Climate Change Thread

[Montmorency]

Population is already projected to top out at just under 11 billion by end of the century. This projection has only been revised downward every few years or so.
https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs...ic/POP/TOT/900

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Well, some thoughts. It should be easier to deliver a good life to fewer people than to more (after a certain minimum threshold). With more people there is more usage of all things, and the whole resource chain from land to water to atmosphere is implicated. And a theoretical present capacity to feed 11 billion people is not relevant, because (1) it says nothing about potential drops in agricultural capacity or production in the future; (2) there is no such thing as a perfect distribution of resources and no one should ever plan or project around such a thing, for example we could theoretically distribute wealth today to give every human the lifestyle of a middle-class American - but it won't happen, even if we were to suddenly transition to socialism successful beyond all expectations; (3) we should aspire to more than sustaining the masses at the level above starvation, unless in the projection where climate change fucks the planet and the best we can hope for is 1940s Soviet living standards by 2100.

Fortunately, there are projections taking into account a rapid decrease in African fertility rates predicated on increasing urbanization and education of women. If other developing countries can drop from a rate of 6 to a rate of 2 in less than a generation, so can African ones if we facilitate the conditions. See also the case that the UN forecasts for African fertility are hilariously overblown. What was that relevant xkcd comic again?

But, as I will reiterate below, this demands gigantic wealth transfers on our part. At the very minimum, it calls for investments in the low hundreds of billions to set countries awash with knowledge and availability of contraception (which tends to work where it is tried, though we need to scale it way up from the current hundreds of millions or low billions). But we can't even do that until we neutralize the conservatives and repeal the Global Gag Rule (on abortion and contraceptive services). Or if you believe that fertility rates will drop even faster if child mortality drops, then -- do something about African child mortality!

African child mortality is 10 to 20 times higher than ours. Let's stop the racist handwringing over too many African babies and do something! With money! And by something, I mean establish networks of hundreds of modern hospitals and thousands of clinics and ship thousands of nurses and medical students from surplus areas in rich countries to do a few years work in African countries. Train hundreds of thousands more of local citizens in medicine per decade, and incentivize them against going abroad by paying them handsomely and investing elsewhere to improve the physical and social security of African citizens.

You know what? Go ahead and make it a comprehensive multi-trillion dollar transformation of the continent, alongside the multi-trillion dollar transformations of the other continents. Or we can hope billionaires will innovate away our problems lol.

There's just no getting around those wealth transfers, we're all in this together so mutual prosperity (or at least aversion to mutual destruction) must inspire us to pay for others.

I think we need to look at the real issue here which is overpopulation.

There are three ways to address world population, we having created this climate: betray all the brown people by genociding them; betray all the brown people by quarantining them and hoping they die of climate disaster or famine or disease or war before they can get to Europe or America (contract genocide to Nature); engage in unprecedented wealth transfer to the Global South to rapidly equalize world development, reducing absolute Western wealth in the medium-term. Which do you prefer?

I'd say we need to reduce the World population by half - in the short term that means introducing policies to penalise large families (which means penalising the poor) and in the medium term it means a global implementation of China's One Child Policy. We also need to "roll back" the expansion of Urbanisation.

If you think overpopulation is a problem then more urbanization is exactly what you want, not less. Density is more efficient in use of land and resources and delivery of services. Urban life also directly depresses fertility rates, and enables higher penetration of complete public education which in turn also depresses fertility rates. Urban women also tend to work more outside the home, which in turn depresses fertility rates. The third factor underlying fertility rates (others just mentioned being urbanization and women's education/work), as demonstrated in my link above, are child mortality rates. I've already begun to describe what it will take to reduce those.

I'd say we need to reduce the World population by half - in the short term that means introducing policies to penalise large families (which means penalising the poor) and in the medium term it means a global implementation of China's One Child Policy. We also need to "roll back" the expansion of Urbanisation.
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When the current Conservative Government in the UK tried to restrict child tax benefit to the first two children people screamed about women who were raped getting no support. When the Government said it would introduce a dispensation people screamed about women having to prove they were raped.

I suspect the primary complaint would have been against penalizing the poorest families who rely most on benefits. Let the affluent go first. No tax inducements will actually reduce fertility rates anyway; no one, especially not low-income people, plans children around the tax code. So as I'm sure the critics pointed out, all it does is contribute to misery and poverty to suggest such adjustments to taxation. Sad that you didn't stop to think of it.

On to a global One Child policy: Who's going to enforce it, and how? Is it going to be like in China too? Indeed, if we can forcibly abort fetuses or incarcerate over-quota women, I would have to ask why we can't just go ahead and expropriate all the property of the wealthy first. Liquidate the bourgeoisie.

I think we're going to screw this up, we already have, and we should be focusing on pollution and hardening our infrastructure against climate change rather than trying to slow the temperature rise directly. By reducing pollution, including things like sun screen that kills coral, we can give ourselves and the other species still clinging onto this rock a better chance of weathering the coming storm.

What state do you think can absorb hundreds of millions of refugees and internally displaced persons? How are we going to harden against the disintegration of the international trade regime and the loss of supply chains?

I at least agree in principle that in a certain range it is more difficult to deliver a good life to more total humans than to fewer, but that duck won't hunt. As long as we're making sweeping proposals no government could ever form a coalition around, the ethical option is solidarity - and yes, that means sacrifice. Developed countries will nevertheless always be sacrificing less, so it's not an unreasonable burden in the grand scheme.

Anyone who is serious about preserving world civilization needs to accept that the only way to mitigate conflagration is to spend many trillions of dollars reeling back and redesigning the American, European, and Asian economies, bottom-up and top-down.

Anyone who isn't a racist, or else someone who doesn't devalue human life in a Stalinist manner, needs to accept that preventing the deaths of hundreds of millions of Africans and privation of more, or preventing the birth of hundreds of millions more into such conditions over time, will require us to spend many trillions of dollars on a continental forced march of development.

We can talk about long-term population reduction once we have a world state.

We can aim for depopulation as one possible and eventual measure. But there are other measures we can take too. Localising economies and reducing waste is something we can do right now and be popular. Capitalism and the assumption of rights is damaging to the environment somewhere along the line. They're nice, but we can draw them down a tad with state regulation. All of this would be much easier and with greater effect with international cooperation, but hey, what do I know.

Quite right, but anything is something we can do right now, for all the difference it makes when monied interests set the limits of acceptable action so tight.