[HN Gopher] The world has probably passed peak pollution
___________________________________________________________________
The world has probably passed peak pollution
Author : robertn702
Score : 262 points
Date : 2024-05-09 22:11 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com)
| Animats wrote:
| That's encouraging.
|
| - Peak pollution - check.
|
| - Peak coal - not yet.
|
| - Peak oil - maybe 2019, but aftermath of COVID affects
| numbers.[1]
|
| - Peak baby - 2013. [2]
|
| [1] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2023-04-19/the-status-
| of-...
|
| [2] https://www.thenewdaily.com.au/life/2022/11/12/the-stats-
| guy...
| defrost wrote:
| Peak Coal - Probably, very likely, more or less about right
| now.
|
| _Global coal supply likely peaked in 2023 and then to decline_
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38652273
|
| Can't say for sure until another few years have passed,
| nonetheless every country in the world has coal on hold or in
| decline save for India and China.
|
| China is the largest producer of renewable technology and
| energy (?), India is building out the worlds largest solat
| array farm (albeit "only" good for 16 million households).
| karmakurtisaani wrote:
| China still builds more coal power, but they intend to use it
| only as a backup for when renewables are not producing
| enough. The YouTube channel Just Have a Think did a video on
| China's energy future recently, highly recommend checking it
| out (sorry for not linking directly, writing on my phone).
| bamboozled wrote:
| Doesn't it take a while to bring a coal station up to
| energy producing capacity ? Isn't they why gas is more
| popular for this ?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| China has domestic coal reserves, so they build coal.
| It's the same reason as West Virginia and just as bad.
|
| If you have any amount of energy storage then the time
| delay doesn't matter. You turn on the alternate
| generation method when the storage is starting to run
| down. It doesn't matter if it takes an hour to come up to
| temperature because you still have two hours of storage
| left.
|
| The actual problem is that "shortfall" is a relative
| concept. Do you have to burn coal because it's cloudy all
| week, or just because you spent a lot of resources
| building coal-fired power plants instead of solar panels
| or wind turbines or nuclear reactors? How often are you
| going to run the things?
|
| The economics of building and maintaining an entire fleet
| of coal power plants to use only in a demand emergency is
| extremely poor. Like you're better off spending half the
| money on nuclear reactors you can run 100% of the time
| and the other half on electrifying transportation so you
| can have a huge demand buffer in the form of vehicle
| batteries and then get people who only drive a few miles
| per day to delay their charging by a few days through
| pricing because a full charge lasts them three weeks
| anyway.
| Kailhus wrote:
| Let's hope their renewable strategy works out because
| they'd otherwise be burning a lot of coal
| monero-xmr wrote:
| My problem with the "peak population" hypothesis is that all of
| the non-breeders will eliminate themselves from the gene pool
| soon. All of us that have kids for whatever reason chose to
| reproduce despite the abundance of modern society. Also the
| groups that have many kids (the Amish have 7 children on
| average, and you also have Mormons and Orthodox Jews) will
| expand exponentially.
| developerDan wrote:
| Who is to say children today will have children of their own
| tomorrow? People who are choosing not to have kids "leaving
| the gene pool" (you say it as if they are some filth to be
| done away with) doesn't change anything.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| If you don't reproduce then your genes are not passed on.
| You have self-selected not to be part of the human race any
| longer.
|
| My hunch is that the people who still decide to reproduce,
| despite all the reasons people who advocate for not having
| children talk about, likely have some sort of genetic
| predisposition for reproduction - a strong innate need.
|
| After all the non-breeders die off, the future belongs to
| the reproducers.
| skissane wrote:
| Not just in terms of selecting genes, but also selecting
| cultures.
|
| If allele A causes increased desire to reproduce than
| allele B, then in a society in which reproduction is
| viewed as an optional extra, _all else being equal_ ,
| allele A is likely to predominate allele B over time.
| Conversely, in a more traditional society in which
| everyone is subject to a strong social expectation to
| reproduce, allele A would have far less of an advantage
| over allele B.
|
| An allele might lead to increased reproduction indirectly
| rather than directly. For example, if an allele makes a
| person more likely to be religious, and if religious
| people are more likely to have kids, then even though
| that allele does not directly impact desire to reproduce,
| it may be selected for due to its indirect impact on
| reproduction.
|
| That's genetics; coming to culture: if subculture A puts
| higher emphasis on reproduction than subculture B, then
| _all else being equal_ , in the long-run subculture A is
| likely to outnumber subculture B, irrespective of any
| genetic factors. However, defections from subculture A to
| subculture B may erase much of its innate demographic
| advantage. This suggests in the long-run, the most
| demographically successful subcultures will be those
| which combine sustained high fertility with sustained
| insularity (social barriers to defection to other
| subcultures)-which is exactly what we observe with groups
| like the Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| It's surprising to me why my parent comment was down
| voted. It's simple biology and mathematics. If you want
| culture to survive (if what is most important to you is
| cultural values) you _must_ have a society with children
| in order to impart those values. There is no future for a
| society that discourages children.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| > After all the non-breeders die off, the future belongs
| to the reproducers.
|
| I suspect it was downvoted because that line suggests
| dismissal or contempt for people who don't have children.
|
| There are many people across all generations who haven't
| had children (either by choice or because they were
| unable for various reasons), and their lifespans and
| social contributions are no more or less on average
| compared to people that do have children.
| quesera wrote:
| Ironically, "breeder" is (or used to be?) a slang
| denigration of heterosexuals, within the homosexual
| community.
|
| I didn't interpret the original comment as contemptuous
| of either opinion. But it is undeniable that both groups
| are sensitive about their choices (or unfortunate
| inability to choose differently).
| fallingsquirrel wrote:
| What a wild take. This is like claiming gay people will
| "die off" in 2 generations because they don't reproduce.
|
| 1000 years ago some subset of people chose not to have
| children, and humanity did just fine, and that same group
| of so-called "non-breeders" still exists today. Therefore
| we can conclude it's not purely a matter of genetics.
| There are a huge number of reasons people make that
| choice. People even change their minds during their life.
| It's not just a YES/NO switch in your genetic code
| somewhere.
| skissane wrote:
| > 1000 years ago some subset of people chose not to have
| children, and humanity did just fine, and that same group
| of so-called "non-breeders" still exists today.
|
| There have always been, and always will be, people who
| don't have kids, for a whole host of reasons.
|
| But that's not the argument (or at least, not the
| steelman version of it, as opposed to the strawman one) -
| the argument is that if there are certain heritable
| traits that discourage people from having children, then
| _all else being equal_ , natural selection will cause the
| frequency of those traits to decline over time, albeit
| often not to zero.
|
| The _all else being equal_ part is very important. In a
| society with strong social pressure to reproduce, a trait
| which makes people less likely to want children may not
| be strongly selected against - because the social
| pressure to reproduce means desire to have children only
| has a small impact on the odds of actually having them -
| whereas in a society which is much more individualist, it
| may have much more of an impact, so the selective
| pressure against that trait may be much stronger. And of
| course, a trait which produces less desire for children
| might nonetheless be selected for because it produces
| some other countervailing advantage
|
| Still, I think the argument does have some weight - that
| in contemporary Western society where reproduction is far
| more of a voluntary choice than it once was, biological
| and cultural factors which encourage reproduction are
| going to be selected for to a much greater degree than
| they were in the less individualist societies of decades
| and centuries past, where less such encouragement was
| needed
| quesera wrote:
| Both things must be true.
|
| On the one hand, you'd expect humans (animals) to have
| completely bred out all forms of infertility -- except
| that there are non-heritable causes of infertility. (In
| fact, all causes of infertility must be non-heritable, or
| at least not inherit _ed_! :)
|
| On the other hand, it's surely true that characteristics
| which deprioritize or diminish the likelihood of
| reproduction _are_ bred out, however incompletely.
| Whether it 's a sense of taste that enjoys poisons, a
| risk-taking brain that kicks in before fertility,
| homosexuality (in males at least), or just not wanting
| children.
|
| These characteristics are bred _down_ to a sustainable
| level, obviously. But they are clearly not bred out
| fully, nor are they consistently bred "up".
| skissane wrote:
| > homosexuality (in males at least)
|
| In many traditional societies, there is strong social
| pressure for marriage and children, arranged and semi-
| arranged marriages, etc - such that a person's sexual
| orientation may not make much difference to their odds of
| heterosexually reproducing. Some people might enjoy
| heterosexual reproduction and others might endure it but
| they'll do it all the same. So that would limit the
| selective pressure against genes that increase the
| likelihood of homosexuality
|
| In the mainstream contemporary West, if heterosexual
| reproduction doesn't appeal to you, then you just don't
| do it-so selective pressure against those genes may exist
| to a degree that it formerly did not. On the other hand,
| the new possibilities for non-heterosexual reproduction
| (such as IVF, sperm/egg donation, surrogacy) might
| counteract that.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| >This is like claiming gay people will "die off" in 2
| generations because they don't reproduce.
|
| It's a serious and interesting question as to why
| evolution tolerated/encouraged homosexuality in a small
| but significant proportion of the population. If you have
| the time, this article gives a good overview of the
| discussion [1].
|
| Depending on your answer to that question - along with
| your views about how evolution affects modern humans
| another - it's natural to think about homosexuality will
| occur in future humans.
|
| Could we have more, less or about the same of it? Will
| everybody be bisexual? How might medical fertility
| treatments affect the outcomes? It's an open field of
| ideas.
|
| [1] https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/the-
| evolutionary...
