Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

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GandK
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by GandK »

Riggerjack wrote:
Thu Jul 13, 2017 4:35 pm
We can all do the math. Some will let that determine their actions, some won't.
This.

The article is aimed squarely at people who don't need its advice. Having kids is a biological urge. Some people feel that urge more strongly than others, and those who act on instinct by definition do not plan. Further, people who don't bother planning out whether or not to have kids certainly won't plan to minimize their carbon footprint.

Riggerjack
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by Riggerjack »

Rereading my last few posts, perhaps I should clarify my opinion.

I chose not to have kids. This was a selfish decision. I deserve no credit for not doing something I didn't want to do.

I have no issue with folks who CHOOSE to have kids. People who want to be parents, and live their lives accordingly are fine by me. Look around, decide your best course and execute. Good luck to you.

What I am far too familiar with, is people who became parents thru lack of a plan, or planning, or action, or commitment, or... You fill in the blank. People who had kids "happen to them". The ones who are just trying to hold on until the problem (kid) goes away.

7 billion people. Eventually, we will either cause an extinction event, or we will harness our fecundity. There are no other options. Each of us has to decide for ourselves which path we want to take. I choose to harness my fecundity, and I'm not quiet about it. Not because I want to shame people who WANT to be parents, but to show the rest that there are good reasons and examples to choose a different path.

BRUTE
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by BRUTE »

jacob wrote:
Thu Jul 13, 2017 3:05 pm
Math is fun!
citation needed

BRUTE
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by BRUTE »

GandK wrote:
Thu Jul 13, 2017 5:41 pm
The article is aimed squarely at people who don't need its advice.
this is true for pretty much all advice. with the added caveat of "who aren't ready for it", all advice.

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Jean
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by Jean »

Riggerjack wrote:
Thu Jul 13, 2017 4:35 pm
@jean

And how would you test that? For that matter, why would you even think that would be a heritable trait?

We can all do the math. Some will let that determine their actions, some won't.

I have seen no indication that what I consider my best traits to be genetic. So my best way of helping humanity as whole doesn't involve a mini-me. I choose to live my example, and save my overly harsh criticism for adults on the internet, where it may do some good, rather than subject children to it, where it would be more likely to do damage.
I can't test this, but I'll bet on it, an try to have as many kids as possible, because, they will controll some ressource and use them sparcely, and other peoples' kids won't, they'll probably just waste them.
Of course, it's completly untestable apriori.
But ressources need to be wardened, and I think my kids will do a better job at it than other peoples' kid.

radamfi
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by radamfi »

vexed87 wrote:
Thu Jul 13, 2017 7:08 am
Go figure, but the stats in the article can only be relevant to you if you are a typical consumer, what the article fails to address is if you really want to reduce impact, you simply need to stop consuming goods and services produced by the industrial system, or simply, get out of the city and stop buying shit.

We're talking adopting appropriate tech, home grown food, second-hand goods, home schooling, home-scale energy production (solar hot water). Adding additional children who don't use the system effectively discounts their carbon emissions. What gets my goat about these environmental journalists is they can't think outside the box of industrialised society. "We could all be more sustainable if we have less children, that way we can carry on as if there is no problem for a little longer."
But can a human realistically achieve zero environmental damage? Yes you can be much better than average, but there will still be a negative impact somewhere down the line. Your body will emit greenhouse gases after death. And there is the environmental damage done on your behalf by governments which are largely out of your control. For example, armed forces and health care providers generate a vast amount of environmental damage and the sizes of those organisations are generally in proportion to the size of the population.

vexed87
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by vexed87 »

But can a human realistically achieve zero environmental damage?
Of course not. We are ultimately talking about emissions from fossil fuels here. CO2 emitted from burning organic matter sequestered deep underground to raise a child is very different from CO2 emitted from lifeforms that have grown relatively recently and can and will grow back, thus eliminating the CO2 emitted. The carbon cycle is a very natural thing, what we are doing is digging up CO2 which would not otherwise be in the cycle.
Your body will emit greenhouse gases after death
I guess we should abolish death then? :lol:

