moral factors here before we assume that we're on vastly different pages.
But I would rather see policy coming out that is in the right ballpark. We can learn from that.
Vague, simplistic overreliance on "the market" is foolhardy and readily dismissed by any serious student of economics.
Dave Roberts has a bunch of great explainers:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/david-roberts-on-the-p...
https://www.volts.wtf/p/the-inflation-reduction-act-everythi...
Plenty of transcripts.
> debt fueled hundreds of billion dollar corporate wellfare
I get it. However...
I'm totally on board with government investment and industrial policy. Like The New Deal, race to the moon, highways, waterworks, etc. IRA, by any other name, is industrial policy and massive investment.
IRA is about 1/3rd the scope of Build Back Better. Pretty much cut & paste. All the programs they could sneak thru reconciliation, because of stupid Senate budget rules.
There's always objectionable specifics. Like the carve out for Manchin's new pipelines. But that's politics. And they're a tiny fraction of the whole.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_footprint
I'm not saying that one shouldn't try to live more harmoniously if they can, but we shouldn't blame individuals for failing so solve problems caused by huge corporations, because it takes eyes away from where they really should be.
I'd compare this situation to a bus with broken brakes, packed with tourists, that's rapidly approaching a cliff. Everyone knows what to do, but is too afraid of the pain that would follow. So everyone is waiting and discussing solutions, such as rocking the bus to increase pressure on brakes, or opening windows to increase the drag. Some are blaming the driver, some are blaming the fat passengers who should've eaten more responsibly, but that's just a form of group therapy session.
If you want to fix id, you also need to educate people.
I'd love to, but it seems that approximately all manufacturers are no longer producing consumer goods that last forever, and we're in the last miles of a race to the bottom in terms of both product quality and reliable information about product quality.
It's because older people are used to the idea that they should be able to spend their money any way they like, and in order to combat climate change they are being told that they should consume less. Plus they probably don't care that much that their actions will cause suffering of future generations.
- It’s scary
- It requires a substantial change in lifestyle
- It has become attached to politics, (particularly liberal, progressive politics) which makes it a representation of the “other”.
That aside, there is something to be said about seeing the predictions of your youth fizzle out. On the other hand, we have a tendency to romanticize the party and reframe ourselves relative to it. We remember things differently than they were.
Not all predictions are equal. It's one thing to doubt predictions from random pundits, it's another thing to doubt the current scientific consensus. A lot of smart people from many countries have been working on climate change. They may be wrong in their conclusions but what they're telling us is the best prediction at our disposal.
> I wonder if that is why there is such resistance to climate change among older people...
Probably for the same reason there was resistance to vaccines. A lot of people aren't rationale at all and believe whatever suits their view of the world, even though it's in direct contradiction with all evidences.
If tomorrow, most of the non-elderly population died off leaving only the less-capable-of-working-and-therefore-feeding-the-world-elderly to fend for themselves, we'd have a crisis on our hands. This will happen gradually, over time. Over time, nearly every thing we produce -- food included -- is done more efficiently when the market requires it.
I should temper this a little -- I'm not saying "let's just start pouring sewage into the rivers because robots will come by and clean it up some day"[0], ignore climate change (or deny it or anything else). I am suggesting those who believe this is a problem that requires awareness (and not dismissal) might be better served by being less sensational. And it would be intelligent of us to remember that when we try to make predictions about the future that the future happens all around the thing you're predicting, too ... and might even make it irrelevant.
[0] If anything it's over-reacting pieces like this that cause people to think that way ... especially when they end up being the opposite of previous hauntingly similar sounding over-reactions (see The Population Bomb)
Well, if we’re getting older and older, isn’t that because we’re getting healthier and healthier? Wouldn’t the number of years we’re “able to work to support more people” increase as well?
Not necessarily, just look at the obesity epidemic. 40% of Americans are now obese. Not overweight, obese. Our society has tackled large scale public health issues that used to kill lots of people (cholera, polio, etc.) But living longer is no way an indicator that we are healthier than we used to be. There's not as much out there to kill us when we're young.
0: https://www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/...
This is driven more by the number of old/young people rather than a small % increase in life expectancy.
Look at a graph of the distribution of people in age groups
Either the vast majority of our productivity gains will to to pensions in the future (as they already do in Europe), or retired people will have to live with severe cuts to living standards.
Famous American aphorism: A society grows great when old men buy land and charge rent for the young to plant trees on which the old will then sit in the shade of
So, did they mix up and then also group the Baltics and the Balkans? Otherwise this is a rather bizarre description.
