Polychlorinated Biphenyls, Agent Orange, 2,3,7,8-TCDD, aspartame, patented GM crops and now glyphosate the list goes on. Monsanto (now Bayer) is really living up to the name of "evil corporation".
This is a category that includes pickles and cell phones. The standards for this category is if some study exists somewhere suggested that, in some quantity, an item might be carcinogenic, possibly only with certain animals. The studies do not require follow-ups or repeatability. It's the lowest standard that the IARC uses.
But you just threw that in with Agent Orange. I declare this a canonical example of someone with an axe to grind.
The word "suspected" does not appear on the report you linked. Rather it says it is a "possible" carcinogenic. Moreover
> The committee therefore reaffirmed that it is safe for a person to consume within this limit per day. For example, with a can of diet soft drink containing 200 or 300 mg of aspartame, an adult weighing 70kg would need to consume more than 9–14 cans per day to exceed the acceptable daily intake, assuming no other intake from other food sources.
While I do think that is an unreasonable amount for a normal person to consume, I've also met a person who would easily hit that number. Most of us should be safe though.
aspartame is one of the most studied substances in human history. It's fine, it's safe. It's not healthy per se unless it helps you kick the sugar habit, but it's a neutral substance.
Read about Bayer's predecessors legacy during II WW of "medical" experimentation on humans in concentration camps, enslavement, tortures, supplying gas to mass killings and more.
Did jury add anything to the large body of evidence that roundup is basically safe, with only flimsy studies showing effect more flimsy than your average psychology paper, despite being one of the most scrutinized chemicals in existence, and despite being used on massive scale?
Agreed on by multiple large scientific bodies, including the EPA.
Nah, they just reacted to a sob story. No different than NIMBYs playing up the "grandma vs evil developers", politicians pulling a "just think of the children", etc. Utterly disgusting.
Also probably depends whether you brag about it or not. If you wilfully undermine plausible deniability the network’s custodian may not be able to ignore you even if they don’t care because of the precedent it creates. If you start hewing close to civil disobedience you also bring more attention to yourself you would not otherwise warrant.
It's not possible to abstract any sizable amount of energy this way, unless the line is kilometers long. It's the scale of the "theft" that matters, which is so trivial compared to the inherent losses in the transmission line.
Yes, when done in good faith. This is customary like trying tastes of beer from a bartender when selecting the beer one wants a pint of. Draining electricity with an antenna is neither customary nor done in good faith…
Your analogy would be better if it were asking if it’s okay to walk through the store daily and take a couple grapes to add to my fruit basket at home.
The more interesting legal analogy is probably water rights. If the state decides to protect the power line, it will be illegal to draw power without permission, regardless of the physical circumstances.
You're very confused. And posting incorrect statements all over this thread. If you're excited about questions of legality, maybe you'd be interested in attending law school to learn more about the topic?
Enforcement and legality are separate things. Many people break the law under the assumption they will not be prosecuted. They're still breaking the law.
That's OK. But it's worth knowing because eventually enough of those small choices add up to something that does trigger the laws attention.
There's another reason this behavior might elicit enforcement: in many cases, failure to enforce property rights can become grounds for losing rights or being unable to enforce them in other contexts. So a large company may have an incentive to go after someone like this just to make sure that other people don't start doing more ambitious versions of this.
Your stance here is ridiculous. Common sense says it's wrong to arrest and/or prosecute people over such a trivial matter.
So much for all your supposed "justifications" for doing so. Have you completely lost all sense of proportionality here? Or has the legal system gone completely bonkers, then? Or are you trying to gaslight me?
We're talking about 0.1 watts of electricity being "stolen" at most.
The line losses are so huge anyway, this would barely even register. Heck a few large trees close to the power line would drain more energy than this. Considering such a trivial act as "theft" is completely ridiculous.
People on that forum are trying to call this "stealing", which is ridiculous. This involves less that 1 watt of power. The law should not concern itself with trifles. It's more of a health and safety issue than any "theft".
They don't seem to get the nuance of the situation and can only see it in terms of black and white and following "the rules". I've personally seen this behavior a lot in the amateur radio community, where people were harassed or threatened for breaking some minor rule.
You should see what hooligans in Belarus and Russia get up to, now that is a legitimate problem:
I would think that using a transformer so that one need not physically connect a wire wouldn’t necessarily change that (it would if the law in question mentions that connection a conductor is needed)
This is a sort of transformer (a very bad one, but still one), so I think many jurisdictions still would call it stealing. Whether they would think it worthy of prosecution is a different question.
I think the point they're making is that whilst it is technically stealing, it is such a small amount.
Stealing a grape from the supermarket vs robbing a supermarket of all its fruit and veg. There's bigger fish to fry and the world doesn't have enough time and resources to go after or worry about such things.
If in your jurisdiction there is a law against this then it is useful to be aware of it. This is not passing judgement, this is being informed. Then, you make your own informed decision and can argue your case if you get caught.
I suppose that one angle is not that one person is extracting a very small amount, it is that if you allow it then everyone can do the same.
Then they can start cracking down on the problem if it becomes widespread. But not when it isn't.
When the punishment far exceeds the loss caused by the "crime" then it is absolutely unfair, it undermines the rule of law itself.
Just being arrested over it could be considered punishment itself. Especially if it's a young person who gets into trouble, it is traumatic for them. It is also sending the message that the system itself is unjust, and he/she might not think twice before committing a real crime, e.g. real theft or fraud when he/she grows up.
> When the punishment far exceeds the loss caused by the "crime" then it is absolutely unfair, it undermines the rule of law itself.
What about punishment as a deterrent? People can commit a crime many times and only get caught once. Should they be punished only up to the cost of the one crime they were caught doing?
It’s not one crime, it’s all of them. The cost of enforcing one instance is more than the cost of all infractions, by all people. Enforcing such laws would turn the law into a farce.
You also have to include the cost of all crimes which would (statistically) happen if the first crime was not enforced.
Take, for instance, knives. In some jurisdictions and places, IIUC, knives above a certain size are illegal to possess in a public place (unless properly packaged and in the process of being transported). The cost of someone simply possessing a knife is obviously zero, but enforcement is expensive. So why is it (putatively) enforced? Because people possessing knives can commit other crimes, such as attacks and robberies. That is, one crime is enforced not because breaking that law is itself a cost, but because it might lead to other crimes, which are costly.
Copying files is absolutely not stealing since it doesn’t remove something from the owner. Stealing is conventional bad not because the thief acquires something, but because the original owner is deprived of something. I’d be pissed if someone stole cash from me even if they burn it. It’s not that they now have my property, it’s that I * no longer have* my property that’s the issue.
