At a micro level, take the example of greenhouse emissions from the United States, which peaked in 2007.
Looking at CO2 during a selective period and deliberately limited space where they outsourced their emissions to poorer countries is not instructive. The emissions were just taking place in a way you chose not to measure. The waste was still there, but only made worse because we now get to add the emissions from shipping raw materials from Canada to China, goods made in China to the US for primary consumption then the garbage gets shipped to the phillipines for disposal as one of many similar examples.
Simply put, the relationship between birth rate and effect on environment is so loosely related…
Not loose. Complex but direct. People consume resources. Find me the example of people who don’t and I’ll concede this point.
The solutions are actual engineering and economics, not family planning and demographic policies.
Right-o. More business as usual will surely solve the problems it caused. We just need to double down on our current trajectory. Lol.
Something, something… problems solved… something something… level of consciousness that created it, or something.
Complex but direct. People consume resources. Find me the example of people who don’t and I’ll concede this point.
You don’t need to dip into the negatives to show that one group of 1000 people consumes less resources than a group of 10 person. If personal resource consumption varies by several orders or magnitude between individuals, where one private jet trip over the course of a day can represent more than the annual consumption of someone else, then it is very easy to show that the correlation between population size and aggregate net resource consumption is weak.
The emissions were just taking place in a way you chose not to measure.
No, running the same analysis by place of consumption doesn’t significantly change things, because the biggest drivers of greenhouse emissions are still local consumption: transportation (especially air travel), heating, and things like concrete manufacturing (where the concrete tends to cure on site).
My point is simple: anyone who believes that climate change is solved by depopulation is dead wrong. We should still be working to reduce emissions in places that have stagnant or dropping populations, because everything we’ve seen in the last 50 years (which you describe as a selective period, but I select that period because it’s been the worst in world history for carbon emissions and climate change) is that countries significantly increase their resource consumption right around the same time they slow down their population growth.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding my point as an argument for the status quo, that what we as humanity are doing enough. No, I’m arguing that actually making the right changes are going to be orthogonal to population growth. Decarbonization is important, and needs to be done, even if you Thanos snap half the world’s population, because there’s nothing stopping the remaining humans from being even more resource hungry.
It’s like you are deliberately misunderstanding. Degrowth is the voluntary, ethical managed reduction in consumption and people. Saying “Thanos snap”, tells me you don’t know what you or I am talking about.
There are a million important conversations to have about consumption and its distribution, they are just of a secondary order to solving the problem. Yes billionaires on private jets should not exist. But ~8.2 billion let’s say for simplicity’s sake, lower middle class (I’m assuming here your goal is not to maximize people at the expense of abject poverty and primitivity) are not going to fit in their environments in any environmentally sustainable fashion. It absolutely must be both population and consumption. You don’t realize how far over the line we’ve gone.
The extact numbers depend on the details, but 1 billion mostly vegetarian humans living mostly in efficient urban centres defined by electrified economies, public transit, passivehouse can keep a modicum of techno-industrial civilization like modern medicine and probably not cross any planetary boundaries and can rewild much of the planet so the biodiversity loss gets plugged.
8.27 Billion poor humans you suggest, will collapse on their agricultural needs alone. The exhausted groundwater, soil depletion, chemical loading and transportation let alone the floods, droughts, and other extreme weather exacerbated by climate change will exceed earth’s carrying capacity in many respects, let alone all the other consumption for human life that goes with those numbers.
Edit:
My point is simple: anyone who believes that climate change is solved by depopulation is dead wrong.
Fine. But that is not what I was ever talking about. Climate Change is one small facet of sustainability. Degrowth is about dealing with all the planetary boundaries we’ve crossed. Sustainability is all factors combined. Land use, soils, pollution, biodiversity, all of it.
Edit 2: Here is a thought experiment to illustrate. How many people do you think we can clothe sustainably? All our polyester, nylon, rayon clothing is shedding microplastics into the environment. You are full of them now. Fibres are shed each time your clothes go in the wash. So the sustainable solution is to use decomposable materials only. Mostly cotton, linen, hemp and wool. How many people do you think you can clothe with global production of just those materials, without synthetics? How much cotton can we reliable grow every year, accounting for floods and droughts etc…
In a sustainable world, are you still wearing your synthetic Nike Air Force 1’s, or are you wearing leather shoes with leather soles? How many cows and sheep are you growing for those shoes? On what land, with what feed. Where do you put the cows emissions?
Tackling sustainability is an enormous job. Solutions are often difficult and limited and imperfect. But every single solution gets magnified and multiplied by having fewer people.
