UK birth slump dubbed ‘good for planet’ | Hacker News Reader

UK birth slump dubbed ‘good for planet’

telegraph.co.uk

13 pointsgeox41 comments

It seems like the biggest problem is that we have been so consumed with growth that we have failed to implement strategies for graceful reductions in population and economic activity. Now that so many nations are experiencing demographic changes it might be good to come up with something for that.

Yes it has amazed me too that the topic of overpopulation/overconsumption strategies hasn’t really been openly discussed in many governments. I know it’s controversial but it’s so important it really should be more transparently discussed.

I think we perhaps have failed to ask what does a person need actually.

Heading off the standard rebuttal many many consequential things aren't very resource intensive, like vaccines, safe food, birth control. And a lot of resource intensive things kind a suck, looking at you Mr Car in the driveway beckoning me to drive yet again into the office.

The UK tabloid rhetoric serves as a strong reminder to me why I left the country and have no desire to ever live there again. Brexit was a resounding sledgehammer driven nail in that coffin. Every single day I am happy I left and all this does is reinforce why. UK journalism has a weird mixture of some of the best and some of the most toxic in the world.

Do you mind sharing where did you move to?

I feel we're the reverse of the Americans in some ways, from what I understand their TV news is completely rabid in the same way our tabloids are but their newspapers are relatively level-headed whereas our TV news (particularly from the BBC) is pretty level-headed but our newspapers are just raw, unverified polemics probably the most toxic in any free country.

I don't think I could leave for good though, I think I have something of George Orwell's frustrated attachment to the place.

Broadcast news (TV and radio) in the UK is required by law to be politically neutral. GB News seems to be fighting that though.

As does the BBC.

> from what I understand their TV news is completely rabid in the same way our tabloids

Your understanding is flawed. Cable news ( fox,cnn,etc ) is rabid, but broadcast news ( abc, nbc, cbs ) is more serious and 'professional'. Especially the nightly news.

> but their newspapers are relatively level-headed

Once again it depends. The wall street journal ( more professional ) to the ny post ( more rabid ) which oddly enough are owned by the same company controlled by the same foreigner who answer to the same elite.

The rabid-professional or the left-right dichotomy is an illusion because the media pretty much is controlled by the state/elite. They appear to be superficially different on silly cultural matters but fundamentally agree on the important stuff.

So, pray tell, where did you go that you deem free of toxic press? It surely isn't anywhere in Europe or the US. Certainly, couldn't be China, South Korea or Japan. Definitely not Australia.

> Birth rate slump in West will address overconsumption, former government adviser says

The birth rate may be dropping but net immigration has reached a record last year and population is still growing relatively rapidly (if not at record pace). I.e. no positive impact on 'overconsumption' at all.

It is good for the planet because anything short of a system change that doesn’t rely on overconsumption seems impossible.

All human birth rate reduction is good for the planet.

The arguments here of whether the person was born in the UK or Kenya are pointless.

The overwhelming majority of the difficulties facing modern society are driven by too many people on the planet.

The current voluntary reduction in reproduction, unfortunately, is only going to be a drop in the bucket. Our massive overexploitation of natural resources, coupled with largely unmitigated toxic waste generation/disposal is going to lead to birth rate reduction on an unprecedented scale.

As ecosystem disruption begins to affect agricultural output, third world population will begin to feel the effects first. Then as these effects become global economic problems, warfare will proliferate.

We'll have War, Pestilence and Famine. The big three of population reduction.

In the next 100-200 years the earth will have a human population billions less than now.

“Why ‘experts’ have a bad reputation with normal people” exhibit 297363

Some context to help understand how absurd this article is: Britain finally reached it's pre-WWII population level in 2017. That of course includes immigrants.

Overconsumption sounds more like an engineering problem the anything else. The problem here is that birth rates are going to continue to have 20 year lows. Thats tragic.

You can say what you want about Augustine, but he was right about the connection between population growth and better outcomes for humanity.

Population decline is going to hurt humanity and society in wild and unpredictable ways and the planet doesn't care either way, it's a giant rock.

Infinite growth always ends up the same way one day or another though

Yeah, humans leaving the planet and flourishing.

In computer games I used to play as a kid yes, that's called sci-fi, until we actually do it I'll rely on the holy spirit and santa claus

Critics of 'degrowth' economics say it's unworkable—

but from an ecologist's perspective, it's inevitable

https://phys.org/news/2023-08-critics-degrowth-economics-unw...

    You may not have noticed, but earlier this month we passed Earth overshoot day, when humanity's demands for ecological resources and services exceeded what our planet can regenerate annually.

    Many economists criticizing the developing degrowth movement fail to appreciate this critical point of Earth's biophysical limits.

    etc.

Earth overshoot day is not a serious movement.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029445-000-admit-it...

"10 year old opinion piece says it's hard to measure resource footprint"

Sure.

So what's your estimate on our current resource burn rate with > 8 billion people, several tens of billion tonnes of ore extraction per annum, terrawatts of energy generation causing problems with the atmosphere, etc.

We golden, or are the cracks starting to show?

The key point you're missing isn't

* whether or not the people that originally looked at resource burn rates Vs. renewals got their sums correct, but

* whether the idea that globally we're overstripping our resources is sound.

Your link agrees that this is an issue:

    But I for one imagined that the footprint analysis was a bit smarter, that it had some handle on how we are overusing our soils and water reserves.

    Sadly, it does not measure the things that most of us assumed it does – and the things we really need to know.

So, ten years on, do we have a better understanding of our sustainable usage?

> Almost one in three children born last year were delivered by mothers born outside of the UK. The number of births by women born outside the UK rose 3,600 year-on-year to account for 30.3pc of all births. The previous peak was 29.3pc in 2020.

And yet the population growth of the UK continues to rise steadily [1], where the UK needs to produce at least 300k homes per year for the next 10 years to meet demand (an impossible order). I can't see how so much construction and infrastructure is 'good for the planet'.

The only thing the UK has done is 'outsource' child births. It's like getting fuel synthesised in China and claiming your product is clean because no emissions were generated on home soil in it's creation, also forgetting it generates most of its emissions during its working life.

I don't see there is anything to be celebrated here. Sarah Harper's point about overconsumption reduction appears to be false.

[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/uk-population...

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