Hacker News Reader

Comment by heretical_spoon | Hacker News Reader

This article provides a different perspective. Lots of good information that I couldn't find elsewhere

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelkrauss/2018/09/16/justic...

> Untrue: I hope the Ecuadorean government will one day compensate them for the awful pollution it has caused

This is the part that does it for me. If Chevron participated in the destruction of their environment then Chevron should have to compensate them. Even if the law says they were allowed to it should be the type of thing that’s not tolerated. You can’t give someone permission to murder you and I think it should be the same for the environment. A government or land owner shouldn’t be able to give the ok for environmental destruction and everyone who’s involved should be liable.

Pretty much everything humans do to live involve environmental destruction. You’d end up outlawing being human.

I think you’re making a slippery slope argument here where none exists. The damage Chevron did In Ecuador was exceptional. It was not run of the mill stuff but really gross pollution of the natural world. If you’ve not learned about this case I suggest reading up on it. It’s worthwhile to understand what corporations are getting away with out there.

or, idk, radically change how we interact with the environment? Something that's desperately needed.

we would need to drop population by a lot

We have polluted our environment so badly already that fertility is on a global drop. Mean sperm count in the West has dropped to ~50% in the last half century. For the rest of the world it's probably the same given how passionate so many countries are to achieve a Western lifestyle.

Edit: Over the coming 50 years, the "boomers" are on their way out. This might already be enough to relax the overpopulation issue in the West. But if fertility continues to drop, there will be huge issues with ageing populations.

Well, that's one opinion. We could also dramatically change our lifestyles and social order. There is not just one answer needed.

Volunteering yourself, or others?

The population can be reduced over time by breeding less without killing anybody early. I am, in fact volunteering myself for that.

I don't know that they were advocating it so much as pointing out the parent poster's agenda runs into this very problem you refer to.

Yes, I usually answer the “there are too many people” allegation with “you first”.

what about just "lots of free birth control"?

Sounds good to me.

Edit: Oh, surprise. Nobody is interested in a serious discussion centered on lowering global population.

I'm open to it. How would you suggest we go about it?

Globally raise standards of living, promote education, and empower women so that they don't feel the need to have zillions of kids. This would likely have to be done via wealth transfer from developed nations to less developed nations.

In order to save the planet this way (the only sustainable way, IMO), standards of living in Western nations will need to decline for at least a couple of decades. After population stabilizes, standards of living can rise again.

Anyone who has family members under 40 should be onboard with this plan, unless they prefer that their relatives' retirement plan be "die in the coming resource wars 30-50 years from now."

> Globally raise standards of living, promote education, and empower women so that they don't feel the need to have zillions of kids. This would likely have to be done via wealth transfer from developed nations to less developed nations.

That all sounds good to me and I think the vast majority would be on board with that. However, it's kind of odd to frame those ideas under the guise of "reducing population".

Very few people talk about the need to actively reduce the global population because it's not something that needs to be talked about - plummeting fertility and replacement rates are going to accomplish the same thing much quicker and the actions you are proposing are already something people care about. By talking about lowering the global population you just risk getting lumped in with a mostly pro-eugenics or antinatalism crowd (which I'm not saying is fair, it's just how it is).

There's a ton of more optically favorable angles from which you can advocate for those changes.

It's not particularly odd once you realize that, historically, higher standards of living, higher levels of education, and giving women options other than having children have been the dominant factors in reducing population growth rate everywhere in the world. They're the primary reason Japan has a shrinking population now.

As for allowing it to happen gradually, if you look at global population growth estimates, things aren't really expected to even level off until around 2100 at about 10 billion people, give or take. That's far too late if we continue on our current course, and having ~30% more people on the planet, all other things being equal, just makes it 30% harder to stop the death spiral we're locked into. Global societal collapse is probably going to happen 20 years before that, but, even if not, continuing to put more humans on the planet for the next 80 years consuming resources is going to make reversing the trajectory towards collapse that much harder.