Even agrarian humans effectively managed to obtain all their food and energy for millennia without accelerating climate change. It was the technology that made use of drilling, mining and piping of sequestered reserves of energy that enabled population to grow beyond the sustainable carrying capacity of the planet. Population is not the problem, it's the means by which we feed ourselves. The laws of nature can and will keep population in check, it's just that we are raiding a large reserve of energy and dealing with the consequences. When it comes to having children, it's a question of how thinly do you want to divide the resources available. In a future where there will be less energy/resources, choosing to have fewer children, and later in life is probably a good idea.

There is also little point in threating about institutions outside our personal sphere of control. One just needs to minimise their exposure and dependence on those institutions, and the laws of supply and demand will kick in. In any case, the economic burden of climate change will likely lead to austerity that will finish off those institutions in time.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by ThisDinosaur »

Riggerjack wrote:
Thu Jul 13, 2017 6:25 pm
7 billion people. Eventually, we will either cause an extinction event, or we will harness our fecundity. There are no other options.
There is a third option. We will reach an ecological barrier and our population will shrink down to some equilibrium level. 7 billion humans are like an algal bloom. Instead of fertilizer runoff causing algae to outgrow their O2 and sunlight supply, we have a fossil fuel runoff causing us to outgrow our topsoil and phosphorus supply.
radamfi wrote:
Fri Jul 14, 2017 12:29 am
Your body will emit greenhouse gases after death.
We should seal our corpses in petroleum-based Ziploc bags so our icky CO2 doesn't contaminate the pristine Earth.

You know, too little CO2 is bad for the ecosystem as well. The first land plants evolved 430 million year ago. They evolved to exploit new resources: dry land and gasous CO2. By 300 million years ago, they had soaked up so much CO2 that global temperatures dropped and an ice age occurred. One of the largest mass extinctions in Earth's history was caused by too-little CO2. The trees that died with no one to eat and release their CO2 became our coal. Humans burning coal are doing a service to the earth.

vexed87
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by vexed87 »

If we close the loops, there's plenty of phosphorus and top soil to go around. Pee in your damn garden and top contributing to soil erosion! :lol:

Of course, this is easier said than done in industrial civilization.

radamfi
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by radamfi »

vexed87 wrote:
Fri Jul 14, 2017 3:32 am
There is also little point in threating about institutions outside our personal sphere of control. One just needs to minimise their exposure and dependence on those institutions, and the laws of supply and demand will kick in. In any case, the economic burden of climate change will likely lead to austerity that will finish off those institutions in time.
What are you going to do when you or your missus or future kid get ill? Are you going to avoid going to the doctor or hospital?

Campitor
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by Campitor »

People will continue to have children. Even if we reach a population equilibrium, it's no guarantee we will not exhaust our resources or blow ourselves up in some stupid nuclear war. Currently we are polluting because the true cost of pollution is being masked or diluted to 3rd parties. If the agents of pollution were directly responsible for the cost of their emissions, they would be more efficient with their waste. Economics 101 states that an item/service will be used inefficiently (amassed, excessively used, etc) if it's provided at an artificially low cost or for free. Humans have a large C02 footprint because it's cheap and/or more desirable compared to the current alternatives. And there would be a massive reduction on healthcare cost and use if humans ate healthier and exercised - most do neither.

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fiby41
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Fuck the world till it spins on a broken axis

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Image

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Jean
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by Jean »

Stop having white babies so we can justify brown people replacing you on your own homeland.

Stahlmann
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by Stahlmann »

Jean wrote:
Sun Jul 16, 2017 2:36 pm
Stop having white babies so we can justify brown people replacing you on your own homeland.
On system level I think that "west" (from North America, West Europe, Australia, NZ) people got very, very, very lazy in terms of having children after development of hormonal contraception in 70'...

Somebody needs to keep the system working :lol: . The problem is that nowaday's immigration culture is totally different from the current one in the west world.