Now, birthrates might be something harder to predict, although they too are subject to demographic forces. (Less people have fewer babies even with higher fertility.) The problem will be slow to correct.
There were perhaps 230 million of us on Earth at around the time of Cleopatra’s death, as the ancient Egyptian civilisation came to an end.
I think those numbers on their own are already interesting. They give us a picture just how unusual the present time really is - or even most of recorded history.
Cleopatra was living in the first century BC, so very roughly 2000 years ago. So for the ~298.000 years before (or ~99.3% of human history), there were less humans on earth than are living in the US today.
Only in the last 0.7% have we ever gotten close to a billion, then surpassed it and reached 8 billion today.
So explosive population growth has absolutely been real, it just used to happen at timescales that are not easy for us to access.
Not that there's no problems with cities and agriculture, just the big picture seems the opposite of what is suggested here.
Also "peak child" means peak baby. We need to support people in old age and in infancy (even supporting mothers pre-birth) so the correct comparison of workers to non-workers is those who have left school upwards to retirement.
Again, not suggesting there are no demographic issues, but even on that scale it's not "all downhill from here" even before you get into robots and longer, healthier lives and other details.
Can we manage the energy transition? Perhaps. I was always a pessimist, so my guess is no. The technology for it has yet to be invented. In overshoot territory, we're already living on borrowed time. The world's ecological footprint widely exceeds the Earth biocapacity has long been exceeded, now imagine 8 billion people who want to live the lifestyle of Americans. Demand in energy just keeps growing. Renewables don't even displace fossil fuels, they only increase the total energy output.
There are also some ancient races who are very powerful individually but only have a few hundred individuals left (sometimes, one).
It seems that individual power tends to rise but overall numbers tend to dwindle as a race develops, and quality * quantity would eventually peak.
Maybe it's how it works in the real life as well.
TV show is what may give food for thoughts.
Um, what? City area growth is slow and mostly vertically, and effect of farmlands have been minimal, at least compared to other factors.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_SXXTBypIg&list=PLJp5q-R0lZ...
Economically, could the deflationary pressures of a declining population lead to low/negative interest rates and hyper QE?
It's going to be interesting to see.
Their kids aren't equipped to take the millions of vacant Western jobs, because they won't have the necessary education, especially when it comes to language.
France has free daycare and yet has had a below-replacement level birth rate since the late 70s.
Similarly, while many countries are offsetting their aging populations with immigration, if that ceases to be sufficient they currently can still afford to create incentives for people to have children.
For how much we consume and greed it's best if there's less of us.
if 99% or 99.9% of the population voluntarily practices a below-replacement fertility rate, either every generation or on average over multiple generations, it might instead take 500 years
whatever eccentric 1% or 0.1% chooses otherwise will double every 50 years, as world population just did
then it's just a question of the technical feasibility of building appealing offworld habitats, and the political freedom to do so
We're approaching the downside slope of the carbon pulse that has been fueling mankind for the past 200 years. Things don't look good for the next decade for anyone.
I've watched too much Peter Zeihan and Nate Hagens to see anything other than that coming.
However, the rest of the world has to deal with losing 25% of cereals (from Russia and Ukraine) as well as the curtailment of rice imports from China, India, and Parisian. Similarly, the loss of Russia's and China's nitrogen, potassium, and potash exports cuts out ~20-30% of those resources, each of which is necessary to sustain post-industrial agricultural yields. This can easily cascade, for example, with Brazil and Latin American food exports drying up due to insufficient fertilizer input, or Saudi fertilizer output drying up due to regional insecurity or state collapse driven in part by high food prices.
So yes, "we" will be fine. North Africa and the Middle East... not so much.
Or are you just adding to the GP's list of woes, but not buying the time frame?
For the record, I'm cheering for you to be wrong...
China's population is peaking now. So is the US native-born population.[1]
Almost all the population growth worldwide is in sub-Saharan Africa. That region may not survive global warming.
So, my question is why are we panicking about it? I'm not even sure that we as human are completely responsible for the warming up (what big ego we have?). There are other species which are in trillions and don't even bat an eye about being overpopulated? Why this burden only on us? Why the burden of protecting a species is on us? Why we have such a big ego to think that we are running the solar system and the earth?
Speed of change basically. If it typically takes tens of thousands of years to make these changes, species can adapt and survive. If you do 10,000 years worth of heating in like 300 years it’s not enough time for that to occur.