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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> When it encroaches on personal things such as the size of a family (below, from the article's Zhang Yue) I do not like it

Not having a child is the most environmentally responsible act one can do. For each child you don't have, you offset tens of thousands of tons of CO2 emissions, millions of gallons of water used, tons of trash produced, etc.

I've been kicking around starting a non-profit that pays people not to have children, with the funding coming from carbon credits.

"By first year itself an American toddler would have generated more Carbon dioxide emission than an average person in Tanzania will generate in a life time."

http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/lessons/14/g68/...

http://www.greencontributor.com/index.php/human-foot-print.h...

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It is really riduculous that we now start evaluating human life by the amount of carbon emission one generates. Sorry, but that is just nonsense. Wont killing yourself achieve your goals? Also, you should start a non-profit that pays family members if they commit suicide.

There's a difference between firing someone in a company and simply removing the position through attrition when someone leaves. This is no different than the later.

Should we continue to overwhelm a physical system we require to survive? I don't advocate killing people whatsoever; I advocate incentivizing people to have less children (or no children, if they prefer). What's wrong with that?

I am not arguing against birth control. What I felt wrong about your view was that, you are basing life's worth on carbon emissions. There are better ways of reducing carbon emissions.

>There's a difference between firing someone in a company and simply removing the position through attrition when someone leaves. This is no different than the later.

The difference is that in your company, you know you dont need the position. How do you know that a couple wants to have a kid or not?

> The difference is that in your company, you know you dont need the position. How do you know that a couple wants to have a kid or not?

I don't! That's why I'm not forcing them to choose! Want to have kids? Awesome. Don't want to have kids? Here's a check. Thanks for not having a kid (or kids).

I didn't boil down a human being to just carbon emissions. I included the millions of gallons of water they'd use over their life, and the trash they create. I didn't not include a comprehensive list of what an average human consumes in their life, but I have now included it below. Spend the ~5 minutes reading it to see the impact. There is no "human footprint" metric that quantifies all of the energy and entropy a human contributes to Earth's biome during their existence, so its not an easy/quick idea to get across.

http://www.greencontributor.com/index.php/human-foot-print.h...

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