this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2023
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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.
this is some malthusian eugenicist bullshit.
Malthusian yes, eugenicist no.
you can't do any malthusian advocacy that isn't necessarily eugenicist
you can't implement any malthusian policy that isn't necessarily eugenicist.
People may make it eugenicist but the policy can not be. For exemple if the country gives money for the first child but not the second, you reduce the intentions to have more than one. Then maybe people will kill their baby because they want a blond girl but this is their fault.
who are you giving money to?
I'm giving money to my country by paying taxes?
I meant which parents.
In social countries, parents receive money for parental leaves and to pay for childcare for example.
eugenics, selecting against socialized countries.
Humans cause pollution so fewer humans = less pollution. It's not that complicated.
Fuck ecofascism. The problem is not how many we are. We are well within the planet's carrying capacity. The problem is how the richest among us live.
Almost every modern human uses non-renewable resources and produces greenhouse gases either directly or indirectly. At the current rates it is unsustainable. It is the exponential growth of industry, technology, and human population that has caused the dramatic shift in climate change.
The top 10% earning Americans (>$178,000/year) created 40% of the nation's pollution according to a recent study. And that factored in the industries they worked in. That still means that the majority of climate change is caused by the activity of normal people.
We can acknowledge reality without being histrionic. Iβm not calling for an end to humanity. Iβm simply explaining that human life is wasteful and inefficient. I think we should accept that, rather than pretending otherwise. Tinkering around the edges isnβt going to change the trend.
this is just ecofascism
misogyny is another classic hallmark of fascism.
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.
It's funny, I was just at the car dealership yesterday getting my car repaired and I talked to a guy on the showroom floor who was buying a new vehicle. The dealer had the new Nissan electric car on display that I was checking out, and the guy said " Don't buy that it's electric! "
I asked him why, because I think electric cars are great. He was a bigger man, about 5'10 tall and 350 lb. He said that he can't fit in anything smaller than a full size pickup truck because they are "too small for me.". Which of course is silly, because I've seen plenty of fat people fit in smaller cars. In fact, I had a friend who weighed almost as much as he did who was able to fit into my 1986 Honda Civic hatchback.
So there you go ladies and gentlemen, Americans believe they're too fat to fit in anything but a gigantic pickup truck with a 7,000 lb GVWR.
The average trip length in America is something like 2 mi in distance. That's a distance that you could walk, and you can bike that in less than 5 minutes. So Americans really can meet a lot of their daily travel needs to the store and short errands by means other than a car.
The biggest problem in America is twofold: infrastructure and behavioral patterns.
One can easily be vegan while doing all of those, I am :)
Unfortunately being a vegan, for me, would require far more trips to the grocery store do to the low shelf life of produce.
How do you get around that?
You don't have to replace your calories from animal products with produce, foods like beans exist. Also some produce like onions and potatoes have long shelf life.
Another victim of not having stores close to housing I take it, I feel for you.
There's lots of plant based stuff with a long shelf life like TVP, beans, rice, grains, pasta, lentils and so on.
Frozen veggies are great and still nutritious and you can freeze loads of stuff like tofu, seitan and all the various meat alternatives.
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:
Same thing can be said for all the carbon reduction measures, producing less leads to consuming less of everything, especially technology products.
In general sure, producing less and consuming less leads to less impacts. But there are quite the differences in what and how we consume it with regard to their impacts. For example, we don't need agricultural space for mining cobalt to build batteries which power electric cars.