In the case of piracy, the original owner still has their property. So I’m sorry but “theft” is simply the wrong word. The original owner is not deprived of their data.
In the case of the fence however, the original owner is indeed deprived of some modicum of energy. The energy is indeed *taken*, or removed from the original owner. Thus I do consider this “theft”. It’s also true that it’s a trivial amount.
Well, there is this cool physics/art installation of 1301 fluorescent tubes being lit by high-voltage lines [0].
There is the story I heard about early in the history of long-distance high-tension lines someone building an inductive coil to harvest electricity, and getting convicted of theft, which seem legit, since it is coupling with the lines and pulling more power than the grasses & ground would pull. There are also various references available online to cases, but the readily available ones don't seem to link to any court case (e.g., [1]).
I saw some back-of-the-envelope calculations about it being on the scale of 25 millivolts/mile, so you'd need quite a coil to get anything more useful than powering a bulb. Anyone with better calculations or actual measurements?
For anyone wondering, it redirects to ```https://ak.oneegrou.net/4/6521518```, which seems to be flagged as adware. Tested and the page got blocked on Firefox for Android
If you attach a load to an electrical line, then you are transferring power from the line for your use. This power is then no longer available for paying customers to use.
The load in question here is an inductive load, coupled through the air to the transmission line through well known physical principles.
If caught, you could be charged with theft for sure.
This is regardless of what people are doing or not doing in Belarus or Russia.
Yes, caught for "stealing" 63 milliwatts of electricity, from charging the 88uF capacitor in that video from 426V to 489V over a period of 40 seconds.
If that was running all year round it would consume 0.6kWh of electricity, which is probably capacitive losses to the surroundings and would be lost anyway.
If it ever got to court, it would be thrown out instantly.
This is the same mentality behind thousands of bullshit complaints to the FCC by radio amateurs because someone broke a petty rule somewhere, and it's why I want nothing to do with the amateur radio hobby at all. The vast majority of them the FCC ignores.
Inductively. You're not actually splicing into the line, or damaging the equipment to retrieve the power. It would be the same as putting a rain barrel to capture water runoff from a public road.
Your house is attached to the grid via transformers, and gets all its power via an inductive coupling. Trying reason that it's inductive, and therefore a form of power transfer that is not stealing does not follow.
Yes, somebody owns the water rights which are separable from and often senior to land ownership. The details of how that works varies quite a bit from state to state and jurisdiction to jurisdiction and may be spelled out in your property deed.
Not financial, but it's essentially considered to be stealing water from the river basin, which is allocated by an old agreement [1]. I don't know the details, but I've heard that this has been relaxed quite a bit in recent years, with collection limits replacing outright bans in several jurisdictions.
Eh it's both. Rain water collects through the watershed and somebody owns the rights to that water.
So you can get into some really funky situations where you are "technically" stealing that water if you improve rainwater->groundwater retention on your property and as a result either have to dismantle the retention mechanisms or have to pay out damages.
Interesting. Do these rights also come with responsibilities ?
If the rights owner fails to collect their water in a timely manner( like heavy rains or blockages leading to water logging or flooding), should they be held responsible in any way ?
Water rights must be used in accordance with the terms dictated by the State when they were assigned. It's literally "use it or lose it".
I finished building three ponds on my farm in 2022. The permits dictated the times of year that I could store water (vs letting the flow pass unimpeded), what I can do with the stored water, and the size and function of bypass channels. If they decide it's necessary, they can tell me to install flow meters and depth gauges.
In times of drought, they unilaterally can order me to leave my ponds empty and let all water pass through, because older water right holders get precedence. They can hold me accountable if I do not follow their terms, up to and including revoking my permits.
Honestly, I'm not really sure it was worth the effort and cost, because the whole point was to improve water security on my property... but I have no meaningful control. It's completely bonkers, because my ponds have unquestionably improved the watershed's ability to store water. If anything, they should be paying farmers to build more small ponds like mine.
In other words, these government regulations pose a significant impediment to solving the growing water crisis. No sane person would go near the process, which I now understand is why most of the ponds in this area were built without permits.
This isnt a one way argument. If this is stealing so is pollution reducing throughput sabotage. Prosecuting one but not the other is a value judgement which gets us to the nature of laws. They are not an end in itself and often times so stupid they get changed when unintended implications become clear.
>At least here in germany, it is unclear whether "stealing" via induction is really stealing, the corresponding law explicitly states that a conductor is necessary. There have been lots of urban myths about it being forbidden, but the fact is that near lots of high power mid wave radio stations you automatically "steal" lots of power, e.g. just by having a neon tube installed in the "correct" direction.
That’s not really true, you’re not harvesting “loss”. When you use that electromagnetic field to induce a current, you’re creating another electromagnetic field that opposes the first one, and which resists the current in the high voltage line.
I’m not saying this is stealing, but it’s certainly not “harvesting loss”.
Well the ground is creating that exact opposing electric field anyway. If trees were planted to the same height as the wire, then the loss to the electric company is the same.
He's just in effect increasing the height of the ground slightly and tapping the potential difference. You might as well park a car underneath it, attach a wire between the body and ground, and get same or better results, because the surface area is larger (capacitively coupled).
My point wasn't "there's no free energy", of course the energy has to come from somewhere. But transmission lines have parasitic loss anyway. My point is that rather than that energy being lost to the environment generally it can be directed to a specific circuit and used. Obviously though this is a much much lower amount of energy than can be "actively" harvested.
A woman has admitted handling stolen goods after being accused of taking potato waffles, pies, and 100 packets of ham from a bin outside of a Tesco Express in Essex. But if something is thrown away, when is it illegal to take it?
Getting all your cardboard recycled may often seem like a pain, but there is big money to be made from all this so-called "beige gold". And sadly this is attracting criminals around the world.
Thieves are making a fortune from stealing used cardboard that's been left out to be recycled, and selling it on. This means that legitimate recycling firms, and the city and other local authorities who take a cut from their sales, are missing out on tens of millions.
"Taking a single grape at the supermarket is illegal but no one would arrest you for it."
Petty crime can have serious consequences regardless. In Germany we had a famous case, where a supermarket cashier redeemed a deposit receipt worth 1.30 EUR a customer had forgotten.
She was let go without notice for that and only got her job back after fighting through three instances. Only the highest court found the termination disproportionate and only because she had been working this job for 31 years.There was never a debate if this was stealing or not, just if the termination proportionate .
And those are just the ones that are so obvious the POTUS needed to make a statement.
Corporations steal trillions through dark patterns, intentiona obfuscation, mailicious marketing, price fixing, collusion, fraud etc.