| rustcleaner wrote:
| I don't think nature promoted it, but that it is a
| maladaptive corruption of mating systems which isn't
| serious enough to result in its cause disappearing from
| the gene pool.
| spacebanana7 wrote:
| If evolution is sensitive enough to give us two kidneys
| via some indirect impact on the number of reproductive
| offspring we create, why can't it drive a "software"
| change to give people the desire to have heterosexual
| sex?
|
| The best answer I can think of is that sexuality is
| somehow very fragile for evolution to calibrate, so even
| natural selection isn't powerful enough to select
| heterosexuality reliably.
|
| But it's hard to argue that persuasively with a
| biological basis which we don't yet have.
|
| Compared to the other evolutionary arguments for
| homosexuality it also doesn't scale well to other non
| reproductive sexual behaviours.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| That isn't really how that works at all. If you have a
| brother and a sister who both have male and female
| children, that's basically the same genetic line going
| on.
|
| The only exception I can think of is if you have some
| mutation they didn't. But in that case if you're aware of
| the mutation the consequences are likely to be awful,
| which is a great case for not having biological children.
| S_Bear wrote:
| Since my broken body is the equivalent to a genetic
| warranty replacement, I'm more than happy to leave the
| future gene pool.
| randomdata wrote:
| The people of typical child rearing age today grew up in
| the "16 and pregnant" era, where having children was
| demonized. They were told that to have children was a
| failing, and that they should focus on their career instead
| - that was the key to a successful, happy life. Social
| pressure is a hell of a drug.
|
| Is that fashion going to remain, though? Everything goes
| out of style eventually. I think we are already seeing some
| cracks where people are starting to question why having
| children is so "wrong". Nothing happens overnight, but I'm
| not so sure the children today will grow up in that same
| environment.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I think the economics trump the social factors mostly. It
| seems to take ever more education in order to grasp at an
| ever more ephemeral stability, and children need a decade
| or two of stability when growing up. I can't imagine
| anyone will be encouraging their 16 year old daughters to
| have children any time soon.
| randomdata wrote:
| It is true that once you are rich enough you no longer
| need children to help support the family unit as was an
| imperative historically (and still in the poor parts of
| the world), so we cannot discount the economics. That is
| no doubt why it became the fashion. It was a
| demonstration of how rich we've become. A display of
| human progress and achievement.
|
| But I see some change in sentiment around questioning
| what good is being rich if you can't enjoy it with your
| children. It is not happening overnight by any stretch of
| the imagination, but I think the tides are slowly
| starting to turn.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I look back at Leo Tolstoy's "A Confession" and I think
| that it's a bit more complicated than that. He summed up
| my own thoughts quite well more than a century before I
| was even born.
|
| > No matter how often I may be told, "You cannot
| understand the meaning of life so do not think about it,
| but live," I can no longer do it: I have already done it
| too long. I cannot now help seeing day and night going
| round and bringing me to death. That is all I see, for
| that alone is true. All else is false. The two drops of
| honey which diverted my eyes from the cruel truth longer
| than the rest: my love of family, and of writing -- art
| as I called it -- were no longer sweet to me. "Family"...
| said I to myself. But my family -- wife and children --
| are also human. They are placed just as I am: they must
| either live in a lie or see the terrible truth. Why
| should they live? Why should I love them, guard them,
| bring them up, or watch them? That they may come to the
| despair that I feel, or else be stupid? Loving them, I
| cannot hide the truth from them: each step in knowledge
| leads them to the truth. And the truth is death."
| randomdata wrote:
| _> Why should I love them, guard them, bring them up, or
| watch them?_
|
| Once upon a time there was no choice if you wanted to
| survive yourself. The world was too much for the feeble
| man without their help. Indeed, the rich now have the
| luxury of relying on "corporations" to stand in for where
| children were once necessary. But then you're ultimately
| back to square one: Why should you love, guard, bring up,
| and watch the corporations?
|
| There is no free lunch. You are going to put in the
| effort either way, but at least children might also
| provide some happiness along the way. The "corporations"
| seem to just draw ire. We didn't recognize that for a
| long time, but I do see a shift starting to take place.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I think we are just all different - I can't imagine
| children bringing me any happiness; I felt the way
| Tolstoy did already when I was a young child.
| Interestingly, my grandmother once told me she only had
| children because of social expectations, and I can say
| that her children were absolutely aware of that. For me,
| the philosophical reasons were enough; the monetary
| savings are in a sense a bonus, but for others economics
| may be the main force preventing them from having
| children which is indeed sad in its own way I suppose.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> but for others economics may be the main force
| preventing them from having children_
|
| Economics never prevents having children. As before, only
| the rich even get the luxury of choosing to not have
| children. But the rich _could_ have children too if they
| so choose. Their fear of children making them look poor
| under the whims of today 's fashion is an entirely self-
| imposed limitation.
|
| Good for them if that's what they want to do. No judgment
| on anyone's personal life choices. But I maintain that an
| increasing number of people are starting to question if
| that is what is right for them. I agree that what is
| right for an individual is not universal. Some people
| will truly not want children, but many more feel
| pressured to not have children due to the prevailing
| fashion trends. I see change afoot among the latter
| group. Having children is slowly starting to become
| "cool" again.
| silverquiet wrote:
| Fundamentally I just disagree with you I think; I'm not
| seeing any signs that trends in fertility are turning
| around, and I think if anything it was social pressure
| that was holding the numbers up to begin with. I'm
| certainly willing to admit that I could be wrong on that
| though; the millennials, a large echo generation from the
| boomers (myself among them) are hitting the age where it
| becomes a sort of "now or never" proposition and
| anecdotally, I do see some people considering it. But I
| also think that religion is one of the big drivers of
| social pressure for fertility, especially in the US, and
| you can see it continue to collapse which I think is a
| sign of the way things are going.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> I 'm not seeing any signs that trends in fertility are
| turning around_
|
| I'm not sure how you could. The sentiment is only just
| starting to change as far as I can tell. It is too late
| for the current crop of young-ish adults. But I don't see
| the next generation, of what generation there is, coming
| up in the same environment where having children is
| demonized and seen as something reserved for the poor.
| For them, I fully expect having children will be the
| display of wealth; the "cool" thing to do.
|
| We see over and over and over again that the rich use
| their resources to set themselves apart from the poor in
| some way and then the poor try everything they can to
| emulate them. It is a tale as old as time. In this
| instance we saw the rich start to afford the luxury to
| choose to have children, and poorer people have been on
| the quest to copy them ever since. But now we're nearing
| a critical mass where the world has become rich enough
| that even the poorest people are now able to start
| thinking about foregoing having children. That signals
| that the current fashion trend is on the outs.
|
| I'm starting to see a shift towards _" Look at how rich I
| am. I can afford to have children and you can't!"_ You
| even alluded to that same shift in a previous comment, so
| it seems you're seeing it too. And we should expect
| something of the sort as it is the natural progression of
| fashion.
| kiba wrote:
| The problem is the lack of stability not wealth, though
| wealth should contribute to stability.
|
| Housing and transportation continue to dominate American
| household budget.
|
| Now, I did read that somebody suggesting that it's not
| cost but density that reduces population fertility. I
| would wonder if that just means we need to provide more
| spaces for families within cities.
| randomdata wrote:
| _> The problem is the lack of stability not wealth_
|
| Children are resilient. Hell, we've raised children
| through terrible wars and famines. Being born into a
| relatively peaceful era and the wealthiest time in
| history is about as stable as it gets.
|
| You may have a point that potential parents are putting
| pressure on themselves to be the perfect soccer mom and
| dads, carting their kids around in their Escalades, and
| then returning home to sleep in their mansions, and if
| they end up anywhere short of that they are not worthy of
| having children. But that's just part of the fashion du
| jour. Children don't need or even care for any of that.
|
| _> I did read that somebody suggesting that it 's not
| cost but density that reduces population fertility._
|
| I don't think anyone would seriously suggest that cost is
| a factor. Sure, there is that study that suggests it
| costs ~$10,000-20,000+ per year to raise a child, but
| when you look closely the cost is for things like buying
| a bigger house. You don't need a bigger house to raise
| children. Look at what American settlers raised children
| in: Tiny, single room log cabins. And they had, on
| average, eight children living in them!
|
| The density suggestion is interesting, although I'm not
| sure it tracks. For example, the least dense US states,
| Maine and Vermont with only ~35% urbanization, have lower
| fertility than New York and California with ~90%
| urbanization. I expect what was noticed is merely
| correlationary as urbanization and the general ability to
| opt to not have children are both not realistic until a
| society reaches a certain level of wealth. In other
| words, the societies that are rich enough to opt to have
| few children are also more likely to be urbanized.
|
| But humans are social creatures. And it hasn't been
| socially acceptable to have children in the modern age,
| at least not until you are into your 30s, at which point
| go ahead, society gives the green light (It will even
| start to cry: "Why haven't you had children yet???") -
| but by then, good luck having more than approximately one
| child before biology puts an end to the party.
| dheera wrote:
| > They were told that to have children was a failing
|
| Were they? High-achiever families routinely demonize
| having relationships at 16 but then turn it around VERY
| QUICKLY after getting that college degree and want their
| children to get married and have kids before 30.
|
| (That said many high achievers themselves don't actually
| want to have kids, despite family pressure to have kids
| at 30.)
| rustcleaner wrote:
| >The people of typical child rearing age today grew up in
| the "16 and pregnant" era, where having children was
| demonized. They were told that to have children was a
| failing, and that they should focus on their career
| instead - that was the key to a successful, happy life.
