this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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Go vegan
Having less children, car free and plane free have more impact.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541
Killing other people's children is even more environmentally friendly!
Drop the gofundme!
Killing yourself as well!
This whole "have one fewer child" thing is totally bonkers, because even on the face of it, it really only makes sense for people in Western nations with their current lifestyles. It's also an average over all the people in that country, meaning it's heavily spoiled by rich kids. Essentially, 1. you can't know beforehand how your child will live and 2. emissions don't scale linearly with the number of people (again, look at the difference between countries). And then there's the anti-humane undertone of it.
The average environmental impact of even poor people in rich nations is many times higher than even rich people in poor nations.
a) Having fewer kids is extremely environmentally friendly, in any nation, and especially the West. Each child produces around 60x the CO2 offset by one person going vegan for life. This is just CO2. Consider the countless other ways an individual pollutes the environment during the course of their lives.
b) Migration from poor nations to rich nations is extremely damaging to the environment. Consumption matches Western patterns almost immediately.
It's often around 1t CO~2~e for a poor person in developing country vs. 5-10t CO~2~e for a poor person in an industrialized country.
However, rich people in Western countries tend to be in the 100s or 1000s of tons of CO~2~e/p/y which is extremely far off from being sustainable.
But I want to emphasize that this is just the current state. How your child lives in 20 or 30 years, you don't know. It may use much fewer resources or much more. I am cautiously optimistic that they will use fewer resources than we do. The question is more whether it will be enough.
1t CO~2~e/person/year is roughly sustainable within the current ecosystem. Thus, many people in poor countries are at or near climate neutrality already. If people live sustainably already, then no, there is no inherent need to reduce population or necessarily have fewer children.
That's not to say there may not be other benefits to having fewer children.
Again, this is true only in the current situation and in Western countries.
Blaming CO~2~e emissions on migrants is a bit disingenuous. But if it helps you make the case to yourself that Western countries should do more to give people in developing nations safer lives so they don't have to flee, I guess I'll take it.
And we have to choose only one?
edit: Also, I have avoid one fewer child for more than 2 decade !
And avoided transatlantic plane travel too!
Or just you know, all of the above :)
Going car free isn't an option for most Americans, unfortunately.
I agree.
I've been in favor of requiring licenses for anything past a light truck (figure older ford rangers as a light truck), so that only people with demonstrable needs for said vehicles would pursue them, otherwise they would need to go through the trouble for nothing. Same would go for large SUVs, as they're often built on the same platforms anyway.
I just drive a Corolla and own an older Crown Victoria as a backup car for my family/"nice car". There's been times where owning a truck would certainly have been useful, but I just rented something from uhaul.
And even for people who use their cars twice a day to go to work, their car spends 95% of their lives parked, individual cars are such a waste. I hope self-driving actually happens one day so the % of use of cars can drastically increase, and their number drastically decrease.
It works if you have a good infrastructure for public transportation. I live quite far away from the nearest public transportation and if I wanted to use apps like Uber, my local equivalent has eliminated penalties for drivers accepting and then rejecting an order if it doesn't pay enough so I've given up trying to use apps like Uber.
So the only option is to get a car or just be stuck unable to do anything.
One can easily be vegan while doing all of those, I am :)
Your point is valid, but the fact is none of those are enough on their own. Even if we get rid of all emissions except for the cattle industry, wed still shoot way past the 1.5Β° mark. So not going at least vegetarian was never an option.
Catal is the worst as far as animal emissions. Sticking with chicken or fish if you want your animal protein is the way to go.
Or nuts and other beans.
If it has to be animals, yes.
The environmentally beneficial effects of plant based diets or a vegan lifestyle are not reduced to harmful GHG emissions alone but encompass a wide range of advantages. To name some:
I've only gone vegan after two things happened:
There are likely other factors as well. Point is: it's never just one thing, and therefore every little thing helps.
Is it more expensive? (Consideringthe same nutrients intake fat, protein, etc)
Not with those replacements, yes if you make original vegan recipes with beans and stuff like that