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Comment by throwaway5752 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Poorer people buy things made overseas that requires a lot of shipping, and are lower quality that require more frequent replacement. They tend to have more children. They usually have more polluting energy sources. And there are many orders of magnitude more of them than rich people.

None of this is their fault, but ignoring it isn't good either.

All aircraft emissions are just 3% of US total. If all rich people (either the top 1% or 10%) reduced their emissions to zero tomorrow we would still not reach reduction targets needed to avoid catastrophic warming.

Everyone needs to contribute.

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Shipping the things that poor people buy is almost unfathomably eco-friendly.

Gargantuan slow ships are actually a great way to move stuff.

>Yes. Poorer people buy things made overseas that requires a lot of shipping, and are lower quality that require more frequent replacement. They tend to have more children. They usually have more polluting energy sources. And there are many orders of magnitude more of them than rich people.

A few cheap gadgets are dwarfed by a flight to Bali, new SUV or large house.

Aircraft emissions are 3% of the global total, for the US it is much higher (~9%)[1] and for the richest 10% it is higher again.

You can't get away from the fact that emissions are going to be reasonably well correlated with spending [2] and the poor don't spend very much.

>Everyone needs to contribute.

If we get a real handle on our carbon emissions then the lives of the poor will improve.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/transportation-sector-emiss...

[2] https://climatefactchecks.org/worlds-richest-10-linked-to-tw...

I'm a little sceptical of claims like "poor people cause more pollution because they have more children than rich people do".

Having a child is on of the most carbon intensive actions any given person can make.

The numbers are what they are. Rich people have much greater obligation to reduce their emissions. They benefit most from economic activity and they cause the most emissions per capita.

If there were zero rich people tomorrow we would still have an emissions problem for the climate.

What if the child is a climate activist?

> Having a child is on of the most carbon intensive actions any given person can make.

What about continuing to live at all? That is a decision people make every moment of the day and are not being held accountable for it at all.

If there were zero people tomorrow there would be still be an ongoing problem for the climate from the changes wreaked already.

You're correct that 24h is not enough time, but wrong to suggest that the world would remain perfectly static instead of changing.

There would be dramatic reforestation, algae growth, etc.

I indelicately started a contentious topic that didn't have to exist. If I were given a fresh chance, I'd have just said that carbon emissions and the changes they are causing to the planet are a bigger problem than any single economic class or nation.

That might have caused some controversy, too, but is closer to what I meant. Your point is well taken, but maybe if I posted differently the ensuing discussion would have been less acrimonious.

I think you spoke directly to the room's elephant. The topic is contentious because it is less than zero sum. It isn't even that the pie cannot be grown larger, but some people have already eaten most of it and must continue to eat as more people decide they also want pie.

Human activity will have climatic impact. At a specific emission rate per capita, what is the number of humans that can exist? Who decides which humans continue to exist?

Besides anything else although the birth rate varies according to income the variation isn't that big. It's dwarfed by the difference in income and hence consumption.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

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