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Comment by maerF0x0 | Hacker News Reader

If we hold people accountable for their offspring then the poorest have orders of magnitude more heirs and thus should multiply their emissions.

The choice to have (greater than replacement) children should be seen as an "emissions" or "income" choice for this kind of reporting, else it fails to capture the systemic externalities of their actual lifestyle.

This, as i understand it, is a sort of form of The Repugnant conclusion: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ , whereby the choice to increase population is a choice to divide the resources amongst greater and greater people, resulting in a smaller share per person. I don't think the developed world, or the "1%" should be held accountable for these sorts of outcomes.

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Did you read the first line of the article?

"The richest one percent of the world’s population are responsible for more than twice as much carbon pollution as the 3.1 billion people who made up the poorest half of humanity during a critical 25-year period of unprecedented emissions growth."

Assuming this is correct the number of children poor people have is essentially irrelevant. The premise of your argument is that increasing the population divides a finite resource amongst all members. Now take into account the articles premise that carbon pollution scales exponentially with wealth.

If you now apply the offspring argument the emissions multiplier for offspring in the developed world dwarfs all else. This isn't an original argument, it was made very popular by a 2017 paper by Wynes and Nicholas:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

If you read the paper it's clear that offspring in the developed world contribute, not the 3.1 billion poorest people on the planet.

> If we hold people accountable for their offspring then the poorest have orders of magnitude more heirs and thus should multiply their emissions.

So how far back should we consider heirs? Primordial soup is ultimately responsible for all emissions?

Surely it's more interesting to look at actual emission rates than to disavow personal choices based on how many children my grandparents had.

What these numbers show is that despite being prone to having more children, the poor account for much less emissions than the rich. That in some centuries there may be so many poor people as to offset this difference is a) speculation and b) doesn't answer the question of who is responsible for emissions and what segment of the population we can address now to best mitigate the problem.

You're giving me this mental image of a fat king stuffing his face, lamenting how the starving villagers will eventually eat all the food.

The difference in population growth rate between high income countries and low income countries is about 2.5x. I'd bet on income inequality and carbon consumption changing at a higher rate than that, and frankly wouldn't think the actual takeaway of this headline would change if the top 1% had half, instead of double, the carbon contribution of a group that is 50x their size.

> is about 2.5x That's 2.5x per generation, compounding. How many generations do we need to consider?

1) The population is expected to cap off before we ever reach a population at which the bottom 50% consume as much as the top 1% at current rates. In fact,the population is expected to never reach a value where the bottom 50% then consume as the top 1% does now, at current rates. That is, we don't expect the population to ever double.

2) The longterm equilibrium state is not relevant when the concern is about pressing climate concerns for this current century.

Imagine the world is a web server. Suddenly it sees explosive growth. The server starts to buckle under the pressure. We can kick people off, or we can address the core algorithms which are wasteful of resources.

What the data shows is that a small slice of the world contributes an outsized amount of emissions. And, historically, has put the bulk of problematic, modern-times CO2 in the atmosphere.

What the data also shows is that, those poor people aside, the rich are doing a great job of warming the planet into dangerous territory, thank you very much.

So, even if one rid the planet of those pesky reproducing poors, the rich would still cook the planet and (continue to) cause a runaway Greenhouse Effect.

There’s no way to solve this problem through population reduction in any reasonable amount of time. And even if we believed there were it would be incredibly violent and unethical.

This is just a way to sidestep the reality that the world’s richest (and that probably comfortably includes the American middle class) has done the most to cause this problem, but the world’s poorest will be hit the hardest by it.

"'If they would rather die,' said Scrooge, 'they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.'"

http://www.open-bks.com/library/classics/dickens_charles_car...

The quote is about a one off donation for christmas cheer. Not the long term consequences of a generation long choice.

The quote is a reflection of a Malthusian political economy's revolting conception of the poor. A Christmas Carol is a critique of the same. [0] The rich do not have fewer children for reasons of their superior ethics.

[0] https://kingscollections.org/exhibitions/specialcollections/...

> The rich do not have fewer children for reasons of their superior ethics.

That i definitely agree with. Seems to be a mix of education and selfishness

Scrooge was a wise man...

If you hold people accountable for their heirs then you've introduced a recursion that makes it nigh-impossible to calculate the emissions of any group. In any case, the title figure is rather staggering, and means that the exponent on the 1% assures their heirs' level of consumption too.

The only way to put blame on someone's shoulders is to assign it to those in decision-making positions, which, you guessed it, is overwhelmingly the 1%.

> those in decision-making positions

How do the poor not have choices? They have a choice to have >replacement children or not.

> you've introduced a recursion that makes it nigh-impossible to calculate the emissions of any group.

If you assume those heirs will never hit a terminal at replacement birthrate, then there probably would need to be some weighting function that approaches 0 after many generations.

My point is that the set of choices available to the poorest among us is largely determined by the richest among us. The only way for the poor to improve their situation is by playing the game of consumptive behavior that has been laid before them by those in positions of power. Keep in mind that reproduction is a deep-seated biological drive and that the one factor strongly correlated with lower birthrates, education, is a scarce resource and one that is subject to all sorts of manipulation at many levels of governance.

It's also somewhat-to-highly myopic to assume that relative wealth isn't an important factor in an era when humans are faced with devastation of the natural processes that we've relied on for millenia (I.e. rising tide raises all boats). Sure, we have social media and iphones, but those don't feed and slake us, and the A/C bill is overdue.

Cf. modern, independent (even 1st world modern) farmers' plight. It's not possible to make a go of it being a subsistence-type local producer. Someone will come in and undercut you with an ersatz product and financial/legal maneuvering.

Aside from that, it's largely been proven that the hysteria surrounding birthrate and overpopulation is a red herring strongly advocated by industries trying to obfuscate the problem of climate change.

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