Every piece of personal data shared between every online entity I have no relation to, or awareness of - is stealing from me.
stealing, in this case is a broad, vulgar term.
If you don't like stealing - then you wont get any place in successful business it would seem, based on the observable, documented, litigated and governmental precedents throughout history.
It depends on who's doing the theft. If it's a high status organization or individual they get away with it, including those behind the 2008 financial crisis. If it's a low status individual, they get put behind bars. It's a dominance hierarchy and those at the top hold all the cards.
Where does the notion of "depends" "whom" - lies...
(etymology on lies, lay ... it all boils down to, druidic functions of WERD. - And may Holy Wood be of interest - as its Druidic knowledge is scrubbed yet ensconsconced into the fabric of digital reality...)
[There is a significant impact on tech with Druidism that is not known]
The HV lines run over someone's property, which implies there is some sort of contract in place, that presumably spells out what the property owner is allowed or not allowed to do. I'm not sure if this would be any kind of criminal issue instead of a private dispute.
The correct answer is that this is a contract dispute, not a state or federal dispute.
The electrical company leases a right of way for the lines across private property. There's a contract in place for that lease.
Does that contract have anything to the effect of "property owner will guarantee a stable, non-interfering electromagnetic environment in this right of way"?
Lol, the name of that channel ("Elektryka Prąd Nie Tyka") is a Polish saying, "electricity doesn't touch the electrician". I guess these hooligans weren't electricians!
Peter Gibbons: Ah no, you don't understand. It's very complicated. It's, uh, it's aggregate, so I'm talking about fractions of a penny here. And over time they add up to a lot.
I think what drives some of the comments that it is illegal is a little bit of righteous indignation. "How dare you get free electricity, that's illegal because I'm not getting free electricity." It's kind of fake moral outrage
Also power trips (especially by radio hams) and territoriality (impinging on "their" spectrum). It really is animal behavior there, people are supposed to react better than that when such trivial "offenses" happen.
If there's deliberate high powered jamming going on, it's a completely different matter.
I can understand that, I'm a ham, if someone was doing something that was interfering with my station then I would be unhappy… Especially if it was deliberate. If it's not intentional, then, I really don't have much room to complain. I should better insulate.
Depends a lot on your relationship with religion. For some religious people, yes.
In fact religious belief in apocalypse might contribute to the apathy about climate policy from the voters, people can either conflate the two or think the religious apocalypse is nearer so no need to address the climate catastrophe: https://www.newsweek.com/shocking-number-americans-believe-l...
- banning plastic bags and straws
- buying expensive electrical vehicles
- ignoring other risks in our circle of influence
- listening to public figures and scientists who gave us “point of no return” dates several times in the last 30 years
It looks like pasta shapes are patentable [1], but I wasn't able to find a patent for this specific pasta shape on Google Patents.
On the podcast, they talk more about the process of creating the cutting die and how much that costs, etc. Also, they had some trouble finding a pasta mill to make the exact shape they wanted. So, even if it's not patented, it might not be profitable to just copy it. After all, most other shapes are cheaper and no "real" pasta company is going to get into a PR fiasco just to sell a different shape out of the 100s they already have.
It would be nice if we had an open-source eSIM software emulator. However I think this requires secret crypto keys that are only available to chip manufacturers?
The CO2-induced temperature rise might not be as severe as predicted. I suspect a "moral panic" over climate change. There's huge amounts of money, influence and power to be made exaggerating the problem into a catastrophe, there's a bandwagon effect.
I personally think desertification will increase, there will be problems with weather cycles in certain regions. But no end of the world, at least in my opinion.
Encourage other people (especially if you're in a developing country) not to have too many children. The absolutely unsustainable population levels worldwide are behind the climate and pollution crises. We are an incredibly destructive species to the planet. All countries, developing and developed are part of the problem.
Not only that the overcrowding and fighting over limited resources causes psychosocial stress, which might explain the mental illness epidemic nowadays?
I genuinely do not see the point you’re trying to make. Is it that pollution == lower birth rate? I’d imagine there are many factors besides pollution that may influence why certain regions have more birth rates than others.
The places with high birth rates are economically undeveloped, so the people there consume very few resources, produce very little pollution and have negligible impact on the environment. One person in the US produces the same amount of CO2 as 150 people in DR Congo. That disparity is broadly similar for metrics like land use, water use, soil depletion, waste production etc.
The number of people being born in very poor countries is essentially irrelevant compared to the consumption choices of people in rich countries. Based on current trends, the global population is expected to peak at around 10 billion, but the planet is comfortably capable of sustaining billions more if we can find a middle ground in resource use between the dire poverty of DR Congo and the wanton profligacy of the US. Talking about birth rates in relation to climate change is at best a misguided distraction and at worst wilful misdirection.
We don't expect or desire (or IMHO even consider it acceptable) for these places to stay poor - the less developed countries on average have had steady improvements, a major reduction in poverty and the associated increase in consumption. The growth in emissions of China are not caused by some population growth but by the increase in prosperity of Chinese people, and we'd also expect places like DR Congo to steadily grow their consumption-per-capita.
The US currently has what was once the Earth's entire population. Much of the population can be explained by a steady flow of relatively poor immigrants.
The people in the high population growth rate regions aren't going to stay there, and their emissions will look similar to the nations they move to.
Medical condition gave me a built-in vasectomy, and my wife and I tried IVF (getting the sperm out without a vas deferens wasn't a fun surgery, FWIW) but it wasn't successful.
Yes, for me it's because of childrens' rights, I don't want my kids to potentially go through what I went through, including the soul crushing compulsory education system.
I feel that natural learning is so much superior, if you can encourage and cultivate it. Coercion destroys the fun in learning and it teaches us how to procrastinate very well indeed. Treat people like slaves, and what do you expect? You get poor productivity as a result, too.
Overall I think the treatment of children and young people in society is terrible and unjustified. It is inhumane.
I think they are being (sort of) micromanaged and exhibit the same behaviors as adults do when micromanaged, this is especially applicable for older teens.
This sounds to me like you're extrapolating your own experience and generalizing it to the whole population, when in truth you are likely to be an outlier: most kids do fine in school (and always have), and most home schooled people find it harder to contribute meaningfully to society (due to less exposure to socialization opportunities and poorer education).
Yes, and my kids are likely to be like me, outliers, that will end up suffering the same way.
And I heard the reason why teens act out so much can be due to the incredibly stifling environment they are in for their age. I think the rise of over-controlling helicopter parenting is making that even worse?
Throughout history the treatment of children in society has been absolutely appalling. And even in today's times emotional abuse of children is very common. During the COVID lockdown nearly half of children were victims of it.
