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Comment by TotoHorner | Hacker News Reader

That's the entire point, they didn't attempt to be objective nor realistic.

That's honestly the biggest issue with a lot of these radical climate activists too.

They use intentionally misleading arguments to exaggerate timelines and pretend we're already screwed. The media certainly doesn't help as more climate alarmism generates more clicks.

And of course, if you say that they're exaggerating then you immediately get branded a "climate change denier".

Now you have a generation of 20 year olds who think it's immoral to have children because of climate change and other dumb shit like that.

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You lost me at “radical”, which makes you sound like a nut. What about this article is radical? Are they suggesting violence?

What makes you think Radical means violence? Radical was used 100% correctly according to its definition.

Radical (adjective) [1]: believing or expressing the belief that there should be great or extreme social or political change

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/radic...

Radical in common speech (within the US) is used to describe an outlier in behavior - zealot, would be the closest synonym for the way radical is used. Violence over climate change would be radical. It's an example of very uncommon behavior, not a specific quality of a radical.

This slight disagreement is an issue of disparate definition. I believe the GP was simply being less than gracious in the interpretation of a comment, despite it making perfect sense how they came to their own understanding.

Thanks. Mostly I was just reacting to the term radical being applied to an article that expressed some mostly conventional views on climate change. What was the radical part?

Speculating about the cause and effects of climate change is radical?

The carbon footprint of a person in "the west" is far far larger than that of a person in China, India, etc. If reducing emissions helps the environment, then it is pretty obvious to anyone with a half developed brain that not having children (in the west) is a great way to reduce emissions.

Other reasons people don't have children:

- Socioeconomic disparities make it difficult to raise a family due to cost of living

- Uncertainty over the future with massive droughts (we have observed them), and ever increasing food scarcity imply that down the road, future generations will have a lot of issues to deal with, so why bring more people to needlessly suffer?

All in all, parent commenter assumes that young people are stupid, and fails to see that young people are generally concerned about their behaviour and the consequences. Commenter also fails to see that young people don't want to bring more humans to this planet because they don't want more people to suffer.

Bringing children to life is generally a very selfish act with dire consequences to anyone involved.

> Bringing children to life is generally a very selfish act with dire consequences to anyone involved.

No, it's not. I understand people having concerns about the future and especially regarding the expense of raising a child. But, to brand people "selfish" for having kids that they're able to provide good care for is silly.

If we are all "equal", then each one of us is allocated some amount of emissions that we may produce. Bringing children to the world reduces the slice of other people, and assumes that the kids will have a good enough life without too much suffering.

Many children have been born to families that had the wealth to provide for the children, but ultimately hurt them in the process or caused needless suffering.

Should ban immigration with the same logic?

> Socioeconomic disparities make it difficult to raise a family due to cost of living

Rather, the number of children per family tends to go down as income increases - compare Congo (6.2 children per woman in 2020, $577.20 GDP per capita) with Norway (1.5 children per woman in 2020, $89,154.39 GDP per capita).

Those are not directly related (although in some way they are).

Lack of education, contraceptives and social nets means that women in congo will have more children on average. If you get them all that and a stable pension after (so they won't need kids to keep them alive when old) the numbers of kids will fall.

On the other hand, in the "rich" western countries, no matter how high the income number is (compared to congo), that doesn't mean that a young couple can actually afford a home large enough to have a kid or two (or more), childcare and all the other kid-related costs.

> that not having children (in the west) is a great way to reduce emissions.

Why in the west? The west is already doing their (our) part by not having enough children to replace the current people here.

The 'rest of the world' has too many children, in some places even too many to literally just feed. Why deal with the areas where couples have <2, even <1.5 children on average and not with areas where the numbers are 5 or even more?

Also, doesn't that mean that we should also stop immigration? Moving someone from a poor country to a rich(er) one means more emissions since they tend to consume more due to more money than in their originating country.

> Why in the west?

The cost in emissions to raise a child in the west is far higher than in other countries.

> The 'rest of the world' has too many children, in some places even too many to literally just feed.

Countries like India and China have far lower emissions per capita than western countries, and especially if we account for carbon emissions and imports.

> Why deal with the areas where couples have <2, even <1.5 children on average and not with areas where the numbers are 5 or even more?

There are very few countries with as many children, all of them very low on emissions per capita, and the easiest way to drop that is by accelerating their growth, improving education, and QoL.

> Also, doesn't that mean that we should also stop immigration? Moving someone from a poor country to a rich(er) one means more emissions since they tend to consume more due to more money than in their originating country.

No idea. If you wish to reduce the need for immigration, the simplest way is to enable people to have children. US' policies on maternity, leave and so on are not helping the situation, and neither is the ever increasing CoL in European countries while we have as high tax rates.

> The cost in emissions to raise a child in the west is far higher than in other countries.

But the west is already way on the way to reducing population, even too much.

> There are very few countries with as many children, all of them very low on emissions per capita, and the easiest way to drop that is by accelerating their growth, improving education, and QoL.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...

if you scroll down to the second table, sort by most recent value, you'll see many many large countries with numbers way above 2 (replacement value), and pretty much none of them will be developed western ones.

Again, why should the west not have children, while the rest can have 5? Shouldn't we focus our efforts on those 5 per couple, instead of 1.5 or watever the average for eg EU is?

> No idea. If you wish to reduce the need for immigration, the simplest way is to enable people to have children. US' policies on maternity, leave and so on are not helping the situation, and neither is the ever increasing CoL in European countries while we have as high tax rates.

But didn't you just say that we shouldn't have children in the west, because children pollute? But moving poor people to richer countries pollutes too, since they earn more there and pollute more in turn.

> Again, why should the west not have children, while the rest can have 5? Shouldn't we focus our efforts on those 5 per couple, instead of 1.5 or watever the average for eg EU is?

I did not express that only we should do it. I simply said that having fewer children, especially in western world, is a very obvious way to reduce carbon footprint.

> But didn't you just say that we shouldn't have children in the west, because children pollute?

That's not what I said. I said that it is pretty selfish, both towards other people, _and_ towards the children themselves but people seem to have glossed over the latter.

Just because I find it selfish doesn't mean that we should be doing what I propose. If it was up to me, we'd be heading for a voluntary human extinction, but for better or worse, we are not. I simply pointed out that claiming that young people are stupid and fall into traps is not the reason they don't have children.

The sad part is if we’re already screwed it defeats the argument of doing much of anything anyway so everyone continues doing what they were going to do anyway.

Nope. It's not binary. That's the entire point.

I think you and the parent are both correct. If we are “screwed” (I.e no action will prevent runaway warming) then any response to prevent warming is pointless. However you are correct that being “screwed” or not is a false binary (we don’t know if warming is reversible but it is likely we can make a positive change and avoid runaway).

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