this post was submitted on 27 Aug 2023
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The memes of the climate
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Maybe, just maybe, having the population go from 2.5 billion to 8 billion in like 70 years has something to do with it...
Oh look another westerner blaming population while the top 1% are responsible for double the emissions of the bottom 50%.
A growing population is what allowed the top 1% to get so absurdly rich and wasteful. Capitalism is dependent on growth.
I'm not blaming the poor for the population growth, I'm actually blaming the rich who encourage it for their benefit. All the talk in the west of 'we need to grow the population otherwise the system will collapse!! We need to get our people pumping out more kids or, if not, we need more immigration!' demonstrates this quite well. It's all about maintaining growth by any means necessary.
And no I'm not anti immigration even slightly, so please don't miss my entire point here by misunderstanding my position focusing on that.
You're not blaming the poor, but you're still pointing to population growth as the cause, which raginghummus convincingly argued against.
Population growth is the cause, and their assessment that I was blaming the poor does not change that. There was no convincing (or even unconvincing) argument made that the population isn't to blame.
Massive wealth inequality existed in human society thousands of years ago too. But climate change on a global scale did not exist until the population exploded since the industrial revolution.
Pretty sure that he pointed out that a small fraction of the population is responsible for an absolutely disproportionate amount of emissions. Is really decreasing the population necessary, or would it be more effective to decrease the emissions of the current population, since we see that a lot of emissions come from so few people?
Also, industrial revolution changed more than just population, I'm sure you know better than simply implying that such a correlation as you describe implies a causation.
Yes, a small fraction consumes more than others currently. Not at all claiming otherwise. I am anticapitalist and definitely don't support it. What I would like is for this to no longer to be the case and that all people consume an equal amount of resources.
But yes, what I'm saying is in order to meaningfully fight climate change we will also need to limit population growth too, even if we manage to completely end resource inequality.
A population can't expand indefinitely without it inevitably leading to less resources per person. And I truly believe even if we take all 8 billion people and have them all live in a way that consumes comparable resources to a, say, a lower-middle class Westerner... we will still have a climate emergency on our hands. And if I'm wrong and the world could support 8 billion like that, how about 10 billion? Or 100 billion? There obviously exists an upper limit. But no one wants to acknowledge it.
Yeah I (and probably everyone else) agree that indefinite growth is not sustainable, but no-one argues for such growth and as far as I know there are no reasons to suspect the world population will grow indefinitely.
I don't know of the top of my head how sustainable a lower-middle class Westerner is, but my guess is not overly sustainable, as it feels that modern society is made so you naturally emit quite a lot. My guess is that we could sustain 10 billion or a bit more, I haven't really heard any convincing arguments we couldn't. I agree there must be an upper limit, but I think it much be much further than you think.