In the past, for example people from East Europe needed to get used to "native" culture (or they got punished very severly). Today's influx is not the same :evil: (I think it should be the price for better living).

Cases where some minority becomes extra pause during work on spiritual ground make me sick. And I am the biggot, because I fight for somewhat equality...

BRUTE
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by BRUTE »

Stahlmann wrote:
Sun Jul 16, 2017 4:53 pm
Somebody needs to keep the system working
that's, like, Stahlmann's opinion, man

Stahlmann
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by Stahlmann »

BRUTE wrote:
Sun Jul 16, 2017 4:58 pm
Stahlmann wrote:
Sun Jul 16, 2017 4:53 pm
Somebody needs to keep the system working
that's, like, Stahlmann's opinion, man
I think that (for example) self-breeding for read meat would be time consuming, so it's better that some people stay in workforce and provide cheap products due to industralization. With the lentils is the same :lol: !

I also hate when people refer to Big Lebowski here, because not everybody can find good paying job, enjoy
the work itself and this character is totally out of touch with previous mentioned qualities :roll: (aside being hardcore laid-back attitude).

BRUTE
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by BRUTE »

brute's money is on the system crashing. asteroid 2020!

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fiby41
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by fiby41 »

Jean wrote:
Sun Jul 16, 2017 2:36 pm
Stop having white babies so we can justify brown people replacing you on your own homeland.
That's racist. ding

Can't help it that the above bell goes off automatically in my head due to watching too many CinemaSins.

When dealing with Islam it is important to keep in mind the distinction between Islam as a doctrine and the Muslims, a group of people who were born into an Islamic environment. There is nothing intrinsically Islamic about human beings, not even when they are named Mohammed or Aisha.

In Europe the secularist left accuses the national‑populist and xenophobic parties of a "biologization of cultural differences". When the said parties plead that they have put "racism" behind them, that they have nothing against coloured people or foreigners per se, and that they only fear for social disharmony as a consequence of the co‑existence of European and immigrant cultures, their opponents rightly argue that this implies a belief in the permanent character of people's cultural identity. By assuming that immigrant foreigners are bound to remain culturally foreign, the xenophobes treat cultural identity as if it were a racial characteristic: a permanent and hereditary trait. In reality, of course, cultural identities change, e.g. most second‑generation Hindu immigrants have moved rather closely towards the mainstream culture of their adopted countries. Cultural identity including religion is not a permanent or hereditary trait.

This secularist "biologization of Islam" is also assumed, quite mindlessly, by most people.
Moreover, this approach of shielding Islam from critical enquiry is unfair to Islam by emphatically ignoring Islam's own self-definition as a religion based on a truth claim, viz. that "there is no god but Allah and Mohammed is Allah's prophet", a truth claim which can and must be evaluated as either true or false.
The harder they try to be secular, the more they reduce the Islam problem to one of co-existence with a community which is somehow different, though the nature of that difference is emphatically not up for analysis.
Example, Not one bad word will they say about Islam, even though it is Islam and nothing else which separates the Indian Muslims from their fellow Indians.

Finally, this non-doctrinal approach to the Muslim community creates the impression of a purely xenophobic motivation, similar to that of anti-foreigner parties in the west. Xenophobic parties in the west are faced with the problem that the country which they claim for their own nation is "invaded" by an outsider population which they cannot or will not assimilate. The cadres of these parties are often ideologues of ethnic or racial purity who do not want to assimilate Blacks or North-Africans or Turks, just as their grandfathers once rejected the assimilation of Juice. The recent electoral growth of these parties is mainly due to working-class people who have assimilated immigrant labour (Italians, Poles) before but who now find that certain new immigrant groups (particularly Muslims) in their neighbourhoods cultivate their separateness. They fear that, they can not assimilate these separatist newcomers, and that their children will be faced with a civil war. Either way, the starting-point of these xenophobic parties is the separateness or non-assimilation of foreigner populations, and their only solution is to send these immigrants back to their countries of origin.

