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Comment by olivermarks | Hacker News Reader

On 1.: Birth rates are stable since about 1990 and declining since 2017: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-births-b... China had almost 30 million births in 1963, but only had 10 million last year.

The rate of population growth is decreasing much more quickly than expected: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-growth-the-ann...

On 3.: In Germany the share of wind/solar in electricity production is more than 37%. How is this unproven? Supply is getting more stable almost every year: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/DE/Fachthemen/Elektrizitaet... Nobody is shutting off energy. And the EU has subventions for personally owned vehicles trying to increase their usage: https://ecf.com/news-and-events/news/money-bikes-financial-i...

On 1 & 2 : Interesting how the UK academics at https://global-change-data-lab.org data is so much at variance with the UN

They have the same data, you just linked to older versions of the UN data:

> This visualization presents a big overview of the global demographic transition, based on estimates from the 2019 data release from the UN Population Division; other charts use the more recent 2022 revision, which projects slower growth than previously expected.

https://ourworldindata.org/future-population-growth#global-p...

Then we all die, the end, might as well kill ourselves now.

People will either intentionally sacrifice to slow climate change or destroy itself.

Neoliberal society will come to an end one way or another.

Half the world’s population growth will be concentrated in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States of America, Uganda and Indonesia (ordered by their expected contribution to total growth). Not many of those countries have any interest in 'intentionally sacrificing to slow climate change'. They are mostly being exploited by rapacious 'green' capitalists for rare earth minerals etc as their populations explode..

Eight countries will make up over half the projected total population increase by 2050: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Tanzania, the Philippines and Egypt.

India is expected to overtake China as the world’s most populous country next year (2023), when China’s population is expected to start declining.

(Source: United Nations Population Fund, 2022)

These places are ground zero for environmental concerns imo

You’re wrong : the carbon footprint of a Pakistanese, Indian or Nigerian person is in order of 2 tons per year.

The carbon footprint of a US person is in order of 20 tons, EU countries are around 8-10 tons.

So I’d say that the problem lies with OECD countries, no the others.

Meanwhile, companies require us to come into work, commute hours, burn fossil fuels, etc.

Companies and governments talk out one side of their mouth about being green and carbon neutral, then tell people they need to burn fossil fuels to come to work, by unaffordable electric cars to be around people you don't work with in expensive to live city centers that they don't pay enough to live in, much less have a family of one or two children, and nuclear is bad.

I've stopped listening, because it's pointless, all I see is highway construction to add more lanes rather than making viable public transportation. If they really believed any of it they'd be doing something about it. I do my little bit, but having this insane nihilistic anxiety about it is far worse.

Carbon footprint per capita is a poor metric because it incentivizes nations to increase population and suppress quality of life improvements.

If you want to assign blame sure an American might be 10 time more responsible than a Pakistani, a Chinese may be twice as culpable is a French. That doesn't really solve anything though. The problem isn't the amount of CO2 in the air divided by the number of living humans.

Emissions intensity of production IMO is a better one because it promotes efficient industry without exerting the wrong incentives on population or quality of life.

The problem is total amount of emitted CO2. A large extent of it being emitted by a rather reduced fraction of the total population (rich countries).

Seems rational to exerce change of this reduced fraction. Indian or Pakistani are respecting their share in terms of emissions in order for climate increase to stay under 2 degrees. We are not, so we need to change that.

When you say "we", policy that can affect carbon emissions and even population trends to some degree are usually made on a country level. So it makes sense for highly emitting countries to reduce their emissions, not for them to be able to purchase "share" by encouraging population growth.

Pakistan and India have enormous amounts of heavy industries, Nigeria massive extraction. 'Carbon footprint' per person is somewhat irrelevant in this heavily industrialized context. Globalization has shifted unpleasant, grimmy polluting activities to these types of countries, while people sanctimoniously push mice around in the first world...

Carbon footprint is a measure that takes into account such transfers and makes it even worse for OECD countries which tend to externalise emissions.

Still, OECD countries are 10-20 worse than Pakistan or India (per person).

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