Birth rates decline pretty proportionally to economic development, arriving at well below replacement levels in highly developed countries. In light of this, it seems misguided to expend energy personally convincing people to have less children, when we could just focus on bringing more people up to the western standard of living that, apparently, organically makes having many kids mostly unappealing.
Less charitably, this is the kind of advice that mostly seems like an excuse to preach at people.
> Less charitably, this is the kind of advice that mostly seems like an excuse to preach at people.
No, I just picked it as a random example of something that you can do to reduce population growth. Widespread access to birth control in developing countries would be a better solution. Supposedly educating girls in developing countries also helps reduce population growth as well. And there are probably countless other things you can do.
They also have traditions in many developing countries to have very large families.
There are 100 things I could put on a list of potential causes for the mental illness epidemic. “Overcrowding and fighting over limited resources” would not be on that list.
> Tell other people (especially if you're in a developing country) not to have too many children
That’s my bullshit detector. All of the friends heavily engaged in global fight, to the point of leading a 500-people EU startup on ecology… have finally changed their minds and have children.
My bullshit detector is, so is ecology more important for you than immigration? Because for me, if you use immigration in parallel to ecology, then you’re just nullifying the results, while asking me to take less space, which is just the usual leftist ideology.
Turns out, after interviewing dozens, that none of the ecologists, really care about ecology. None of them are sincere. None of them are honest when presented figures. None of them are upfront about their desires and projects.
It’s just that they want less of people like me. Has always been.
None of the scientific evidence I have studied has withheld the “what if we didn’t do it the leftist way” test.
This won't work. You have no instrument on actually limiting child birth and no one ever will have it. While some nations might listen to that advice, others simply won't. Then what?
We already have a method for reducing birth rates that has worked 100% of the time - end extreme poverty, send girls to school and provide basic healthcare.
It's taboo to say this, but people worldwide have had far too many children, and I believe that overpopulation is the root of the sustainability crisis, including climate change and pollution.
And that taboo is probably rooted in evolutionary psychology, people have a genetically driven tendency to criticize those who advocate having less children? So could there be an instinctual drive behind it?
> I believe that overpopulation is the root of the sustainability crisis
This has been studied long time ago by scientists such as Alfred Sauvy [1], who concluded that overpopulation is not the cause of sustainability crisis, and that greenhouse gas is the major cause. In particular, limiting the growth of population has few impact on the production of greenhouse gas, whereas changing the means of energy production and consumption is much more impactful.
Moreover the world population is expected to be less than 12 billions in 2100 [2], which is plainly sustainable. This is mostly due to the demographic transition, a pattern observed in most countries, where the fertility rates decrease over time. More specifically I recommend the excellent book of Emmanuel Todd and Youssef Courbage on this subject [3]. The authors argue that in most countries throughout history, when both the majority of men and the majority of women know how to read and write, then the fertility rate decreases, and a revolution becomes imminent.
Sustainable means different things to different people.
In a simulator, could you have 12 billion people with their needs met, living fulfilled lives and continuing into the far future? Yes.
Is there a political and practical way to reach that state? No. "One study estimates it would take just over 5 Earths to support the human population if everyone’s consumption patterns were similar to the average American." Any US government that tried to bring America's environmental footprint down to a sustainable or fair level would be voted out. It doesn't matter whether it would be gas taxes, meat taxes, per mile taxes, flight taxes, carbon tax and dividend, building renewable energy in less developed countries, or any other scheme. It doesn't matter if it was targeted at the ultra rich or the middle class. The sheer scale of it would cause Americans to vote out the government. And the same is true for any democracy and plenty of the non-democracies too.
People have children for lots of reasons. I'm probably not qualified to list them all, but I expect that people will not stop any time soon. Seems that they enjoy the process.
Perhaps consider that those 80 billion souls will contain Einsteins and Mozarts.
I doubt there's any single ideal population size, because the impact of each individual varies so widely. In the future, when we're all living 100% solar powered regenerative net-carbon-negative lives, the problem will be that there aren't enough people to offset warming caused by volcanic eruptions, meteor impacts, and overpopulated wildlife.
Always handy, the point (lean back, look up) is we don't need 80 billion as a prerequisite to have more - that's a weak (to be generous) argument.
> I doubt there's any single ideal population size, ..
It's bounded by an upper limit of humans living like turkeys in a turkey farm and tossing the weak in the chipper to blend back in with the feed . . . is that your ideal mode of life?
The Earth is nice example of a complex system with many interconnect parts maintaining a relatively stable for millenia feedback regulated environment.
What is the argument for pushing human population to 80 billion, and at what cost does that come in terms of human living standards and the other non human life we share the planet with?
> we don't need 80 billion as a prerequisite to have more
Your claim, unproven. My point is that 80 billions souls will produce 80 billions souls worth of art, science, literature, and culture. Which sounds divine. Why would you be opposed to such a thing if it can be accomplished sustainably?
> It's bounded by an upper limit of humans living like turkeys in a turkey farm and tossing the weak in the chipper to blend back in with the feed
Seems that you have a dark turn of mind, which explains the pessimism.
> What is the argument for pushing human population to 80 billion, and at what cost does that come in terms of human living standards and the other non human life we share the planet with?
Humans have lived regeneratively and sustainably in the past. We seem to be in the process of figuring out how to do it in a less labor intensive manner presently. I do my part to live sustainably, and I believe in humanity's ability to innovate and adapt and to address complex problems. Seems like you feel differently.
> My point is that 80 billions souls will produce 80 billions souls worth of art, science, literature, and culture. Which sounds divine.
This sounds like magical thinking. Even making the huge leap to say that cultural output would somehow scale commensurate with population infinitely, what does that actually look like in a reality with finite time and attention? I think we've already passed the point where anyone can keep up with all the cultural output (music, literature, graphical media) that is released each day. This idea of a cultural smorgasbord where we all get to sit back and enjoy a buffet of art is a dream that can only exist in the most idealistic of vaccuums.
Nothing magical about observation. Seems to have scaled so far. Not sure what magic you think might interrupt individuals' desire to produce more art and science.
> I think we've already passed the point where anyone can keep up with all the cultural output (music, literature, graphical media) that is released each day.
Good thing that's not necessary for one to benefit from it. I, for one, am happy to benefit from all the medical innovation I can't keep up with.
I'm not sure why they think Americans are a good standard of living. If we want people to be 30+ percent obese, unhappy with dating and the stuff we ordered to have shipped yesterday.
There's programs to give efficient LEDs from comed to people for changing it slowly.
People can get a good standard
of
living
by
exercising more but habit forming is hard and people
can be very short
termist and sheep like. Sheep like can be a positive thing too though (in a more health obsessed city you might encourage others).