And, while this line of thought is certainly not pro-eugenics (I don't want to pick and choose which people end up being born), it is explicitly antinatalist to a point. The point is that there just ain't room on this planet for 10 billion of us. And, the reasoning is exactly the opposite that traditional antinatalists use. It's more that human life and human civilization are worth preserving, rather than "humans don't consent to being born," and "all life is suffering."

But, back to the real point, which is why reducing population makes sense at all, the problem we have is that we're just consuming too much of the Earth's bounty every year, and it's not sustainable. Technological progress can help here, and I expect it will be a part of the solution, even though we're not really committed as a planet toward using technology to reduce consumption. But, technological progress aside, the simplest and easiest way to reduce consumption is to just have fewer people consuming.

That is it. That's the argument, that's the plan, and that's really the only semi-realistic way forward that I can see.

Now, about most people being in favor of such a program, the issue is the bit I mentioned about Western standards of living needing to decline for a few decades. People are in favor of a lot of stuff, as long as they don't have to sacrifice for it. Nobody in the West really wants their standard of living to decline, and few seem on board with agreeing to it for the sake of the future. This is why I think we're actually doomed, to be honest, and this is the part I fully and wholly blame capitalism for, but I'd love to see myself proven wrong by the time I die.

That’s not true. If we could even just scale back global consumption of resources to 1960 levels, we’d be able to have a sustainable global civilization with enough of a buffer that we wouldn’t have to impose a hard cap on individual consumers. Instead, capitalism depends on constant growth to sustain itself, otherwise share prices won’t go up, which leads to all sorts of things that the capital class considers bad.

Edit: Oh, I see we'd rather just make this argument go away rather than address it, still. This is why we can't have nice things, y'all.

> scale back global consumption of resources to 1960 levels

Probably more than that we can't sustain population growth like we have over the last century. Blaming capitalism is easy, but the more nuanced, difficult, and important conversation about population still languishes as taboo.

> Probably more than that we can't sustain population growth like we have over the last century

And that's a problem how? Fuck taboos when the continuation of global civilization depends on it. It's not like we've got another planet to fuck off to after we use this one up.

It makes a bunch of people feel uncomfortable. Those who've had children, those who want children, and those hoping for grandchildren. That and government, and most of the economic order, is interested in increasing GDP, available productivity, and consumer spending. I've seen more principled environmentalists raise the issue, only to be shot down by their peers for their 'abhorrent' views.

Edit: Oh, and there's a conspiracy theory that floats around white supremacy groups:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theo...

I hardly think white people will go extinct, but that might be a concern for some people in the western world.

The best way I've encountered to reduce population growth is actually to empower women, particularly in the developing world or for poorer populations. Having better education and employment opportunities for women strongly correlates with fewer children (and of course those children will be vastly better off, as will national GDP with a better skilled labour pool)... but even this idea could be seen as 'imperialist' or 'colonialist' if such an agenda is driven by the western world, even if it's feminist and environmentalist at heart.

Well, it should make them uncomfortable, but more for the fact that those children and grandchildren need a fucking world to live in.

I actually posted the same thing about empowering women in another comment here. Call me imperialist if you want while I help save the planet. I don't mind.

> Call me imperialist if you want while I help save the planet. I don't mind.

Not sure why you're projecting your resentment towards me given them I'm sympathetic to your viewpoint. <rant>But moreover, such a tone can be hurtful to your message. Even if their interlocutor is right, people loathe condescension, and it can often galvanize them into their cherished bad ideas. Not everyone is acting in bad faith. Understand peoples' motivations and fears, and then you might have a path to persuade them you have the better idea. But also learn where you might be wrong, or where the subject is more complicated and nuanced than you've conceived it to be.</rant>

Oh, that wasn't intended as a personal jab. It was a response to what you said about these ideas being considered imperialist and such.

If anyone else comes up with a better and more workable idea to save the planet and stave off global societal collapse, I'm all ears. No arrogance here, and no condescension intended.

It's a crowded world

It’s always interesting to read 2 news articles which seem to disagree on the key points. but maybe reading between the lines on the guardian article it’s that this lawyer did commit fraud, but the punishment has been disproportionately harsh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com