| Social pressure is a hell of a drug.
|
| You could _almost_ call that a genocide... if the
| originator of that messaging authored it to cause a birth
| collapse. Throw in every public policy decision made to
| economically destroy single-earner households and it
| really _almost_ starts looking like genocide (or
| democide?)...
| silverquiet wrote:
| If the future is agrarian, extremely-religious people living
| a very low-productivity lifestyle of essentially subsistence
| farming, then that's probably actually a nice balance for the
| Earth and humanity. However it really doesn't feel like
| that's where things are headed in spite of the current
| demographic trends you note. In a sense, I think that's the
| way the Americas were before Columbus re-united them with the
| old world.
| harimau777 wrote:
| Have you lived in that sort of society? It's not great for
| humanity.
| silverquiet wrote:
| I don't know about great for humanity, but sustainable
| probably. I sit behind a keyboard for a living; while I
| might harbor some romantic notions about a pastoral life,
| deep down I know I'm not cut out for it. And the heat
| index where I live now gets into the one-teens every
| summer so I really don't think I'm cut out for it.
|
| Also, I'm not one to complain about downvotes - I can
| take my knocks, but I'm a bit surprised that my comment
| is rather disliked; it's just my thought at that moment.
| skissane wrote:
| > Also the groups that have many kids (the Amish have 7
| children on average, and you also have Mormons and Orthodox
| Jews) will expand exponentially
|
| I agree with your overall point, and about the Amish and
| Orthodox Jews (especially the ultra-Orthodox,
| Hasidic/Haredi).
|
| However, for Mormons, I'm not sure that is true. Mormons, in
| the US at least, have plummeting fertility rates, and also a
| lot of problems with retaining their younger members. They
| don't belong to the same category as Amish and ultra-Orthodox
| do, they are converging to the American secular mainstream
| while those groups remain on a clearly different trajectory
| from it.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| It's also possible that secular society creates effective
| off-ramps to convert the hyper-religious to secular values.
| I'm uncertain if this will work given how successful the
| in-group remains despite the internet and modern social
| media.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Too early to tell. Wait a couple more generations.
| silverquiet wrote:
| God is dead and we have killed him - Nietzsche was onto
| this quite early into modernity.
| skissane wrote:
| Many ultra-Orthodox Jews use "Kosher Internet filters" -
| filters that block content that isn't approved by their
| rabbis. In Israel, you can buy "Kosher phones" which have
| this software pre-installed by the telco and locked down
| so you can't remove it.
|
| People assume that technology necessarily encourages
| secularism, but it doesn't inevitably do so. Technology
| also makes possible new methods of social control which
| can be used to suppress secularism.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Every Mennonite I know has 0 kids. Of course I only know
| those who have left the community, but I think it is an
| illustrative anecdote.
| skissane wrote:
| When I say "Amish" I mean "Old Order Amish". Mennonites
| have both lower fertility and lower retention, so their
| demographic future is less bright overall.
|
| That said, there is a subgroup of the Mennonites, the Old
| Order Mennonites, who have fertility and retention much
| closer to that of the Old Order Amish. The Wenger
| Mennonites, in particular, are rather similar in those
| measures. But only around a third of Old Order Mennonites
| are Wenger, and only around 15% of Mennonites in the US
| are Old Order.
| iiovemiku wrote:
| From my perspective, the only reason they are resistant to
| societal factors that drive people to have less kids is that
| their strong religious values (which are held together by
| their strong communities). So this really begs the question
| of what society will look like if the only people who will be
| breeding in the future are those who form tight communities
| that promote relatively religiously extreme values (that
| happen to include having lots of children).
| oconnor663 wrote:
| If we could keep running this era of civilization forever,
| Matrix style, I'm sure that would be true. But how many more
| generations will there be before AI+biotech lead to us, I
| don't know, 3D-printing people? The old laws might not have
| many cycles left to go before the new ones show up...
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| My problem with it is that it is a public policy failure.
| Capitalism and perpetual economic growth fundamentally needs
| more people.
|
| At some point economies will do the math and public policy
| and figure out how to keep the expansion going.
|
| The US hasn't done it because Mexican immigration fills the
| gaps. But Germany, China, Russia, and (holy crap) South Korea
| (although I suspect South Korea will absorb a shitton of
| North Koreans some day when the regime collapses).
|
| What happenes when biotech extends human life and achieves
| the artificial womb? Go ahead, say its impossible.
| justin66 wrote:
| > My problem with the "peak population" hypothesis is that
| all of the non-breeders will eliminate themselves from the
| gene pool soon.
|
| Ah yes, the "breeder" gene. Very sound thinking.
| doug_durham wrote:
| This is a pretty "icky" comment. Naming specific groups that
| will be growing exponentially has echos of less savory
| characters using these arguments for political gain.
|
| It is very unlikely that any group will have long term
| exponential growth. As pointed elsewhere where this type of
| growth doesn't scale. The groups you mention have been around
| for centuries and they haven't become dominant. Social
| cohesion falls apart over time.
| skissane wrote:
| > - Peak baby - 2013. [2]
|
| I think your source's claim that "The planet will never see
| more babies than it has in 2013" is open to question.
|
| To just use the US as an example: mainstream Americans have a
| declining fertility rate, and we have no reason to think that
| is going to reverse in the foreseeable future. Immigrants have
| higher fertility, but they tend to converge to the mainstream
| after a generation or two. So, that seems to support the
| article's contention, at least for the US - and if we look at
| other countries, we observe things are broadly similar, so that
| in turn supports that contention for the planet as a whole.
|
| However, we also observe in the US small, ultra-conservative
| religious minorities, such as the Amish and ultra-Orthodox
| Jews, who still have a high fertility rate, and also have high
| youth retention (80-90% of their children will stay in the
| group as adults). Now, even though these groups are a tiny
| percentage of the population, the miracle of exponential growth
| means that within 2-3 centuries, they could be the majority of
| the US population, which could then result in a national baby
| boom. And, eventually, as they spread across the globe (they
| exist to varying degrees in other countries too), a global baby
| boom. So 2013's "peak baby" may end up being surpassed.
|
| Of course, there is no guarantee that is going to happen -
| maybe they'll get to a certain size, and then they'll stop
| growing. And of course, it is physically impossible to sustain
| exponential growth indefinitely. However, it remains a possible
| future that they won't stop growing until _after_ they 've
| gotten so big that 2013 turns out not to be the year of "peak
| baby" after all. Maybe it will actually be 2213 or 2313
| instead. Our descendants (if one happens to have them) will
| find out.
| bdjsiqoocwk wrote:
| > the miracle of exponential growth means that within 2-3
| centuries,
|
| I don't know if any realm of human sciences where
| extrapolating exponential growth yields trustworthy results,
| outside maybe of wealth accumulation, and even then not for 2
| _centuries_.
| skissane wrote:
| I never claimed that it is _inevitable_ that they 'll
| sustain their current growth rate for the next 2-3
| centuries, only that it is _entirely possible_. And I don
| 't see why it wouldn't be. If you look at ultra-Orthodox
| Jews in New York/New Jersey, I don't see how they'd hit any
| natural barriers to their continued growth until they are
| many times larger than they are now, at which point they'd
| be a serious challenger for becoming the population
| majority.
|
| The main ways it might not happen would be if either (1)
| they (gradually or suddenly) abandon their current culture
| for a less fertile one, (2) mainstream society persecutes
| them sufficiently. Both are entirely possible, but neither
| is anywhere near certain.
|
| The situation for the (Old Order) Amish is more difficult,
| since - unlike ultra-Orthodox Jews - they'll run out of
| enough land to sustain their agrarian lifestyle, and will
| have to transition to a more urban one. While the more
| urban lifestyle of ultra-Orthodox Jews demonstrates it is
| possible for insular high fertility religious minorities to
| exist in an urban setting, there is a real risk that they
| might lose their fertility and/or their insularity in the
| process.
|
| Also, people often bring up the problem Israel has with
| many ultra-Orthodox Jews not working and relying on
| government subsidies to live. That is much less of a
| problem in the US than it is in Israel, so the
| sustainability of that lifestyle is less of a barrier to
| future growth in the US than it is in Israel. Furthermore,
| the fact they manage to grow so much in the US without
| doing that, means being forced to stop doing that isn't
| necessarily going to stop their growth in Israel either.
| joshuahedlund wrote:
| What are their historical and present population and
| growth numbers?
| skissane wrote:
| Consider a place like Kiryas Joel, New York: in the 2000
| census it had a population of 13,138; by 2010 it had
| grown to 20,175 (a 53.6% increase over the decade); by
| 2020 it had grown to 32,954 (a 63.3% increase over the
| decade); the US Census Bureau's 2022 estimate is 38,998 -
| 18.3% in only two years. The vast majority of that growth
| is due to births not migration. It is now the largest
| municipality in its county, and also its MSA - in 2023,
| the White House renamed the Poughkeepsie-Newburgh-
| Middletown MSA to the Kiryas Joel-Poughkeepsie-Newburgh
| MSA, in recognition that it has overtaken Poughkeepsie
| proper as the MSA's most populous municipality (although
| greater Poughkeepsie is still larger)
|
| And Kiryas Joel is expanding in its _de facto_ area: as
| its spiritual leader, Satmar Rebbe Aron Teitelbaum likes
| to say, its "holy borders" go further than its legal
| boundaries under New York state law, although very likely
| the legal boundaries will at some point grow too. And,
| there are similar ultra-Orthodox communities in other
| parts of New York state, and also in New Jersey
| (especially Lakewood)
| jacobolus wrote:
| Ultra-orthodox communities (like everyone else in the
| modern world, with vanishingly few exceptions) are
| entirely dependent on the broader society/economy. Under
| the implausible scenario where they approached a majority
| of the population, they'd inevitably (a) diffuse _much_
| more broadly into the rest of the population, and (b)
| make their current set of organizing practices
| unsustainable, without any persecution involved.