Plainly sustainable without fossil fuels? From what I can gather, the majority of farming, construction and transportation (including of farmed goods) relies heavily on fossil fuels.
It's not sustainable because the more people they are, the worse their living conditions will be. Look at how densely populated Asia is. Does everyone want to live like this? Overcrowding is also not good for our mental health.
I think there's 2 topics that need to be held apart here:
1) Limiting number of children in rich countries. This is what your links talk about I think. Yes, perhaps there is a taboo in place here.
Is that relevant to sustainability crisis though? Population is already declining in rich countries, quite naturally.
2) Limiting number of children in poorer countries. Well, as in the article pointed to in a sibling comment, "Richest 1% account for more carbon emissions than poorest 66%"...
So by saying that overpopulation is the root of the crisis -- 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?
The issue is the global population. Obviously, that's the metric that matters for global issues like the climate and environment.
The global population is still increasing. Furthermore, as poor countries develop this is compounded by increased consumption (both resources and energy) per capita. In that respect, "richest 1% account for more emissions than poorest 66%" should be interpreted as very worrying when the poorest are getting richer.
Ultimately we don't anyone to be poor. At current population levels this would probably mean a total collapse of the environment.
Overall, the global population is indeed the root cause of our problems.
I never understand this argument of overpopulation. How can you be OK with reducing population but at the same time worry about global warming?
To have that position you basically need to reconcile two positions that to me aren't really compatible, unless someone explains it to me.
Either it's fine for Earth to not have humans and just exist peacefully with the rest of the ecosystem until another lifeform takes over.
Or it's not fine for the Earth to have no more humans and so we need to stop climate change from making the Earth uninhabitable for us, but if to do that we want to reduce the humans, I don't get it.
To "kill" humans to save humans seems weird. I guess you can slide on the scale of "more people living worse", or "less people living better", but to choose who is not possible in my opinion, so this is not implementable.
Because if you care about the Earth primarily, then warming or not doesn't really matter, it's just a geological event like many more gnarly ones over the history of meteorite impacts and so on.
But if you care primarily about the humans, then how can the answer be to have less of them? And pick and choose who gets to reproduce?
Your belief seems to be that the value of humanity scales relative to the number of living humans. I disagree - I don't think one billion humans would be 1/10th as valuable as ten billion humans, provided we got to one billion just by deciding to have fewer kids. Killing humans is morally wrong in everything except weird edge cases, but having two children instead of three is not killing anyone.
The bulk of what I value about the future of humanity is our continued existence and collective ability to do beautiful and impressive things together, not the individual existence of some as-yet-unborn hypothetical humans in that future. I don't think humanity's output scales linearly with population and I don't think there's much moral worth to future individuals outside their general contribution to wider human civilisation.
What you are missing is that to you, "valuable" continued existence means continuing to produce pointless tech gadgets and indefinitely increasing global GDP or something.
To somebody else it means just living life.
There is no way to objectively argue superiority of one over the other except from a religious worldview.
I don't care about useless gadgets and GDP. I care about people poking around in the Mariana Trench, surveying carnivorous snails, writing and reading novels, and keeping their societies functioning and happy. Please don't damn me for opinions I don't actually hold.
Regarding the superiority of worldviews, sure, subjectivity applies and we could go down the rabbit hole of discussing that - but the comment I was replying to was not about which worldview was better! Vasco said that "Either it's fine for Earth to not have humans ... Or it's not fine ... but if to do that we want to reduce the humans, I don't get it." I'm not going to argue that my values are the best because it's already self-evident to me and I doubt I can improve on the existing work[0], but I am very willing to explain how they're logically consistent.
[0] Via utilitarianism and the repugnant conclusion and onward. I don't think I can do any better than all the philosophers who've debated this.
I mean, you might as well quote me a list of your very personal niche hobbies and the importance of keeping them up as some kind of tradition humanity needs to uphold.
I don't think such a line of argument holds very tight in the grand scheme of things.
To others, enjoying the company of their own children and grandchildren (some of the most commonly shared joys across people, in contrast to niche interests) are far higher up there on their list of priorities of things that make our existence worthwile.
Likewise, utilitarianism won't get you far since the other person must first subscribe to it as a good idea. I don't care about "the greatest good for the majority" in some kind of vague sense whatever it means, if subjectively it means no good to me.
There will be less people in the future if people reproduce at less than replacement rate. You don't have to have them killed, they will die eventually.
> The issue is the global population. Obviously, that's the metric that matters for global issues like the climate and environment.
No. "Obviously", the metric that matters is emissions. Or, the integral sum(person * emission of that person). When the emission per capita varies by a factors of 1000x, the distinction matters.
Look, what if you could choose between:
Option A: The 50% lowest polluting part of the world's population never existed. Would this make a dent towards global warming? No. Perhaps slow the onset by a few years. The overall magnitude of the problem would be the same.
Option B: Through reduced consumption and technology, reduce emissions of the 50% highest polluters by 80%. This would have a quite massive impact towards global warming AND also help when the 50% poorest increase their living standards.
Given these -- how can you say that "population" overall, without further qualification, is the problem?
Another factor here is that population growth isn't something that will continue as/if people are lifted out of poverty -- when people become richer and more educated, the birth rates invariably drops.
There are many other good comments on this page now about why you are wrong citing statistics and research reports, I encourage you to read them.
Emissions are only one of the problems, the other being use of resources.
And both are a function of the population and are people get out of poverty use of energy and resources per capita only increases, compounding the overall impact, as already said.
If we were 500 million globally, for instance, we would not be having this discussion because there would be no problems.
I am not wrong, this is just a statement of fact. I am always surprised by this ostrich syndrome many have in absolutely refusing to consider that population is an issue, the key issue, even.
> If we were 500 million globally, for instance, we would not be having this discussion because there would be no problems.
I think even 500 million is too much with current lifestyles. Given that a very large proportion of current emissions are caused by 500 million.
But this aside, let's assume you are right.
Which 500 million would you preserve? How would you get there before climate change is irreversible anyway due to melting tundra etc?
Especially given that a lot of human history can be summed up as "wars to determine WHICH one will be the surviving set of humans to survive on limited resources". So which billions do you think will go willingly?
--
Yes, of course, assuming that this magically just happened it would solve the problem. So would a number of other unrealistic solutions that has nothing to do with population control. Are we going to discuss which one out of a number of completely unrealistic uptopias are best?
I see your 500 million inhabitant world, and raise with imagining a world with a population of 20 billion, with a million nuclear plants, no use of fossil fuels, LED-powered vertical farming, centralization of populations in big cities to let wildlife grow back and focus all efforts in responsible, non-disruptive mining of the resources needed.
