Comment by junaru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by junaru | Hacker News Reader

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> are you not saying that it may be better that 10 poor people are not born, than for rich people to do minor changes to their lifestyle?

I definitely would say that and would argue it needs to be way more than 10.

If you want to solve manmade climate change you need to solve the demand for goods that cause it. You lower demand by increasing the the supply (can't do that because that increases the emissions you try bringing down) or you increase its price making only the very rich able to afford it and delaying the problem for a decade till population catches up. We already see it with migrant crisis all over the west - both Europe and US.

You do this decade after decade, again and again each time creating more and more privileged cast that can afford it (current policy) and in essence pushing the rest of the civilisation further and further into poverty as they will never catch up and if they do - new legislation will bring them down again to mask the issue once more.

An example of that would be farmers in Europe protesting removal of diesel subsidies or just in general people being able to afford smaller and smaller cars due to taxation in Europe every year.

The problem with these "minor changes to their lifestyle" is that they need to accommodate exponentially growing population that already is a magnitude or more higher than persons who need to adjust.

We are talking about 90%+ reduction in what you call "minor changes" to achieve emission equilibrium to begin with and add that with exponentially growing population and its simply not feasible not due to lack of compassion from top percentile but because changes like these would completely anihilate the modern human civilisation and bringing it back hundreds of years.

As an example theres a very informative video on what happens to country and infrastructure when 4 million people join the power grid in a decade [1] Imagine that scaled to 4 billion and the extreme worldwide devastation.

Population control is the only way to solve climate change and it needs to be reduced everywhere but especially in the undeveloped nations as they have the most potential of bringing everything down.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iiny1GrfhYM

> The problem with these "minor changes to their lifestyle" is that they need to accommodate exponentially growing population that already is a magnitude or more higher than persons who need to adjust.

It was approximately exponential up until around 200ish AD, fell below exponential for a few hundred years, then was above exponential for around 600 years (the growth rate was going up approximately linearly), had a period where it varied and even was slightly negative, and then around 1500ish entered a period where the growth rate was increasing almost exponentially. That lasted to around 1960, and since then the growth rate rapidly.

Here's a graph of the growth rate from 4000 BC to 2023 [1] from the data here [2].

I was curious what it is called when the growth rate itself is going up exponentially, but utterly failed to craft a search in Google that worked for me. I then tried ChatGPT (the free version) and at first it was just wrong. I reiterated that I want to know what it is called when the growth rate is going up exponentially, not when the growth is exponential. It apologized and told me it is called "exponential growth of the growth rate" or "exponential acceleration".

I tried to verify that it is called "exponential acceleration" with Google, but failed.

[1] https://imgur.com/gallery/GRPBVg2

> I was curious what it is called when the growth rate itself is going up exponentially

The derivative of the exponential function is the exponential function.

d/dx eˣ = eˣ

So if it’s growing exponentially the rate of growth is exponential and the rate of that acceleration is also exponential.

There's two different ways to indicate how fast a function, F(x), is growing.

One is to look at host much its value changes as x goes to x+d, and divide that to d to get an average rate of change from x to x+d. Take the limit as d -> 0 to get the instantaneous rate of change at x.

That gives a rate of change of Limit as d->0 of (F(x+d) - F(x)) / d, which is pretty much the textbook definition of d/dx F(x).

The other way is to look not at the actual value of the change but rather how much of a fraction of F(x) it was. That gives this measure: ((F(x+d)/F(x) - 1) / d. The instantaneous value would be the limit as d -> 0. That limit is of the form 0/0, but using L'Hôpital's rule we can turn it into (using the notation F'(...) for d/dx (F...)) the limit as d -> 0 of F'(x+d) / F(x) which is F'(x) / F(x).

When people talk of growth rate they usually mean this second measure. The first is usually called the rate of change. BTW, note that rate of change and growth rate are related. The growth rate is the rate of change of log(F(x)).

Exponential functions have an exponential rate of change but a constant growth rate. It is that constant growth that makes the concept of a half-life work for things that exponentially decay.

> You lower demand by increasing the the supply

Jevon's Paradox[1] states that as efficiency increases (which itself is a form of supply increase), demand increases.

My own view is that the paradox makes the idea of population reduction moot, those remaining humans would simply use more energy because supply has gone up and demand (through lack of competition) going down to levels below supply would, again, drive prices down.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

> Jevon's Paradox

This looks to support my argument as its indeed what is happening and what is causing emissions to go up (less developed nations industrialising) due to technology trickling down. Please correct me if i'm wrong.

> My own view is that the paradox makes the idea of population reduction moot

Lets use math and assume all pollution comes from end users who can afford/drive cars (~20%) and ignore the rest of modern civilisation and set current efficiency of 1x.

8 000 000 000 * 0.2 * 1 = 1 600 000 000

Lets call the 1.6Bil a hard line that we want to sustain aka the perpetual enviormental doomsday in the current year+x.

Over the next 80 years with strict population control and current technology we can make that:

4 000 000 000 * 0.4 * 1 = 1 600 000 000 and bring 20% more people into the top percentile bringing the misery, disease, war and resource shortage down or keep it to its current form.

Or if we wanted to bring same 20% of population to the same mark with efficiency (11.2 bil is expected population by 2100) we would need to achieve efficiency of:

11 200 000 000 * 0.4 * x = 1 600 000 000

x = 1600000000/(11200000000*0.4) = 0.357

Thats an efficiency increase of ~2.8x

So it boils down to you claiming that in the next 80 years we can increase efficiency 2.8 times across the board. This does not only include energy but materials too 2.8x less materials used to build cars, houses, roads etc. And on top of that we will do it with a completely new source of energy since fossil fuels are going dry in the coming decades.

Furthermore you calling population growth moot suggest thinking that this can be repeated again ad infinitum in 2180 and 2260 and so on.

I'll put it mildly - don't think its feasible.

Edit: fixed the last calculation for clarity/typos

Sure, if we ignore the paradox altogether then you have a point, but there's a reason why this paradox has held as a useful observation for hundreds of years.

Redo those calculations as if the paradox has weight and see where you end up.

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