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Comment by MrVandemar | Hacker News Reader

You can't prevent overpopulation: it has already occured. The carrying capacity of the planet is far exceeded.

A reduction in population would have immediate benefits: less manufacturing, less energy use, less pollution, less consumption, more land available for wildlife instead of stock/agricuture.

But what that means is "no growth" and "less money", which is not a popular concept in economics, politics and wealthy people, and they largely set the discourse.

It's been said that we're the only species that won't save itself because it's not cost effective. Damn right.

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I remember reading somewhere that one the greenest thing you can do is have less children. I cannot find it now but iirc, if every one on the planet had one less child, climate crisis would be averted in so many years/decades. It makes sense that intuitive level but would love to verify details.

Your comment makes me wonder if it is indeed about “save the planet” without scarifying “growth” is what most people care about.

There’s no research needed.

It is beyond obvious that the best single thing that an average individual can do for the climate is to have 0 kids — the next best thing is to have fewer kids.

Anyone who doubts this is mostly justifying their lifestyle choices (or will think they’re supremely clever for suggesting suicide as being better). Which is fine. Climate is fucked if they have 0 kids or 10 kids. Doesn’t matter a lick at this point.

The good news is that for nearly everyone wealthy enough to be on HN the bill mostly won’t come due until it’s your kids’ kids or kids’ kids’ kids lifetimes.

All that aside, I think this is the paper you’re talking about:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

The average standard of living worldwide is close to the highest it has ever been in history, contradicting the assertion that the "carrying capacity of the planet is far exceeded".

One doesn't neccesarily contradict the other at all.

Some might argue that high consumption patterns along with high emissions and high resource demands all add up to a high debt which is exceeding planetary recovery boundaries.

Some in fact do make that argument.

The "standard of living" is not related in any way to the "carrying capacity of the planet".

The former is a metric of how comfortable your life is; the latter is a complex metric of energy production and surplus, food per acre and inputs, etc. and how sustainable it is (which, at the moment, it isn't).

But we're running at about 200 species extinctions per day. Every animal on the earth has detectable levels of PFAS. You have microplastics in your body and DDT in your adipose tissue. We all do. We're cooking the atmosphere and boiling the seas.

But yeah, enjoy your standard of living.

From wikipedia:

> The carrying capacity of an environment is the maximum population size of a biological species that can be sustained by that specific environment.

In other words, we’ve exceeded the carrying capacity of Earth because our current practices cannot be sustained over a longer timespan.

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