Which one of those is more or less preferable or realistic is pointless, and distracting from possibilities that may be within reach.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
The big problem is the way that people want US-style lifestyles with big houses and cars. This consumes way more energy than European or Asian style living in apartments with public transport.
Overpopulation will solve itself as countries develop. We’ve seen that over and over.
Well, the bulk of them want more meat, washing machines and air conditioning.
The main increase of energy usage has been due to this, not people in urban areas eskewing apartments and public transport to drive cars and live in suburban houses.
The amount of concrete needed to build such big homes contributes to carbon emissions, not to mention destruction of nature, and it also costs more to heat and cool.
Th USA and other industrialised countries operated with huge emissions because oil and gas were cheap and because no one factored in the externalities. Which includes energy security.
Now that we are seeing a reversal to the status quo, you see the move to more efficient systems moving into full swing. The uptake of renewables is exponential now.
I just renovated and fully insulated my house with cellulose fiber that was actually really cheap, double glazed inner windows and installed floor heating with a hydraulic heat pump. My energy bill is almost nothing of what it used to be and I’ve not installed my solar yet, but I’ll be starting in March.
I did this because the price of gas, kerosene (water boiler) and oil have increased dramatically and the technology to do so exists and is cheap enough to make this investment a no brainer from an economic standpoint. It’s hard to imagine how cheap solar panels are now.
I’m not the only person doing this.
The USA and all other developing countries will adopt all these efficient gains at the same rate. No one is going to pay more for less.
nobody specifically wants shitty us style suburban planning with shitty us style houses. Plus it would hard to replicate that because its an artifact of historical cultural and political developments. In short it would be harder to replicate that instead of doing better.
i don't think overpopulation is the problem, but maybe it's a symptom. the problem is we've forced our way up to an unrealistically high standard of living which is completely unsustainable, and now we're trapped in an inescapable death spiral because nobody wants to go back.
people aren't willing to stop paying for conveniences because they're cheaply available, corporations aren't willing to stop selling them because there's a demand for it and money to be made, and governments aren't willing to force anybody's hand because the people and corporations will both force them out of power if they try.
there is absolutely no chance of breaking out of it other than giving up on democracy, but that will only happen when modern society collapses entirely, which will be far too late to prevent unimaginable suffering on a massive scale.
There is a difference between striving for basic amenities like clean water, healthy food etc, and the luxury of ordering vanities off Amazon every other day..
Not everyone desires the latter, yet it appears to be the much more environmentally impactful one at least at scale..
my standard of living is very sustainable. i don't drive, i don't eat meat, i rarely eat dairy, my electricity is 100% renewably sourced, i recycle diligently, i heat my home to the absolute bare mininum temperature required to be liveable and rely on wearing extra layers for warmth, i don't spend hours using power-hungry entertainment devices, i've been wearing the same shoes and clothes for ~4-5 years and i only replace things when they completely break, or if replacing it allows me to use less energy or be less wasteful in the future. it's not hard.
some of the "innocent poor countries" you're talking about are the worst offenders for deforestation, pollution, and other habitat destruction. get off of your high horse, we are all responsible for the state of the planet we live on.
The point wasn't about you specifically, just about the average Western/1st World citizen.
> some of the "innocent poor countries" you're talking about are the worst offenders for deforestation, pollution, and other habitat destruction. get off of your high horse, we are all responsible for the state of the planet we live on.
For their own sake? Or is it, among others, Western offshore companies who partake in what you blame those darn third worlders for? It's a global economy.
Think of coffee for example. Pretty sure we consume orders of magnitude more of it in the West than the rest of the World. Yet, the coffee bean plantations aren't exactly at our doors- Instead they replace forests in Guatemala, Columbia, Indonesia, etc.
Yea, yea, people making their life better is now the reason. We must all live in poverty, because that is the natural state, where we obey the needs of nature. Nature is healing!! And for that we need to abandon demoncracy.
And the leader should be who? Of course you, because only you know the solution! Cheeky ;)
you can put your fingers in your ears and say "la la la" all you want, it doesn't change the undeniable and objective truth.
everybody knows the solution, *you* know the solution, it's just a hard pill to swallow so mental gymnastics are preferable.
as a species we know that the overconsumption of resources is the problem. there are exactly zero valid arguments against that. anybody who claims that consuming less resources *isn't* the solution is either ignorant or lying.
It's not overconsumption, it's waste and pollution that are the problems. Cleaner technologies and policies are the solution. We could have decarbonized part of the economy already with nuclear power.
Degrowth is not a viable alternative on a world that's still has a large number of people that need better standards of living, and will still be adding a couple billion to the population. There's no viable economic or political model that would make degrowth work.
it is overconsumption. for one, it would be much easier to need our needs with renewable energy sources if we just consumed less energy and weren't so wasteful with it. more to the point, energy is only one part of the problem. all the clean, free energy in the universe doesn't stop deforestation, overfishing, and other habitat loss and environmental damage from unsustainable agriculture as a result of overconsumption. solving the emissions issue doesn't count for much if all the ecosystems we rely on collapse and we starve to death anyway.
degrowth is the only thing that could work at all, the lack of compatible economic and political models that would be compatible with is exactly my point, which is why we will ultimately not solve the problem.
meh, semantics. the only correct answers to the question of "how do we prevent the suffering caused by the overconsumption of resources?" are "consume less resources." or "pull more resources out of thin air using magic". whether people are unable/unwilling to do it or not is neither here or there.
Even if it all grinds to a halt tomorrow, at this point it won’t make a difference anymore. It’s the end of an era, possibly of civilization too, at least this particular flavor of it.
it would make a huge difference. sure, we can't undo the damage that has been done, but things can and will get way, way worse as we carry on without changing anything.
The human species might have a built in self-destruct / self-limiting mechanism, which is world war, possibly nuclear war, which might end up saving the planet in the really long term?
Exactly. I'm not sure if they just stepped out from under a rock... I've been hearing the overpopulation rhetoric for decades already.
In fact, nowadays I'm beginning to hear the opposite: "please have more kids". I'm in Europe atm (I'm south-american) and I'm shocked to see that natives, by and large, just do NOT have kids, or at most 1. All cultural incentives that promoted having kids seem to have been vilified. I find it kind of sad honestly...
There's no such thing as "overpopulation" on its own. There's only population relative to resource abuse. A small fraction of the population using resources at the rate that your common local billionaire or environmentally abusive megacorp uses resources will be just as "over". A much larger population appropriately pricing externalities instead of ignoring them will not be "over".