The best example of this alleged similarity is the common complaint about the Islamic birth rate.

1. The non-whites in the USA do not or need not form a genuine problem for US whites, because people of different ethnic backgrounds can and do share in the same American Dream, can and do participate in a common American society. By contrast, Islam in India is intrinsically separatist and aiming for hegemony and ultimately for the destruction of Hinduism through conversion or otherwise.
There is nothing intrinsically anti-white about blacks, but there is definitely something intrinsically anti-Hindu about Islam.
For this reason, the concern of whites about the growth of non-white groups in the USA is reprehensible, but the concern of Hindus and non-Muslims about the growth of Islam is entirely justified.

2. people's membership of certain racial groups, black or white or other, is unchangeable. While the potentially alarming adherence of people to Islam is entirely changeable. And it is at this last point that the secularist acceptance of the Islamic identity of the Muslims distorts the picture.

Muslims have walked into Islam, and they are bound to walk out again as well. Conditioning of Islamic indoctrination is powerful. Yet it's still a superficial imposition. So it's susceptible to the law of impermanence. That is why any solution which starts by assuming the race basis or Muslimness of Muslims, is mistaken.

vexed87
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by vexed87 »

radamfi wrote:
Sat Jul 15, 2017 11:12 am
vexed87 wrote:
Fri Jul 14, 2017 3:32 am
There is also little point in threating about institutions outside our personal sphere of control. One just needs to minimise their exposure and dependence on those institutions, and the laws of supply and demand will kick in. In any case, the economic burden of climate change will likely lead to austerity that will finish off those institutions in time.
What are you going to do when you or your missus or future kid get ill? Are you going to avoid going to the doctor or hospital?
I have highlighted that key word for you. I am not advocating a fundamentalist approach where all carbon emissions from non-personal institutions are banned, there's no point, that ain't happening anyway. The footprint of an individual in healthcare institution who eats well, exercises and generally doesn't do stupid risk taking activity is negligible. The whole healthcare system has to be centralised because of the scale of the problem of poor lifestyles. Some people just get dealt bad cards sure, and my wife and I have very personal experience of that too.

Way back when I was a kid, I remember a local doctor could come to you to prescribe a course of antibiotics if you were bed ridden, now you might get blue lighted by ambulance to A&E. Home visits would never happen these days, particularly in the US, they wouldn't be able to bill you for the overnight stays, bed changes, round the clock 'assessments' etc etc. I imagine the home visit model of healthcare might return, if the centralised bureaucratic healthcare system collapses.

In the mean time there is a moral dilemma, consume non-renewable resources today in exchange for extending one's own life at the expense of our children and grand children having a hard time with climate disasters. I claim no moral high ground. My wife has had life saving procedures only available because of advanced healthcare, she has implanted electronics that keep her bladder functioning, without them she would get frequent bladder/kidney infections. Before treatment, she had been in intensive care with septic shock several times and would have died without IV antibiotics. The implants weren't available 10 years ago. Had her condition developed then, she would have succumbed to an infection sooner or later.

I'm lucky she is around now, and every day with her is a blessing. Her implants are not permanent however, they need replacing every 3-5 years because of the batteries. I have already come to terms with the fact that if there is a major economic shock, or even just scaling back of healthcare here in the UK due to declining resources, I may lose my wife as a result. It sucks, but that's life. No one lives forever, and there's no god given right to healthcare treatment. Just about everything about modern society today is only possible because of our exploitation of non-renewables. However, if we can acknowledge that, we can take steps to protect the most important aspects of healthcare, and find a way to make them run without fossil fuel inputs. I won't hold my breath though and intend to make the most of my time with my wife whilst she is fit and well.

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Jean
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Re: Want to fight climate change? Have fewer children

Post by Jean »

@fiby41

All your points are correct.
But even if immigrants are all nice and assimilating, if one group stop to have child, and people from another group massively immigrate to where the first group used to live, the first group is going to be wiped out.
You can think it as no importance.
I think it has some importance.

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