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This is where you get it wrong, because you haven't actually thought about how much more one human can consume compared to another, and the actual lived reality that households with children tend to consume less than childless households.
We're not living subsistence lifestyles. There are many of us who travel for leisure by airplane, waste more food than is necessary to keep a person fed, throw away or consume more physical goods or energy than we need, create way more pollution, etc.
Rich societies tend to have fewer kids and consume way more resources and emit more pollution. The billions of people in Asia contribute less to our pollution than the comparably smaller population of Western Europe and North America. The relationship between population and environmental impact is broken because one rich Westerner can consume more than literally ten thousand poor Asians.
Say anything you want, i stopped listening after that nugget of stupid.
That's funny, I noticed the implied "per person" in that statement because it is kind of obvious.
When the child develops a personality, I'll buy that it counts as a person. You might as well include dogs as people, they are about as useful.
If two adults consume 20 amount of product, and the child consumed 5, then yes, per person the amount is less per individual. But when your talking about a thing that just sits there and consumes resources, yeah that's disingenuous math. The child will eventually grow into an adult, but if we're talking resources vs ability to provide, households with children will always consume more than without. Look at how fast those things go through diapers, and tell me the single couple is throwing that much trash away every week.
Are you counting the trash generated by the fact that the DINK couple can afford to go out to eat dinner at restaurants 5 times a week, and travel by plane 4-5 times per year?
You're thinking about human resource consumption as if it's a bell curve, where most are within an order of magnitude as everyone else.
But that's not the case. The wealthy consume literally thousands of times more than the poor, and income/wealth is negatively correlated with fertility, so it can be the case that a single childless millionaire consumes more resources than a dozen 4-person households.
So when comparing the countries where the birth rates have actually fallen below replacement, and where their populations are on the cusp of shrinking, you'll see that as they have fewer children their consumption still goes up exponentially even when their population doesn't.
Taking away scarcity by making fewer people compete for those resources doesn't actually change the aggregate amount of resources consumed. People are perfectly capable of increasing their demand several orders of magnitude if there's less competition snatching up those resources first.
Dear God, who are you friends with?!
?!?!? Who the fuck can afford that?
I'm not sure who these magically able to take vacations people are, but people with kids travel by plane too...
The fact that you struggle to imagine that these people exist in large quantities tells me that you haven't actually fully understood the power distribution of who is consuming how much.
On CO2 emissions, the top 10% emit about 48% of the CO2. The top 10% of Americans (where the cutoff is about $135k) produce about 55 tonnes of CO2 per capita per year, and they have low birth rates.
Yes, but paradoxically having more children makes households consume fewer passenger miles at any given budget, because traveling with children is slow and less enjoyable, and their tickets are just as expensive. So the DINK couple with the $200k budget can fly for vacations and even weekend getaways once every few months (4-8 times per year), but after having kids might only fly on one trip per year. Even with two kids, doubling the number of people in their household, they might be looking at half the passenger miles by taking 1/4 as many trips.
And if eating all the meat in the world and throwing food in the trash and using disposable diapers doesn't compare at all to the consumption involved in traveling out of town by plane, then adding up all the day-to-day stuff the family is doing with kids won't compare to the jet setting couple with the same budget.
Throw in the fact that the people who have the $200k+ budgets are less likely to have kids, and you have the correlation where consumption is negatively correlated with fertility/household size.
You seem to be having two completely different arguments.
People with kids = poor, consume less
People without kids = rich, party all the time
You keep going back to the plane thing. Every childless couple doesn't automatically make them a jet setter?
You're talking about the bottom 90% of the world and I'm saying that they don't consume as much as the top 10%, so I'm focusing mainly on the top 10%. If we're going to discuss resource consumption, the people we talk about should be weighted by the resources they consume. And by that metric, the global rich consume much more, and have fewer children, than the global poor. Therefore, it's easy to point out that reducing birth rates won't actually do much to reduce consumption, because the people who have kids aren't doing much of the consuming.
The jet fuel is just an example of that general correlation, and one of several mechanisms why the childless tend to consume much more. You can argue "oh but all else being equal more mouths equals more resources" but I'm saying that all else isn't even close to equal, so you should engage with the patterns as they actually exist in the world rather than a hypothetical where everyone is equal.
Doesn't read past headlines
Yes but the countries expecting or experiencing population decline are high consumption countries, largely.
That's my point. The correlation already runs the other way. As those countries start to see shrinking populations, they'll also continue to consume greater amounts per capita, offsetting the population decrease.
China and South Korea are starting to shrink. Do we really believe that their pollution and resource consumption are going to go down in the next 10 years?
And it doesn't really matter whether we're talking causation in one direction or another, or a spurious correlation with some other confounding factors. The fact is, the highest consumption populations tend to have the lowest birth rates, and vice versa, so why would we expect dwindling births to reduce consumption?
Well if the goal is the fewest number of humans, all living good lives, with ecological impact low enough to not worsen the planet over time, we should be happy that the humans who are forecasted to not exist are of the variety that are high consumers/polluters.
This is not a eugenics comment. I'm not suggesting anyone is invalid or should be removed, but we are instead discussing births that simply don't happen.
Yes, but what I think he's saying is that so far the deceased birth rate coincides with drastically increased consumption per capita. Therefore the decrease in birthrate may have no to negative short and medium term effect on total consumption/pollution.
Right but our goal should be some hypothetical 100000 people who all live incredible, careless, needless, yet fulfilled lives (number is a joke, pick any you like). But to get there, it's gonna take a while. Generations.
I'd rather focus on raising up the lowest into a tier of stability, health, basics, etc. And rely on the upper group of consumers diminishing.
Wondering about short term gains on something like this is silly.
What you're describing, then, has nothing to do with birth rates. That's what I'm saying in this thread: reduced birth rates won't fix the problem of runaway consumption and emerging scarcity.
Reduce birthrates A LOT (via non eugenic methods, I'm not playing with that), and prefer to remove (again, via absence) the most consumptive.
Give it a few hundred years and baby, you got a stew goin.
I'm saying that you can reduce birthrates a lot and it won't make much of a difference, because you can't go below zero and the rich/high consumption countries are already low.
If your goal is to reduce net consumption, then reduce consumption (or replenish consumed resources through increased production or restoration/replenishment of what is consumed). Preventing births itself won't meaningfully move the needle.
Over a few generations reducing birthday near zero would absolutely love the needle.
I think we generally agree, I'm just focused on a wider time span