| skissane wrote:
| Of course they are going to have to change as they grow.
| The question is how big the changes will be.
|
| We already see this in Israel - a big increase in Haredi
| women pursuing secular careers. In other communities
| worldwide, that development ended up significantly
| undermining the patriarchal culture and producing a
| demographic transition to lower fertility. But, will it
| necessarily have the same consequences for the Haredim?
| We will have to wait and see: maybe it will, maybe it
| won't. Precedent would suggest the Haredim won't be able
| to avoid that outcome, but the situation on the ground
| suggests that maybe they will
|
| I'm not claiming any of this is inevitable, only
| _possible_ , _plausible_. Nobody knows for certain what
| the future holds-we shall find out
| jacobolus wrote:
| Almost anything is "possible", but this seems entirely
| implausible, based on extrapolation that goes at least an
| order of magnitude beyond anything supportable by
| evidence or careful argument. Can you name any other
| examples of this happening throughout history, in the US
| or anywhere else, where a completely self-isolated tiny
| minority group took power and displaced everyone through
| "out-procreating" them?
|
| To be honest I really dislike this kind of vague
| speculative fearmongering when targeted at specific
| minority groups, which seems extremely dangerous. It
| historically blends right into overt bigotry and
| sectarian oppression.
|
| The US has a long, proud tradition of all sorts of
| unusual sects and cults trying to do their own thing,
| often in somewhat closed communities, sometimes to the
| dismay of their neighbors, sometimes failing pretty
| badly, but usually without really breaking fair laws or
| causing serious mischief to anyone else (but also
| occasionally breaking a lot of laws and hurting people;
| the police should go after such cults). We all owe quite
| a few of the rights we take for granted to the hard
| struggle of some of these groups to make their own
| choices.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >Can you name any other examples of this happening
| throughout history, in the US or anywhere else, where a
| completely self-isolated tiny minority group took power
| and displaced everyone through "out-procreating" them?
|
| Kiryas Joel NY, Lakewood NJ, certain parts of Brooklyn.
| They basically have their own government, and they have
| far less state government oversight due to politicians
| not wanting to go against them.
|
| They drive around NYC with vehicles that look like cop
| cars, acting like cops, which would get most other groups
| charged with impersonating a government official. They
| elect themselves to the school board and vote to
| prioritize funding for their group's children, and
| deprioritize funding for any other group's children. Etc
| etc.
|
| Not that they are the only group to have done it, but
| these are your easy to google examples.
| DavidPiper wrote:
| > Maybe it will actually be 2213 or 2313 instead. Our
| descendants (if one happens to have them) will find out.
|
| Peak-anything is just shorthand for "the first peak on
| record" because our culture and ability to record-keep has
| only really existed in a population and resource boom period.
|
| I agree that circumstances might mean that the global peak
| baby might be 200-300 years away, but the thing that makes
| the current round of peak-anything relevant is that we don't
| know how our social and economic systems will function when
| certain things are in long-term decline (even if they do pick
| up again in a few hundred years).
|
| If we knew what a few centuries of low birth rates or low oil
| consumption looked like, we wouldn't be nearly as interested
| in what "peak-those-things" means, the same way we're not all
| that interested in specific market peaks because we
| understand the boom/bust cycles and long-term productivity
| increases, etc.
| JeremyNT wrote:
| > _Peak-anything is just shorthand for "the first peak on
| record" because our culture and ability to record-keep has
| only really existed in a population and resource boom
| period._
|
| Humans are presumably always going to want babies. There's
| nothing to really replace them.
|
| On the other hand, coal/oil/pollution all seem highly
| likely to be a transient phase of industrialization.
| There's no reason to think we should ever go back to
| burning coal or oil once we have renewables.
|
| Oil is tricky in that we do like plastic and there's no
| obvious alternate material, but the amount of oil needed
| for plastic will be minuscule compared to the amount of oil
| burned as we bootstrap to renewable energy sources.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > mainstream Americans
|
| What is a mainstream American?
| skissane wrote:
| I mean mainstream American society of secular to moderately
| religious people, as opposed to ultra-religious minorities
| such as ultra-Orthodox Jews or Old Order Amish
|
| I mean the term quite broadly and inclusively, since many
| of the big divides within American society (ethnicity,
| race, politics, class) make a relatively modest difference
| to fertility rates, and those differences appear to be
| shrinking over time
| Andrex wrote:
| Legally speaking?
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_person
| SantalBlush wrote:
| Any American who likes Tom Petty.
| bregma wrote:
| SWM
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Putting aside the considerable statistical skepticism, the
| natural next question we all have at noticing these trends is
| - is there any way for secular society to get some of the
| "special sauce" these ultra-religious groups have, before the
| aggregate supply of everything starts to fall?
|
| Secular pronatalism doesn't seem like it has a lot of staying
| power with most people as an ideology. But I've been on board
| for a long time, and so have a lot of my friends. So maybe
| the best answer is the common sense one: Wait a few
| generations for all those not susceptible to the secular
| pronatalism mind virus to select out of the gene pool, and
| hope society doesn't crumble under its own technical debt in
| the meanwhile.
| nyokodo wrote:
| > Wait a few generations ... and hope society doesn't
| crumble
|
| We don't have a few generations until we are beyond the
| point where we can mathematically recover unless we develop
| economic mass adult-cloning technology and develop the
| psycho-social faculties to integrate that into a healthy
| (enough) society. The world won't end, but let's just say
| hyper-advanced visions of the future seem unlikely at this
| point.
| vouwfietsman wrote:
| Secular pronatalism as an ideology is new to me, but
| obviously the main limiting factor in fertility rates
| globally is just a mismatch in the lifestyle of the modern
| luxury-expecting freedom-enjoying individual vs the self
| sacrifice needed to do child raising. I would say a
| significant part of that is financial and time-related,
| both things which have obvious political, not ideological,
| solutions. Fighting the ideology of individualism with an
| ideology of self sacrifice did not work for climate change
| and will not work for pronatalism.
|
| I often joke to my peers: it doesn't matter what I invest
| in, my best financial decision was buying a house, my worst
| financial decision was having kids, the rest is just
| screwing around in the margin.
| skissane wrote:
| I'm sceptical about how successful secular pronatalism can
| be. Large families, generation after generation, can come
| at a substantial personal cost, and it is a difficult sell
| for individuals if it is just a matter of principle, as
| opposed to something backed by promises and threats of post
| mortem reward and punishment. Furthermore, many religious
| pronatal groups reduce defections by socially ostracising
| and demonising defectors, making defection expensive. That
| kind of behaviour is much easier to justify given religious
| premises than secular ones. So I doubt secular pronatalism
| is ever going to be as successful as religious pronatalism.
| At its best, it might see some success under particularly
| favourable circumstances, but religious pronatalism will
| thrive in far less favourable conditions
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| To be successful, I think we need to bring back the "it
| takes a village to raise a child" mentality. We need to
| take some of the burden off of the parents.
| ativzzz wrote:
| This requires a cultural overhaul. Secular western
| culture is too individualistic and is incompatible with
| "village" behavior
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Not going to happen to a large capacity under
| multicultural societies; no matter how hard you
| indoctrinate children, humans will retain their racial-
| tribal differences and will tend to segregate if not
| forced together by economics and state violence.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| True, true. The evil vizier-economist's answer would be
| to notice that statisticians tend to estimate the value
| of a human life at around $10 million on average, and
| then notice that raising a child in the United States
| costs a paltry $250,000 or so over 18 years, and finally
| start to wonder how they can facilitate smoothing out
| that discrepancy across space and time to the parents'
| benefit. I"m not crazy enough to think far along those
| dimensions, but there is a big mismatch here that I think
| would be core to any secular solution to the problem.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I rarely run into a person that values their own life as
| high as 10 million dollars, unless they're quite wealthy.
| kaashif wrote:
| Really? I would value my life much more than that.
|
| I think how the question is phrased really matters.
|
| How much do you value your life? Or how much would
| someone have to pay you to kill yourself?
|
| Are these even different questions?
