Hacker News Reader

Comment by newnewpdro | Hacker News Reader

The scale of human activity has become so large that what may seem like fairly trivial variations can be quite impactful thanks to the multiplication factor.

Until we substantially reel in the global population size the situation will continue to be rather precarious.

View on HN

> reel in the global population size

What does this mean? Forced sterilization? One-child policies? I don't ask this to be confrontational, but because it's a difficult question and I honestly want to hear opinions. Access to contraception doesn't make a difference when the culture still says you have 8 kids. This is borne out by what has happened: continued growth of the third-world population. T

By far the most effective measure is to educate and empower women.

One thing to do is to consistently shout down voices who routinely fall back into the outdated "population growth is good because we need it for my comfortable pyramid-powered pension" argument, not realizing how much it is at odds with whatever environmentalist views they might also hold. And even if they are convinced "fuck the planetists": the old trick of deriving comfort from growth will stop working at one point, and the only open question is how close we are already or maybe even beyond.

No, it means drastically reduce the population size; the implementation of this is orthogonal to the point.

Some numbers and sources would be nice.

I suspect that the availability of contraception is being over estimated.

Even in Poland I had Catholic hardliner pharmacists refuse to sell me morning after pills, and in some cases, regular birth control pills.

In any case, availability of contraceptives just gives people choices, and what people choose depends on lots of things, economic and otherwise.

Global birth rate is declining almost across the board. It’s the lowest it’s been in the US in the last 30+ years with no signs of speeding up.

Also be careful what you wish for. Some of our most important social programs (such as social security) have intense insolvency issues as birth rates continue to decline.

Financial insolvency is a non issue compared to resource and environmental insolvency.

You’re confusing quantity with its rate of change. If the population stops growing today and remains the same, all those people are still having an impact on the environment.

Or they don't? I mean, it is very possible to have an extremely reduced impact on your environment. You can even have a positive impact! Not at our current average life style, but maybe even at our current average life quality.

Population already has a negative rate of change in the west (leaving out migration).

I think this viewpoint originates from a stunning lack of imagination.

You're right, anything is possible in Imaginaryland!

You look for the overlap between Imaginaryland and Possibilityland, rather than just sulking around in Whatwentbeforeland.

It reminds me of Mark Fisher’s concept of “capitalist realism” — it’s easier to imagine the end of the world (voluntary reduction of the birth rate to zero, clathrate gun feedback loop) than the end of capitalism.

I sometimes ask people to consider a thought experiment about planning for 50 to 100 billion people, after stepping them through the idea that while the expansion rate is starting to slow, it really isn't something we should rely on. I find most people just shut down, several stating that it isn't something we should ever think about. I find it strangely poetic that many people are perfectly willing to think about billions of people dying, but not about billions of people being born.

Hilarious how the one guy who understands math is way at the bottom.

Yes, population is the core problem, and there's no avoiding that fact. There's no easy solution to it--increased education and wealth slowly reduce the birth rate, but that takes generations and is far from certain. Absolutely critical--and very easy--would be dropping immigration from countries with net-positive birth rates to zero. Good luck finding support for that among people concerned with climate change.

Western capitalism seems to be the one thing that has successfully incentivized people to have less kids, later in life. It's not always glamorous, but it's probably better than most alternatives.

That's great and all but there's over a billion people in India alone and a huge fraction of them are still living in poverty, effectively contributing very little currently to factors like co2 emissions. It won't stay that way for much longer.

Quality of life tends to increase, and correspondingly impact increases. We already have far too many people if you consider the quality of life is destined to normalize at the "western" end of the spectrum.

> Quality of life tends to increase, and correspondingly impact increases

I’m not sure I agree that this is true because it ignores all of the efficiency gains (especially in electronics but in other things as well) we’ve seen the last 50+ years. Not to mention things like renewable solar which is not readily and cheaply available.

The biggest portion of environmental damage is due to transportation, and transportation is due to single family homes causing a need for sprawl. People in India live on top of each other, and I’m sure they’d all like some space if they can afford it. They’d also like to take international vacations.

Our electronics run on next to no power but then we throw them out constantly and buy new onea because some marketing department said we should.

Not to mention things like renewable solar which is not readily and cheaply available

The energy input of solar (sourcing and extracting the rare earths, the manufacturing process, installing and maintaining them in situ) is non-zero, and solar panels have a finite lifespan. These variables are often not well understood, nor factored into discussions of solar as "renewable". I don't believe there exists an end-to-end solar operation, i.e. the entire supply chain solar powered by its own products. So solar is only cheap because its inputs are cheap, and they are cheap because they are powered by cheap oil.

Not the one thing - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-child_policy

That started almost 50 years ago. Now China wants its citizens to have more babies, but it has not been able to incentivize them.

What we really need is cap-and-trade for offspring. Everyone gets one each (so two to a couple), and if you need more, you can buy permits from someone who doesn't, at market price. That adds an economic incentive to have fewer children!

what a disgusting and disturbing idea.

Well if you liked that, perhaps you might be interested in the logical next step:

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080-h/1080-h.htm

Western capitalism doesn't need such policies. Birth rate in developed countries is below replacement-level fertility.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...

The thing that seems to decrease birth rate isn’t capitalism, it’s education of girls and women. These things often go together along a “modernist” axis but they don’t have to.

What does " substantially reel in the global population size" mean.

People that raise this point almost 100% exclusively mean that about "people that are not me"

It means we get our global numbers down to something less problematic, especially when considering basically everyone wants to live comfortably with luxuries like air conditioning, fast transportation, and next day delivery.

If you're suggesting I want other people to have fewer kids while I raise a family myself, you're mistaken - zero kids here and none in my future.

The OP did not say we need to reel it in over the course of only 1 or 2 generations.

They said that, until we do, the situation will remain precarious. I'm sure you can imagine an (admittedly extremely improbable) scenario where the global population shrinks to 4 billion over the course of 500 years without significant injustice being done to anyone to achieve the shrinkage.

Sadly, when it comes to greenhouse-gas-driven climate change, the timeline on which we will succeed or fail to address the problem is too short for any population size adjustments to be of any use (unless you want to achieve the adjustment by mass murder).

This is probably the source of any misunderstanding between you. The OP is not contemplating mass murder, but does not appreciate the urgency of the climate issue. You appreciate the urgency and so assume the OP must be advocating an "immediate" extermination.

The best way to reduce population growth is spreading wealth (where that is defined as safe and secure food, shelter, education etc).

People who don't think they need to breed to have a number of descendants survive childhood mortality to look after them in their old age don't have lots of kids.

Make having children no longer be a right and instead be subject to conditions (like only one child per woman, or a large tax, or traded permits, or requirement to put millions of dollars in escrow for the child, etc.).

Abort all children unless the condition is met, and if they are birthed in violation of that, take them away from the mother and imprison her.

[here "woman" is intended as "person with an uterus"]

you forgot your sarcasm tags.

okay, you first.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com