Collapsing birth rates, as required by degrowth are a big part of that solution.
Looking at CO2 during a selective period and deliberately limited space where they outsourced their emissions to poorer countries is not instructive. The emissions were just taking place in a way you chose not to measure. The waste was still there, but only made worse because we now get to add the emissions from shipping raw materials from Canada to China, goods made in China to the US for primary consumption then the garbage gets shipped to the phillipines for disposal as one of many similar examples.
Not loose. Complex but direct. People consume resources. Find me the example of people who don’t and I’ll concede this point.
Right-o. More business as usual will surely solve the problems it caused. We just need to double down on our current trajectory. Lol.
Something, something… problems solved… something something… level of consciousness that created it, or something.
You don’t need to dip into the negatives to show that one group of 1000 people consumes less resources than a group of 10 person. If personal resource consumption varies by several orders or magnitude between individuals, where one private jet trip over the course of a day can represent more than the annual consumption of someone else, then it is very easy to show that the correlation between population size and aggregate net resource consumption is weak.
No, running the same analysis by place of consumption doesn’t significantly change things, because the biggest drivers of greenhouse emissions are still local consumption: transportation (especially air travel), heating, and things like concrete manufacturing (where the concrete tends to cure on site).
Ocean-based shipping is so energy efficient on a joules per kg (or per cubic meter) per kilometer traveled that shipping a container 10,000 km from Shanghai to Los Angeles uses significantly less energy and emits lower carbon emissions than a 1,000 km route over land.
My point is simple: anyone who believes that climate change is solved by depopulation is dead wrong. We should still be working to reduce emissions in places that have stagnant or dropping populations, because everything we’ve seen in the last 50 years (which you describe as a selective period, but I select that period because it’s been the worst in world history for carbon emissions and climate change) is that countries significantly increase their resource consumption right around the same time they slow down their population growth.
You’re fundamentally misunderstanding my point as an argument for the status quo, that what we as humanity are doing enough. No, I’m arguing that actually making the right changes are going to be orthogonal to population growth. Decarbonization is important, and needs to be done, even if you Thanos snap half the world’s population, because there’s nothing stopping the remaining humans from being even more resource hungry.
It’s like you are deliberately misunderstanding. Degrowth is the voluntary, ethical managed reduction in consumption and people. Saying “Thanos snap”, tells me you don’t know what you or I am talking about.
There are a million important conversations to have about consumption and its distribution, they are just of a secondary order to solving the problem. Yes billionaires on private jets should not exist. But ~8.2 billion let’s say for simplicity’s sake, lower middle class (I’m assuming here your goal is not to maximize people at the expense of abject poverty and primitivity) are not going to fit in their environments in any environmentally sustainable fashion. It absolutely must be both population and consumption. You don’t realize how far over the line we’ve gone.
The extact numbers depend on the details, but 1 billion mostly vegetarian humans living mostly in efficient urban centres defined by electrified economies, public transit, passivehouse can keep a modicum of techno-industrial civilization like modern medicine and probably not cross any planetary boundaries and can rewild much of the planet so the biodiversity loss gets plugged.
8.27 Billion poor humans you suggest, will collapse on their agricultural needs alone. The exhausted groundwater, soil depletion, chemical loading and transportation let alone the floods, droughts, and other extreme weather exacerbated by climate change will exceed earth’s carrying capacity in many respects, let alone all the other consumption for human life that goes with those numbers.
Edit:
Fine. But that is not what I was ever talking about. Climate Change is one small facet of sustainability. Degrowth is about dealing with all the planetary boundaries we’ve crossed. Sustainability is all factors combined. Land use, soils, pollution, biodiversity, all of it.
Edit 2: Here is a thought experiment to illustrate. How many people do you think we can clothe sustainably? All our polyester, nylon, rayon clothing is shedding microplastics into the environment. You are full of them now. Fibres are shed each time your clothes go in the wash. So the sustainable solution is to use decomposable materials only. Mostly cotton, linen, hemp and wool. How many people do you think you can clothe with global production of just those materials, without synthetics? How much cotton can we reliable grow every year, accounting for floods and droughts etc…
In a sustainable world, are you still wearing your synthetic Nike Air Force 1’s, or are you wearing leather shoes with leather soles? How many cows and sheep are you growing for those shoes? On what land, with what feed. Where do you put the cows emissions?
Tackling sustainability is an enormous job. Solutions are often difficult and limited and imperfect. But every single solution gets magnified and multiplied by having fewer people.
Collapsing birth rates, as required by degrowth are a big part of that solution.