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I was recently buying an older car and calculating out
| how much buying a newer car with more safety features was
| worse by assigning a value to my life/health and the risk
| of death and the risk of injury. I see used cars which
| generation over generation have major safety upgrades
| which, if you value your life at 10 million would
| probably save you 10 grand or so over the life of the
| car, having a gulf in price of a few thousand, and most
| of that value difference wasn't because of the safety
| features.
|
| I guess it's possible people are just ignorant, but in
| general I see people especially men acting recklessly
| enough with their lives that they seem to not ascribe the
| highest values to them. They would rather have a shorter
| life where they have more money and other things.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Religion doesn't mean Ahura Mazda flapping about under
| the sun, getting all melty-winged.
|
| Everybody who gets up in the morning and behaves in the
| ways they honestly believe are right has religion,
| including the non-spiritual.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| In the context of this discussion and skissane's comment,
| religion is the tapestry of traditions/"beliefs" that
| bind a tribal group together.
|
| I write "beliefs" in quotes because there are beliefs
| (i.e. assumptions) that people might have philosophically
| on how they model the world, and there are "beliefs" that
| people espouse they have as a means to bond with other
| members of the tribe.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I don't see it as all that hard to imagine secular
| pronatalism. You just need the non-parents to subsidise
| the parents. We saw several examples of this under
| communism.
| riffraff wrote:
| The special sauce seem to be forbidden contraceptives and
| limited opportunities.
|
| Yes, there's also a kind of mandate in the bible to be
| fruitful and multiply, and the fact that if you grow up in
| a larger family you tend to have a larger family, but I
| would bet the other factors matter more.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Are you and your friends men? Unfortunately, the people who
| truly produce the next generation are largely absent from
| places like Hacker News, and history seems to show that,
| once they have any other options, spending 15-30 of their
| prime years doing the energetic equivalent of 40
| consecutive Tour de Frances 9 months out of every 18, while
| being entirely dependent on a physically larger, stronger
| person who may or may not have legal and/or social sanction
| to beat you, is less appealing than living the way you and
| I live, as we please.
|
| I'm guessing the only thing that will ever reverse this
| will be the invention of artificial wombs.
|
| For what it's worth, I'm personally on board with having as
| many children as possible. Life is a cherished miracle. But
| I also can't bear children and take no risk in this
| endeavor.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| I find it funny when men talk about having as many kids
| as possible when they take on 0% of the health risk, have
| no expectation of quitting their job, and statistically
| have a low chance of becoming a single parent.
|
| Seeing it from the side of a Woman, it's no wonder birth
| rates are declining.
| missedthecue wrote:
| It definitely makes the policy predictions for how
| countries are going to deal with this much bleaker. Many
| countries have tried the carrot for years now. Get ready
| for them to start using the stick.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| If we start forcing women to carry children against their
| will maybe our civilization doesn't deserve to survive.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| >Unfortunately, the people who truly produce the next
| generation are largely absent from places like Hacker
| News, and history seems to show that, once they have any
| other options, spending 15-30 of their prime years doing
| the energetic equivalent of 40 consecutive Tour de
| Frances 9 months out of every 18, while being entirely
| dependent on a physically larger, stronger person who may
| or may not have legal and/or social sanction to beat you,
| is less appealing than living the way you and I live, as
| we please.
|
| Whoa that reads almost as loaded as my reply:
|
| I suspect collapse of nativity is why Feminism(tm) kills
| civilizations throughout antiquity.
| 39896880 wrote:
| Pronatalism doesn't belong to religion especially. People
| didn't used to have a lot of kids because God told them to,
| they had a lot of kids because they were free labor.
|
| In that way, the pendulum is already starting to swing the
| other way in the US with the loosening of child labor laws.
|
| Secularly, though, we'd have to do something to make it not
| hellishly expensive and inconvenient to have children. The
| US can't even extend the child tax credit, much less fix
| healthcare, housing, education, food deserts, or childcare
| all at once.
| navane wrote:
| I heard the retention of their offspring was 20%, so they
| have 5x more offspring, but only 20% of that stays 'in the
| group', net result 0.
| skissane wrote:
| Kiryas Joel, New York, is growing over 50% per decade. That
| is not consistent with "net result 0".
|
| If you look at the actual statistics on the growth of
| ultra-Orthodox Jews in the US and Israel, and Old Order
| Amish in the US, the actual figures are inconsistent with
| "net result 0"
| globalise83 wrote:
| The fact that these are still very much niche interests after
| many generations indicates that the social indoctrination
| processes needed to maintain such cultures are not scalable.
| skissane wrote:
| > The fact that these are still very much niche interests
| after many generations indicates that the social
| indoctrination processes needed to maintain such cultures
| are not scalable.
|
| In 2023, Israel contained over 1.28 million ultra-Orthodox
| Jews, 13.5% of Israel's population. It is estimated that by
| the end of this decade, it will be over 16%. [0] By shortly
| after 2065, it is estimated that 50% of Israeli children
| will be Haredi. [1] I think this is counterevidence to your
| claim - the social indoctrination processes necessary to
| maintain Israeli ultra-Orthodox Judaism have already scaled
| to over 1 million people, and are projected to scale much
| further than that
|
| [0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/haredim-are-fastest-
| growing-po...
|
| [1] https://archive.md/lYYgK
| globalise83 wrote:
| So in % terms not even a rounding error of the global
| population by 2085. These religious communities rely on
| both cult-like indoctrination and quasi-incestuous family
| networking in tandem to survive. We are not going to see
| Amish or ultraorthodox Jewish populations taking over the
| world.
| stevenally wrote:
| Don't the Haredi refuse to enlist? Doesn't seem
| sustainable...
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| > the miracle of exponential growth means that within 2-3
| centuries, they could be the majority of the US population
|
| It's so unhelpful to speculate about what the world will be
| like 100 years from now.
|
| Think about what things were like in the 1920's and how
| unrecognizable the world is by comparison. Then, consider
| that technology is being developed significantly more quickly
| than it was in the 1920's.
| tlocke wrote:
| True, I struggle to think 10 years ahead these days. The
| horizon for predictions is definitely shrinking.
| rustcleaner wrote:
| Just a friendly reminder to modern Progressives that (on
| average) you will not be in the future described by parent
| because you were tricked into an anti-natalist posture and
| will fail to reproduce adequately. It's a problem which kills
| itself in time so long as the problem doesn't ideologically
| metastasize into competiting populations.
| doug_durham wrote:
| Ahh, so conspiracies now. Interesting approach. "They"
| tricked us with the ever menacing "they".
| happypumpkin wrote:
| Their theory also depends on the children of the
| "conservatives that have the most kids" remaining
| conservative, which I haven't observed among my own
| social group. My friends that had the most conservative
| parents (ex: Jehovah's Witnesses) went the furthest in
| the opposite direction, becoming progressives who don't
| want many (or any) kids.
|
| Personally, I'd rather have fewer kids and be able to
| give them more attention and resources.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| >the miracle of exponential growth means that within 2-3
| centuries, they could be the majority of the US population,
| which could then result in a national baby boom.
|
| Only if their reproductive habits do not change in that time.
| Hard to project out 3 centuries with a good deal of accuracy.
| iiovemiku wrote:
| Wow, seeing peak baby is a little scary honestly. I had always
| thought that low birth rates were a problem for only countries
| like Germany, Spain, Japan, etc. (at least for the time being).
|
| Seeing countries like India even out (and even going under
| replacement rate) gives me some heavy pessimism about
| population graying. I had always thought that heavy swingers
| like them would carry on the whole growing population thing for
| a good few more decades.
|
| Looks like we're more or less on a crash course in the next few
| decades, especially with lifespans moving as they are.
| Nicholas_C wrote:
| Will be very troublesome for countries with low fertility
| that can't attract immigrants to keep the population from
| declining.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Countries like India, all of South East Asia, all of LatAm,
| a good amount of North Africa... all below replacement and
| falling fast. Argentina's incoming preschool class in 2024
| is 30% smaller than the class of 2020. That's how quickly
| this is happening.
| grecy wrote:
| > _Wow, seeing peak baby is a little scary honestly_
|
| Are you worried 8 billion is somehow not enough humans?
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| 100% agree, this is not a real problem and is better than
| the alternative.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| Yeah, I've never understood the panic over a declining
| birth rate. Are we to be scared that long after we're all
| dead and gone there would only be several billion humans on
| this planet?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The concern is increasing taxation of the young,
| productive population to sustain the old, non productive
| population causing political turmoil and decreasing
| national competitiveness on the global scale.
| nasmorn wrote:
| Clearly the old people of the future(us) will fight for
| their pensions in the thunderdome. Which also perfectly
| explains a lot of the ads I got recently about very
| muscular old guys
| missedthecue wrote:
| Really, they will fight in the voting booth. Imagine US
| politics right now, but the boomer generation is 3x as
| big. That is going to be reality in most democracies in
| the next 20-40 years.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| Good point, young people just out of college who have
| lived off of their parents and the government for a
| quarter of a century might get upset about having to
| support non-productive people.
| ncruces wrote:
| People will finally figure out that they're only
| productive for about a half their lives, and that it's
| not just the last quarter that they need help with, it's
| also the first.
|
| The _real_ problem is the transition period where there
| are more unproductive people than not, because the stock
| of existing people is still here. That 's why a crashing
| population is bad.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| The question is if the complex society we have built
| actually requires growth to maintain it. In other words,
| our society requires 0.6 lives of work rather than 0.5.
|
| If this is the case, even a steady state would mean a
| lowered standard of living.
|
| It's hard to know, as our societies have decided to
| reduce costs on the front end (lowered birth rate) rather
| than on the back end (decreased longevity). That's
| understandable as someone who is never born doesn't
| suffer, but it's the worse solution from a social
| maintenance standpoint.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| The impact won't just be after we're dead, we're simply
| going to have less warm bodies to provide us care when
| we're seniors and retired than exist today. Schemes like
| social security, pensions, etc which are financed by new
| entrants into the system will also become fiscally
| unviable and benefits WILL be reduced.
| Lammy wrote:
| Luckily _I 'm_ one of the Chosen Few who would always have
| been allowed to exist.
| casercaramel144 wrote:
| I mean yeah. Not existing has a utility value of 0. You
| can make the same argument for people who don't exist
| yet. Is it infinite utility to go around as a government
| and force people to pump out 100 babies a year? Since not
| existing is so bad?