The number of people in India is not why companies like Vedanta Limited, an alumnium, iron, and gold ore mining company pollute so much.
>There's no such thing as "overpopulation" on its own. There's only population relative to resource abuse.
This is an unfortunate delusion that is widespread, and exploited by governments and industries that seek to ravage what is left of our environment for profit.
If you believe and understand that the earth is a finite place, with finite resources (as all intelligent, rational people do), then you believe and understand that this finite place, with finite resources, can only support a finite population. Of course we can debate about what exactly the "sustainable" population is and we can agree that the "sustainable" population depends on how resources are managed, used and maintained, but there can be no disagreement that this number exists, and that if there are too many people our finite resources cannot sustainably support them no manner how efficiently they are distributed.
Unfortunately far too many people don't believe this, and don't understand that the earth is a finite place with finite resources. They insist that the earth can support an infinite number of people if only we manage our finite resources properly and impose a strict enough dietary and behavioral regiment on the teeming billions stuffed onto the planet.
Most essential resources aren't consumed but part of cycles — food, water, shelter. These cycles are sustained by energy and, if we were to use it well, the sun alone provides more than enough.
A simple example of this is that water isn't used up, it gets dirty. It can be made clean again but that requires energy. This can be done by humans (water filtration) or by nature (evaporation and rain). We don't manage these cycles very well and they sometimes stretch out over too many of our lifetimes to manage (plastics, some nuclear waste) so it becomes easier to talk about resource 'use'.
The equation is pretty simple `humans × resources/human`. We can talk about reducing number of humans or reducing the resources needed per human. If we manage the cycles well, humans could inject more resources into the system instead of taking away from it. Of course this would still be limited by available energy. In that case, increasing the number of humans within energy capacity could benefit ecosystems.
We already have a lot of available energy but there is orders of magnitude more available as our technology improves — fusion, thorium fission, solar, wind, tides.
The amount of vitamins in food is trending down. We say we're farming, but the plants are living on materials delivered from petroleum or natural gas in a media where we attempt to kill all life. There's not a cycle. We shouldn't complete that cycle because our waste streams are doomed with toxic chemicals (f.ex. PFAS).
In the US we build shelters either out of carbon-intensive materials or use significant carbon fuels for upkeep... or both, usually.
It's not that the technology isn't there, we just choose not to. Hell, some 30% of people love that reality star turned president. Sadly we're getting what we deserve.
There are great opportunities here — improving farming being a great one as you mention.
Changing our farming methods to increase humus and topsoil quality should bring back vitamins to our food. Not only this but it should also capture a great amount of CO₂. I'm not sure how reliable my memory or the original calculation are but I remember reading in "The Scientist as Rebel" that if we increase our topsoil by 2 inches on currently farmed land, that should capture most of the carbon we've emitted during industrialisation.
Of course, as you mention, if we keep mindlessly following the status quo, we'll keep getting what we deserve.
Yes, but the vast majority of the resource consumption happens for people in rich countries in the West, and those are not the countries with the large population growth.
> we can agree that the "sustainable" population depends on how resources are managed, used and maintained
Good. Now read what I wrote again.
Side note on tone: The posturing ("delusion", "intelligent", "rational") makes you look bad. And it's like a thousand times worse when you're trying to pick a fight with someone by argumentatively agreeing with what they said to attack a straw man. If nobody ever told you that before, I'm sorry that you never got the benefit of that advice, and I hope it helps now that you know.
It’s not really taboo, it is being mentioned in, like, the comments on every 2nd post on climate change.
The problem with this line of thinking (and similar ones like „what about China?“) is that it basically absolves you from any responsibility in the matter. After all, there are simply too many people on the planet, what could you possibly do about it?
As other commenters pointed out - the west uses way too many resources compared to their population, and that is a problem.
And it is absolutely possible to have a society that doesn’t drain the planet dry, but not with capitalism :-)
I'm super super low carbon footprint, personally. All ARM-based computers here, just Raspberry PIs and tablets, that can run from a portable solar panel if I want. Very few possessions too. I love coding and freedom so much more that having stuff. And even more so when doing so in the forest, amongst nature.
The carbon impact of PCs is negligible for almost all people, and possessions are only a smaller portion of emissions (with the exception of high embodied carbon things like electric cars).
Important things you can influence for a low carbon footprint are:
- How do you heat and how much? Gas heating is surprisingly bad in the US due to the high amount of methane leakage
- Do you drive a lot in a combustion car, or even worse, fly?
- What kind of food do you eat? As a rough guideline, dairy and meat is pretty bad and beef much worse. Also the stuff that has to be brought in by plane.
Living in nature often makes it harder to have a low carbon lifestyle and the things often associated with "good for nature" like reducing plastic waste and organic products are often worse carbon wise.
That's an interesting question re: genetically-driven tendency to criticize those who advocate having less children. I've had the same experience when voicing my opinion as it seems you have, and I'm still not quite sure where its rooted. From the outside, it just seems like a kind of species-selfishness, like "we can be invasive but no one else can or we'll exterminate them!" like we do with deer.
> And that taboo is probably rooted in evolutionary psychology
No. It's because it inevitably puts you in the position of deciding who gets to have children while the rest are denied such privileges for the good of the species.
When I think of reducing the population I think simply of making birth control universally free and public information campaigns about the environmental cost of more humans. Nothing more than that, and that'd honestly be a huge step in a country where large swaths support abstinence-only sex education.
And in the really long term that's completely unsustainable. So it's like a pyramid scheme scam, it requires a constant influx of new entrants. Whilst destroying the planet.
I guess people even have their pension funds tied up into the system, so nearly everyone is forced to participate in it, against their wishes even.
I think not having egalitarian destribution of resources is real problem rather then overpopulation. Becoz as we see very few have most carbon footprint.
It's just that it wouldn't work because any group defecting and having more children would inherit the earth and you'd be back to square one, only now not even in control.
It's the same mistake as every other decel "solution".
It's so obvious, and so unbelievable that proponents don't think of it that one has to wonder, who pushes this? Qui bono?
Overpopulation isn’t the source of the problem, IMHO. A wild human being in their natural environment pollutes thousands of times less than an industrialised consumer.
Each American or European, whose food is grown thousands of km away, is plenty more only to make their salad. Can they be blamed for their Carbon Footprint^TM? I think we should blame the fossil fuel corporations which have turned us into fuel junkies
Is that actually true? Nature has a very low capacity per area for "wild humans". I don't think the planet would support anywhere near 8 billion "wild" (hunter-gatherer) humans.
It's estimated that we couldn't support much more than half the world population without the Haber-Bosch process. Industrial fertilizers are just that important. With hunter gatherers you'd be talking about orders of magnitude fewer people.
