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Comment by koe123 | Hacker News Reader

I think your own values are coming through pretty clearly. Understandably, telling a parent they shouldnt have had kids is bound to strike a nerve. Having kids is great. Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment. Both can be true, and having kids definitely doesn't make someone bad.

However putting kids on a pedestal is silly. If we push our civilization above earths sustainable carrying capacity, we are fucked. In isolation having them is beautiful, in the aggregate it can be bad.

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> Having kids is also the worst single thing you can do for the environment.

No, just no. You can't show that. You don't understand environmentalism. You're just a Malthusian. It's an assertion that human existence is incompatible with the environment, and that's a completely unacceptable proposition, because it defines "environmentalism" as "extinction."

Reducing the population by half will, at best, reduce emissions by half. That's not going to stop climate change. That's not climate action. That's not anything at all.

I really wish people with your attitude would study ecology, would study biology, would study the world. Life, human and not, all affects the ecosystem. All life depends on other life. We all interact, we all change the world. Life has fundamentally changed the geology of Earth in absolutely drastic ways! Life is impact. Defining environmental purity as the absence is an ideology bereft of life, and the nature of life.

Is it possible that cutting emissions in half would stop climate change (after some time)? There is a tolerable level of emissions. I vaguely remember that it's half what we're at.

No, look at the numbers in the IPCC reports. Cutting emissions in half is not enough.

We need to get to zero by 2050 then have interventions to sequester CO2 at a low level.

Given you’re using big words without explaining them and decorating your argument with patronizing language like “no, just no”, perhaps I should just yield. Even if you turn out to make a convincing argument later, if you really care about convincing people I implore you to think about how condescending your style is…

But if I may explain my thinking essentially from a responsibility perspective your choice is downstream to a whole life of pollution, and of their kids etc. Depending on how many kids the average person has how polluting the average person is, that seems like a significant contribution.

Despite that you attribute to me some sort of strange degrowth philosophy where I am advocating for extinction, all I am saying is that there is a huge impact to overpopulation if we don’t change our habits. If it is sustainable to have more humans later on due to improvements in conduct, by all means I think thats great.

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