|
| TBH if I never existed by definition I would be fine with
| it, you know, since I don't exist and was never born. I
| don't think its coherent to measure things from aggregate
| utilitarian POV, since the optimal solution seems
| relentless expansionism like a virus.
| Lammy wrote:
| > I don't think its coherent to measure things from
| aggregate utilitarian POV
|
| I do, because second-person collectively-singular
| Humanity is a living thing all its own, and the more
| humans there are the more alive We are. Your argument is
| the anthropological equivalent of "640K ought to be
| enough for anybody".
| harimau777 wrote:
| Having more than 640Kb of RAM isn't a good in of itself,
| it's only good in that applications arose which required
| more RAM.
|
| Similarly higher population isn't a good in of itself. It
| seems to me that there's much less evidence that there's
| something that needs higher population.
|
| I don't see how higher population necessarily makes
| humanity as a collective organism more human. That seems
| like saying that an individual human is more human if
| they weigh more.
| Lammy wrote:
| > I don't see how
|
| Try ketamine some time with good sensory deprivation --
| comfy bed, silk sleep mask, ear plugs :)
| casercaramel144 wrote:
| So by the tyranny of exponential growth, we should just
| start building massive breeding factories and forceably
| enslaving people randomly matching them to have children?
| Because this could actually be the optimal policy if we
| take your view of "second persons" to it's optimum.
|
| In your world governments forceably breed humans like
| chickens in massive factory farms churning out people to
| the carrying capacity of the planet. I don't want to live
| there and I sure as hell don't find it moral.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Why not encourage through policy and taxation changes?
| Invest in culture that promotes. Restructure society to
| encourage having babies at an earlier age.
| snapcaster wrote:
| You think maybe there could be a pretty large spectrum of
| solutions between stopping population growth and massive
| forced breeding factories?
| Lammy wrote:
| > Because this could actually be the optimal policy if we
| take your view of "second persons" to it's optimum.
|
| Maybe if you're evil enough to not care about any
| individual human's quality of life. Is there a word for
| the logical fallacy where you argue against the most
| absurd possible interpretation of a person's beliefs in
| order to feel no guilt for disregarding them?
| iiovemiku wrote:
| Population increase (and the increase of its increase) has
| always been a constant for as long as I've lived so yes I
| suppose. I don't think we are prepared for the spout of
| working-age people to start slowing down (especially with
| the population of the elderly only getting higher).
|
| Assuming we only get this planet though, I suppose it
| couldn't've gone like this forever haha.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| The issue is that a lot of countries have based everything
| around growth, including population.
|
| Pensions is a big one, another one is care for elders.
|
| It's not a problem if we had eased up to say 1 billion and
| stayed there, but the rate of change is quite abrupt.
| grecy wrote:
| > _The issue is that a lot of countries have based
| everything around growth, including population_
|
| And it is very, very ,very clear this is a horribly
| stupid and shortsighted thing to do. It is simply
| impossible to have constant growth, clearly it is
| unsustainable.
|
| The system HAS to change. It might be from a slow and
| steady decline, or it might be a very abrupt change, but
| it's _going_ to change one way or another.
| moralestapia wrote:
| Yes, I am. Humans don't live forever. No offspring and it's
| all gone in one generation, disregarding if they're 8
| billion or 100 billion.
| Retric wrote:
| Humanity will eventually go extinct, but birth rates
| would need to decline much further or stay this for a
| very long time before it's a meaningful issue.
|
| Further, people alive in 2300 will be decedents of people
| who chose to have kids generation after generation
| despite living in an industrialized environment. That
| self selection both in terms of DNA and culture means a
| population bounce back becomes increasingly likely over
| time especially as fewer people means less pollution and
| less competition for resources.
|
| Humanity might even end up cycling through
| industrialization, collapse, hunter gatherers,
| agriculture, industrialization, multiple times before
| settling on some stable equilibrium. You just can't
| extrapolate exponential curves indefinitely when they
| depend on the population size.
| tlocke wrote:
| Yes, fertility is heritable.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| A big dividing line is between those who think people are a
| burden vs those who think they're an asset.
|
| I've grown convinced people are overwhelmingly an asset. In
| a rough sense that means they/we produce more value than
| they consume on average.
|
| I think debates about population size are mostly really
| about this difference.
| snapcaster wrote:
| Thanks for putting this so well, I think that is the
| divide as well. I've struggled to express this idea
| without being too offensive to the "liability" camp but i
| think you've made it more clear and less emotionally
| charged
| abdullahkhalids wrote:
| The key phrase in your problem statement is "more value",
| which assumes that all value can be projected onto a
| single axis. Typically [1], this means that you can
| assign a dollar value to any change in the physical world
| [2].
|
| The "debate" for many people is whether this simplistic
| economic model can be used at all. They say that value is
| multi-dimensional, and those value dimensions are not
| fungible. Concretely, if making a medicine factory
| results in the extinction of a specie, you can't say that
| it is okay, because the benefit of the former is
| incomparable to the loss of the latter.
|
| Coming to population, more humans mean more destruction
| of ecosystems. And it is not clear whether destroying
| ecosystems can be fungibly compared to the additional
| human economic value those extra humans create. It's not
| about more or less, it the incomparability of the two.
|
| [1] but not necessarily what you meant
|
| [2] Just to be clear, the economics discipline already
| has a wealth of research that humans cannot in fact
| consistently assign absolute or relative dollar values to
| the same thing. Yet our political-economy and popular
| conceptions have this as a central assumption.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| [1] is right.
|
| This argues against something I didn't say and don't
| believe.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The way the burdens and assets scale is non-linear.
| There's no reason to expect that we _always_ or _never_
| want the population to go up, regardless of current
| population.
|
| And we went from 1 billion to 2 billion to 8 billion very
| very fast. The burdens are really piling up.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| it's scary because our form of capitalism (growth
| capitalism) is not the right type of capitalism for that
| situation. And, policymakers don't seem to fully grasp that
| you need to prepare ahead for demographic shifts (for
| example, china deciding to try to goose population growth
| by substituting one-child for "please make the state three+
| babies" as if that doesn't only help after at least two
| decades)
| 39896880 wrote:
| "Number of humans" is a nonsensical metric because it
| doesn't acknowledge the systems that humans comprise. For
| example, we depend on the young to earn/work and the middle
| aged to earn/work/invest to support the old/disabled. What
| happens when there are fewer young people, and then fewer
| middle aged people, to support the old /disabled not in
| just a few pockets of the world but in many countries all
| at once is still very much unknown.
|
| It's not the number of humans, it's the age distribution of
| those humans + where they live.
|
| Put another way: you can "feel" like the world needs fewer
| people, but you're probably not going to like what _your_
| world looks like when that desire comes true.
| missedthecue wrote:
| People all age at the same rate. 8 billion old people is a
| very scary prospect indeed. It's honestly shocking we ever
| talk about anything else.
| wongarsu wrote:
| We still won't reach peak population until 2060 at the
| earliest, and more likely around 2100. [1] has a good graph
| by region on page 4, and a graph for world population near
| the end. Most regions haven't reached their population peak
| yet and subsaharan Africa is still growing strongly.
|
| Of course a lot of this is just delayed by higher life
| expectancies. Aging populations will require major social
| reforms in our lifetime, and I don't think society is really
| prepared
|
| 1: https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.de
| ve...
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| I think you're looking at peak population, while they are
| talking about peak number of children. According to some
| reports, the number of children has already peaked[1]. The
| remaining growth is just momentum from past births.
|
| [1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-13/earths-
| population-rea...
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| You _think_ they 're doing the thing they explicitly
| stated they were doing?
| missedthecue wrote:
| People live for 80-100 years, so the population will
| gradually tick up. But once the very top-heavy global
| population pyramid begins to die off, things get extremely
| ugly, extremely quickly. In our lifetimes, we are going to
| see a horrific amount of elder poverty.
| rqtwteye wrote:
| At some point we can't rely on ever growing populations. It
| may be painful for a while but at some point growth has to
| stop.
| sexy_seedbox wrote:
| > _growth has to stop_
|
| But unlimited growth is always on the menu for startups and
| companies! Investors, am I right?!
|
| /s
| goatlover wrote:
| I've seen estimates on Earth's carrying capacity range form
| less than a billion to a trillion, all just depending on
| what you think technology and science can do in the future
| (think massive arcologies, super efficent AIs, giant space
| solar panels, and advanced molecular nanotech), and how
| resilient nature is.
|
| What can be said with confidence is that the Earth
| currently grows enough food to support 10 billion people,
| when some people back in the 60s and 70s predicted massive
| starvation and shortages would have happened long before
| that.
| xnx wrote:
| Crossing my fingers that we've also hit "peak extinction", and
| not just because we've killed off most of the vulnerable
| species already.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Peak Plastic?