Probably best to focus on decoupling from fossil fuels.
The Haber-Bosch process is the primary method in producing ammonia from nitrogen and hydrogen. Ammonia produced, utilized mainly as fertilizers, currently responsible for approximately 1.8% of carbon dioxide global emissions
Yes, green ammonia is a thing - not yet at scale but there are plans afoot, funded by resource billionaires, to make industrial ammonia w/out the greenhouse gas ommissions.
We should have never let the population levels grow havoc as the H&B process was introduced.
We reduced famines for a few centuries or less while the population in the most polluting countries exploded. Now, we risk famines and a possible slow death due to extreme drought due to the climate change created by the fossil
Fuel Industry, in the billions
The implementation of the H&BP was irresponsible and reckless.
I would argue the opposite. It has led to the greatest improvement of human life in history and prehistory. It's one of the cornerstones of our technological progress. It has staved off immense amounts of suffering. Even if it doesn't last it was worthwhile, because we at least have a chance to deal with future problems like climate change. Staying as a pre-industrial society would never have given us this chance.
It's actually true that some blame can be apportioned to fossil fuel companies that have actively pushed "more fuel consumption" since the 1970s, the Koch Group in particular funde a slew of think tanks to poo-poo and crash and burn any grass roots public transport movements in the USofA during the past 50 odd years.
It's less true that a valid comparison should be "if not modern 21st Century life then hunter gather".
There's a middle ground more agrarian, less hunter, lifestyle that supported a large population in the past and can likely support a larger population than Victorian times if farming | mining switched across to renewables (electric | hydrogen) instead of fossil fuels - we've learnt a lot about efficiencies in the past century, it's a matter of application and less consumption now, certainly time for less greenhouse gas being released.
> It's less true that a valid comparison should be "if not modern 21st Century life then hunter gather".
There are billions of shades of grey, like, for example, living like before the 2000’s, when the massive production of plastic crap in China produced pollution levels to skyrocket.
Wild humans would pollute less exactly because they are limited by their environment instead of torturing from cradle to the shop billions of chicks and piglets every year
Nah, its not true. Look at the overpopulated areas, look at how dirty the rivers are and how much trash is at the shore. Why should they care? Most of the people do not own anything. And owning something is considered evil as of late on HN. There is some socialist government in place and most likely it takes years to open a business when it is not a soup kitchen. Ah, business, thats evil now too.
It's not really taboo, it's just straight-up a racist right-wing talking point.
Treat it as a software optimisation problem - should you go after a large number of very minro problems, or take an axe to the single large problem that dominates your metrics?
I didn't single out a specific race, I think, I just mentioned that it was that specific region of the world where the problem was located. As far as I'm aware it was nothing to do with discrimination because of a specific characteristic (which is the definition of racism). It was just that population growth in that region was very large combined with a high per-capita CO2 footprint.
Many NGOs are actively trying to increase the availability of birth control in such regions, they are aware of the problem with unplanned pregnancy in those parts of the world. I strongly doubt there's any racism behind it.
While in the west population growth is relatively slow and we still have a high per-capita CO2 footprint.
I guess I unintentionally touched a taboo subject (racism) that's not permitted by the current moral orthodoxy, which is no different to religion in the end? I hope I'm correct about this.
I don't really care if my posts are flagged or even if I get banned from this site completely, I am exercising my 1st Amendment protected freedom of speech rights. It's just that on the Internet every forum is privately owned, there is no "public square" here, and thus all are subject to moderation and censorship.
> It was just that population growth in that region was very large combined with a high per-capita CO2 footprint.
I can't find the comment in question, but if the person above is right when they said it was about India then you are wrong that they have a high per-capita CO2 footprint.
They are under 2 tons CO2 per person per year.
That's about 40% of the world average, 25% of the EU, 22% of China, and 13% of the US.
From my observations the current rightwing meme is that women in rich countries haven't had sufficient numbers of children and measures to drive increased population should be put in place.
This is congruent with removing women's bodily autonomy, banning abortion and banning or restricting birth control of all types.
I have never in my life seen or heard anyone advocating for less use of birth control. This might be an N=1 scenario, but my bullshit'o-meter is tingling a bit.
The people I know on the right have nothing against birth control. They are just against abortion exept for exceptional circuimstances, because by that point the relevant parties had their chance with birth control. To them, abortion shouldn't be an escape hatch from bad life choices.
You make be hanging out with some fairly centrist right-leaning folks. Clarence Thomas explicitly painted a target on Griswold vs Connecticut when overturning Roe vs Wade, and quite a number of anti-abortion groups have been trying to parlay their victories versus abortion into restrictions on Plan B and IUDs.
Err - have you heard of a fella called "His Holiness The Pope"? Here is a recent summary of remarks made recently [1].
'On the subject of birth control, the Catechism of the Catholic Church states that “legitimate intentions on the part of the spouses do not justify recourse to morally unacceptable means (for example, direct sterilization or contraception).”
St. Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae, the landmark encyclical reaffirming Church teaching against contraception, on July 25, 1968.
In the encyclical, Paul VI warned of serious social consequences if the widespread use of contraceptives became accepted. He predicted that it would lead to infidelity, the lowering of morality, a loss of respect for women, and the belief that humans have “unlimited dominion” over the body.'
Now, mainstream Catholics are relatively moderate in terms of many modern political positions, but I hope that the fact of approximately 1bn people adopting and affirming this position establishes that my assertion isn't bullshit. Beyond Catholics I think that the "true right" (someone help me please) have many folks (often with undercuts, wild eyes and tattoo's that they regret only because if they are discovered they will disqualify them from public life) who have far stronger views. To find out about these people (I will restrain myself from more powerful descriptions of them) please investigate the "tradwife" [3] and "incel" [2] movements.
> This is congruent with removing women's bodily autonomy, banning abortion and banning or restricting birth control of all types.
There is absolutely no need to do any of that. Just tax them. Tax the childless and unmarried more. Tax the married couples with children less. Make not having children a form of wealth and tax it accordingly. The results will be achieved without a single sacrifice in personal autonomy.
> From my observations the current rightwing meme is that women in rich countries haven't had sufficient numbers of children and measures to drive increased population should be put in place.
When you get to the far right wing, it's not just about "are there sufficient numbers of children?" but "Is my favoured population subgroup having sufficient numbers of children?"
Now we're getting somewhere. The taboo is when you start accounting for christofascist families churning out children like it's a Factorio assembly line so that there are always more of "us" then there are of "them".
https://dioxindorms.com/content/chronology.html
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41271-018-0146-8
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/24/monsanto...