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Hopefully peak plastic pollution, anyways. Plastic is a very
| useful substance, the issues are that it is made from fossil
| fuel and that its pollution is significant. If we capture
| carbon and then use that carbon as a feedstock to create
| plastic in a form that won't end up as a pollution (aka not
| plastic bottles or synthetic fleece) we can turn it into a
| positive.
| elijahbenizzy wrote:
| "Peak baby" is an objectively bad thing
| WA wrote:
| It's not. We need a sustainable size of population. Unlimited
| population growth is not sustainable. It doesn't mean that we
| are going to die out. It just means that there are as many
| newborns as old people dying. Check out this good old Hans
| Rosling video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezVk1ahRF78
| sMarsIntruder wrote:
| Everyone is entitled to their own ideas, but are we really
| associating 'peak baby' with global pollution?
|
| Humans certainly contribute to pollution, but we should address
| some ethical questions first.
| mpreda wrote:
| Well, yes.
|
| And, what are the ethical questions we should address first?
| cs702 wrote:
| I'm not sure "peak baby" is a good thing, but agree with you
| that the other three peaks are encouraging.
|
| Arguments by smart people like Sabine Hossenfelder have led me
| to question the conventional wisdom on population growth.
|
| For example, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VI1AaZ9OkH8 .
| Lord-Jobo wrote:
| I think peak baby is less about good or bad and more about a
| turning point for growth demand.
| jl6 wrote:
| Conventional wisdom on population growth is that it's a
| solved problem and that the population will inevitably
| stabilize or decline. I say let's not count our chickens just
| yet. There are still countries and groups where the growth
| rate hasn't stabilized at all, and even if these are small
| today, exponential growth means they soon won't be.
| Population growth will continue until _everyone_ agrees it
| shouldn't.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Due to the dynamics of demography, a population is either
| exponentially growing or exponentially shrinking. A stable
| population is an unrealistic goal.
| svnt wrote:
| You'll have to provide a lot more context for this to be
| believable. Maybe it is an unrealistic goal for animals
| who aren't interested in having a stable global
| population.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It follows naturally from differential equations that
| describe population:
|
| dPop / dt = fertility rate * pop (birth rate) - deaths
|
| Note the "current population" factor in that. _As long as
| the number of births depends on the current population_
| (i.e. anyone has a chance to give birth), this equation
| will result in an exponential curve. If the fertility
| rate is greater than replacement rate (that "deaths"
| term that I've handwaved away), the population will
| exponentially grow. If it's less than the replacement
| rate, the population will exponentially decay. But it is
| necessarily exponential, because it's a constant rate
| multiplied by the current population, and if you remember
| your calculus, an exponential is defined by a constant
| growth _rate_.
|
| There's a whole subfield of population dynamics, and I
| remember lots and lots of predator/prey models, resource
| constraint models, etc. from my applied calculus class.
| Some of those do have non-exponential growth curves, eg.
| a basic 2-species predator/prey model gives rise to
| sinusoidal population curves as the increase in prey
| leads to an increase in predators, which results in more
| of the prey being killed and eaten, which results in a
| decrease of food, which results in the predators dying
| off. But what they all have in common is _death rates
| that are proportional to some function of the current
| population_. In other words, you have to kill off
| proportionally more of the current population based on
| how many people they are, something which would be
| ethically unacceptable to most humans. If you just have
| natural deaths (i.e. a death rate proportional to Pop(t -
| life expectancy)), you always get either exponential
| growth or exponential decay, because that 's the way the
| math works.
|
| I suppose there was one other population curve that gives
| a sigmoid function (i.e. a logistic curve that
| asymptotically approaches a limit but never reaches it).
| This is what you get when there is a natural resource
| limit to giving birth, i.e. when instead of births being
| fertility rate * total population, it's fertility rate *
| (exponentially decreasing fraction of the population).
| Many people find this scenario ethically challenging as
| well: in plain English, it means that only the elite can
| afford to have kids, or alternatively - cap the number of
| houses so that only the top X families can have a house
| and raise a child, and then create social stigma around
| having kids when you cannot afford those increasingly
| scarce markers of stability. It is disturbingly close to
| reality, though.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Fantastic explanation, better than I could have put into
| words. Thanks for filling in.
| colechristensen wrote:
| It's nothing about agreement. Everywhere has declining
| birth rates once they hit a modern standard of living for
| at least a couple of generations. Not because people think
| fewer children are a good idea, but because having many
| children in modern world is unpleasant and very few want
| more than two.
|
| I think it mostly has to do with increasing desires for a
| high standard of living when it becomes possible and the
| pressure of high density cities making lots of kids an
| unattractive prospect.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| A shrinking population is fine, this planet has its limits.
|
| A rapidly shrinking population is not ideal.
| jandrese wrote:
| There is a lot of panic over shrinking population where
| people project it out 1000 years and find there are only
| like 5 people left in the world.
|
| Steady state population should be the long term goal, at
| least until we start moving into orbital colonies or
| something. But unfortunately that's an anathema to growth
| oriented economies which makes it the bad guy in economics
| and politics.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| I mean Japan hasn't been doing great but it's been doing
| fine, so I don't think the end of growth has to mean
| anything but a period of stagnation. The economy will be
| fine.
| missedthecue wrote:
| In your lifetime, Korea will have more than two 60+ year
| olds for every working person. They are screwed.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Korea also has a cultural practice of extreme ageism. So
| much so that the elderly are frequently impoverished to
| the point of food insecurity and committing suicide by
| jumping from bridges.
| missedthecue wrote:
| At fertility rates of 1.6, it takes just 25 generations
| for the global population to go from 8 billion to 900k.
| Just 10 generations for the global population to drop
| below 1 billion. Pretty scary stuff.
| rcxdude wrote:
| assuming fertility rates stay constant, which they rarely
| have. 250 years is a lot of time for things to change.
| (and of course there's no need for fertility rates to
| grow to as high as they have been historically, due to
| the massive drop in child mortality).
| missedthecue wrote:
| I'm not convinced it's a self-correcting problem.
| jandrese wrote:
| This is exactly my point. People assume that human
| behavior won't change if the population starts shrinking
| noticeably, especially if that shrinkage results in
| reduced housing pressures.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| That's an extreme drop rate for the whole globe to have,
| and a very long time, so I'm not scared by it.
|
| The population only went over 2 billion in 1927. Dropping
| from current numbers is fine, and less competition over
| space would be nice.
| missedthecue wrote:
| The issue isn't just the total number, it's the
| demography. The population is getting very old at a
| breakneck speed. I'm not sure how healthcare and pensions
| are supposed to be provided for old people when the tax
| base gets smaller and smaller every year. The end result
| is pretty terrible elder poverty.
|
| Not to mention the changing political dynamics of having
| a lot of old people outnumber younger people by 2 or 3
| times in the voting booth. The gerontocracy is bad enough
| now. Imagine it 3x worse.
| tiborsaas wrote:
| - Twin Peaks - 2017
| sandworm101 wrote:
| Anyone one to watch is 'peak road' or peak transport.
|
| Most countries continue to steadily expand transport
| infrastructure. Returning some of that back to a natural state,
| or just abandoning it, does happen but remains very rare.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Positive on the one hand, stupid it took us this long on the
| other.
| defrost wrote:
| It's worth looking back at 50 years of fossil fuel producers
| going into overdrive on casting FUD on harmful effects of CO2
| since it was first raised at the UN in the 1970s.
| hackerlight wrote:
| To clarify the article. This isn't peak CO2. It isn't even
| peak pollution. It's peak _first derivative of pollution ex.
| greenhouse gases_. We 'll get to peak CO2 when emissions of
| CO2 are net zero, so in a few decades at best. Until then
| atmospheric carbon and average temperatures will keep rising.
| defrost wrote:
| IIRC I had to do some of that calculus stuff before cutting
| loose on writing upwards and downwards magnetic field
| continuations for geophysical exploration software suites,
| so, yep, cheers for that.
|
| That aside, fifty years ago was when the dangers of
| increasing atmospheric insulation was raised as a serious
| potential issue in the UN, and fifty years ago was when the
| think tank ecology surrounding fossil fuel producers
| started churning articles on ice ages, _Climate, who really
| knows?_ , killing public transport initiatives, etc.
|
| Hindsight is famously 20|20 but it serves us well to
| remember past playbooks; it wasn't just pure stupidty,
| there were people who knew better actively promoting larger
| cars and greater per capita consumption rather than looking
| to lower total emissions.
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| Speaking of pure stupidity, I definately sometimes am.
|
| That said, even when there's evidently plenty of malice
| around, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that enough
| cooperators can figure out how to coordinate despite all
| the damned defectors!
| ajross wrote:
| Silent Spring was published just 61 years ago (and on top of
| that into a world with less than half its current population!).
| Seems like we did pretty well, to me.
| MaxHoppersGhost wrote:
| Posted from a huge house with air conditioning while using
| multiple petroleum products (iPhone/computer, chair, desk,
| fleece, etc). The pollution lifted every single person's
| standard of living across the globe to levels unimaginable 100
| years ago. It's easy to be in Seattle or New York and say we
| gotta stop burning oil and coal but there are trade offs that
| were worth making. If you live in a developing country without
| aircon those trade offs are still worth making.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Every single person? Not exactly. What about farmers forced
| off their land for corporate interests? What about people
| working in the garbage dumps of Tijuana in Mexico [1]? I've
| actually lived in the "first world" (born there) and now have
| lived over a year in a developing country where most people
| (including myself) don't have "aircon", and whether
| technology has improved things is not as clearcut as you
| might think.
|
| Yes, we have better health care and more products, but we
| also have more pollution, more meaningless jobs, weaker local
| communities (especially in the most developed parts of the
| world), and beautiful species are going extinct.
|
| Actually, I think the standard of living, at least in the
| long-term and for the many future climate refugees, is not
| actually that much improved.
|
| [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-
| xpm-1988-07-25-mn-4650-s...
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| > Actually, I think the standard of living, at least in the
| long-term and for the many future climate refugees, is not
| actually that much improved.
|
| This is basically pure anecdote.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Tell that to the people in Mato Gross do Sul now who
| don't even have running water now because of the extreme
| weather events caused by technology. Just an anecdote, I
| guess.
| knowaveragejoe wrote:
| It's cold and harsh, but yes that's just an anecdote.
| What do you mean extreme weather caused by technology?
| rcMgD2BwE72F wrote:
| Internal combustion engines
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| I find it truly amusing how any suggestion that technology
| LOWERS our standard of living is immediately met with a
| severe reaction here. It's as though it is gospel, to be
| assumed without any question. Technophiles are truly
| narrow-minded.
| fragmede wrote:
| the micro view of technology is that it improves things.
| how could it be otherwise? the things that used to take a
| painful ten hours can now be done in six, without painf.
| it's not until you look at capitalism, realize that we're
| not all on the same team, that things go awry. see, we
| invented this thing called money, and things have gone
| downhill ever since. there have been some good things to
| come out of it, sure, but the thing of it is, we're
| already at a place where we can make enough food for
| everybody yet people die of starvation every day because
| we can't get over ourselves because they don't have money
| so they don't deserve to eat, even though there's food
| right there! so technologists keep invention new
| technologies and society just has to deal with these
| technologies. because we can't just have a society where
| everyone is fed and has a roof over their heads and can
| do whatever else they want to do with their time.
|
| so the macro view, that some technologies have actually
| lowered our standard of living, is difficult, because
| it's not the technology's fault! it's only when you have
| to deal with other people that there are problems. throw
| in 7 billion other people and of course things are bad .
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| Yes, that is very true. The micro perspective is that it
| improves things indeed, which is why it is hard to
| understand its true nature, which is just pure
| development of itself. But in fact, the Greeks already
| realized it in their creation of the words "techne" and
| "logos", which form the modern word "technology"!
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Actually, I think the standard of living, at least in the
| long-term and for the many future climate refugees, is not
| actually that much improved.
|
| Compared to what? Where do you draw the line of the "pre"
| technology? Technology has been as part of human society
| since before we invented history.
|
| Do you have a specific point after which you think
| technology became a net negative? Do you think thinks were
| fine pre-industrial revolution, but after we invented the
| steam engine things when to shit? Perhaps it was the
| domestication of bananas that really took us away from
| living in harmony with nature rather than twisting it to
| our own ends.
|
| I don't think it really makes a sense to draw a line in
| history and say everything after this point is bad. The
| only sensible way to draw a rational technophobic line is
| to look at specific technologies and their effects and
| decide if your life will be better or worse with each.
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| A better way to think of it is in terms of proportions, I
| guess.
|
| To wit, the negative effects of technology are simply an
| increasing function of how advanced it is. There is no
| need to think in terms of "pre" or "post" good
| technology. As it becomes more powerful, we need greater
| wisdom to control it. And of course, we completely lack
| that wisdom.
| NateEag wrote:
| > The only sensible way to draw a rational technophobic
| line is to look at specific technologies and their
| effects and decide if your life will be better or worse
| with each.
|
| Interesting to note that this is what the Amish actually
| do.
|
| The popular depiction is of people who blindly live as if
| they're in the 1790s, but it is not that simple. The
| various Amish communities all do things slightly
| different from one another, and the technology allowed in
| different communities is not homogenous.
|
| For ex., the Amish family just down the road from me has
| a solar panel on one of their barns, and a small
| forklift, I think diesel-powered (might be battery). But
| on the occasional Sunday when the meeting is at their
| house, there's not a car to be seen.
|
| I've read of Amish carpenters who actually use a computer
| to run their business. It's usually kept in the workshop,
| away from the family home, though, and IIRC none of them
| had an internet connection.
| nozzlegear wrote:
| > Yes, we have better health care and more products, but we
| also have more pollution, more meaningless jobs, weaker
| local communities (especially in the most developed parts
| of the world), and beautiful species are going extinct.
|
| Small tangent, I just want to point out that all of the
| issues you've pointed out in first world countries are
| maybe a problem in the cities, but not so outside of them.
| To wit, where I live in small town Iowa, USA, there's no
| pollution; there's a strong sense of community; plenty of
| beautiful species; and if I wanted a "meaningful" non-tech
| job I could easily get hired working on any number of farms
| in the area.
| latentcall wrote:
| Ah yes I forgot the standard of living is just more stuff in
| my house! Meanwhile we have all this cheap junk but expensive
| healthcare, expensive education, expensive housing, poison in
| our food and water, and rising temperatures. Glad some folks
| could binge order cheap plastic crap on Amazon for these
| amazing benefits. Advancement!
| hypeatei wrote:
| It's the typical "but you're typing this from an iPhone"
| argument. You must not criticize modern society if you
| participate in any part of it.
| bamboozled wrote:
| We could've had all of that without the C02 we've emitted,
| please don't talk silly talk.
|
| We screwed up this hard because we burned fossil fuels as
| they were highly profitable for a handful of our species.
| orthecreedence wrote:
| > We could've had all of that without the C02 we've
| emitted, please don't talk silly talk.
|
| Wait, what? How could we have possible done all this
| without fossil fuels? Our modern life takes immense amounts
| of energy and fossil fuels are basically free energy we can
| suck out of the ground.
|
| And I'm the first one here to critique the profit motive,
| but fossil fuels are profitable because they are a really
| easy to use, dense, transportable energy source.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > The pollution lifted every single person's standard of
| living across the globe to levels unimaginable 100 years ago.
|
| I think it's important to note that you are making this
| statement with virtually no evidence about the long term
| sustainability of this standard of living. It's great to be
| sitting on all this bounty, sure, but from the perspective of
| history we're not even out of the prototyping phase. If
| climate change models are even remotely accurate, for
| example, then the standard of living we are currently
| enjoying will not be shared by future generations in any
| nation. I definitely take your point that it's unreflective
| for a citizen of a rich nation to say "pollution for me, but
| not for thee", however if in the long term we experience
| severe ecological collapse as a result then is it really
| worth it for 2-4 generations to have iPhones and air
| conditioning? Only time can ultimately tell, but I think it's
| critical to consider how radically unique the last ~200 years
| of human history have been, and as a result how poorly
| equipped we are to extrapolate its lessons into the future.
| jereze wrote:
| Well, such an optimistic title, considering that greenhouse gases
| are excluded in the article.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Greenhouse gases will most likely peak in 2024, but 2023 & 2025
| are also probable.
|
| https://climateanalytics.org/comment/will-2024-be-the-year-e...
| hackerlight wrote:
| No they won't. Only the first derivative of greenhouse gases
| ('emissions') will peak. Greenhouse gases itself will only
| peak after the world achieves net-zero.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| Since you're being pedantic, greenhouse gases don't have an
| infinite lifetime in the atmosphere so they will start
| going down slightly before we hit net-zero.
|
| I hope most understood that I meant to say peak greenhouse
| gas emissions.
| jereze wrote:
| Even if we are close to peaking emissions, we must consider
| the phenomenon of accumulation. Given that CO2 has an
| effective lifespan of around 100 years and methane about 10
| years in the atmosphere, reductions in emissions now will
| still result in these gases accumulating and impacting the
| climate for decades to come.
| hollerith wrote:
| Where you have "accumulating", you mean persisting.
| voxelghost wrote:
| No, even if you emit less, you are still 'accumulating',
| but at a slower rate. And previously released methane is
| still converting to co2 in the atmosphere, for decades to
| come.
| hollerith wrote:
| OK. It's too late for me to retract my comment, though.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| If you cut all methane emissions right now, the Earth would
| immediately start to cool down, and do it for a decade or
| 2.
|
| That is half-lives work.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| You mean the growth of emission rates. Emissions will still
| be ongoing for a looooong time.
| yen223 wrote:
| We aren't allowed to celebrate any victories anymore?
| hanniabu wrote:
| Not when they give a false sense of security
| pests wrote:
| Live a little. People need to reach achievable goals and
| actually see the results of their hard work.
|
| Don't do it unless it's perfect right?
|
| good luck with that.
| kersplody wrote:
| And ironically decreasing coal and fuel pollution decreases
| albedo causing faster warming which will persist for a few
| decades until things balance out. Less pollution is good,
| particularly when it comes to reductions in sulphur dioxide
| from bunker fuel and PM2.5 from coal emissions, but it does
| have side effects amounting to a couple of degrees Celsius of
| warming according to recent papers. Hanson's "Global Warming in
| the Pipeline" is a sobering read.
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| The good news is you've taken your foot off the gas. The bad news
| is the car is going 100mph and there is a cliff edge in 10 feet.
| perrygeo wrote:
| Nailed it. We're confusing the second derivative (how much are
| we "accelerating" pollution) with the real scalar value of
| interest (distance from the pollution "cliff"). Taking your
| foot off the gas does nothing. Putting your foot hard on the
| brakes may not even do anything! Momentum do what it do.
|
| If humanity can't work through these fundamental math and
| science comprehension problems, we're doomed.
| el_nahual wrote:
| Given that (with regard to greenhouse gasses) we've a) unlocked
| positive feedback emission loops from tropical & arctic methane
| and b) still pumping increasing amounts of carbon into the air,
| it's clear to anyone paying attention that we've already fallen
| off the cliff.
|
| We're just hovering for a second like Wile E Coyote.
| hehdhdjehehegwv wrote:
| I often wonder if Looney Tunes physics explains more about
| our world than classical economics...
| silverquiet wrote:
| Is a) actually clear at this time? My impression is that
| there are some questions about methane levels, but I don't
| know if sources of them are clear given that humans activity
| also causes a lot of methane emissions. But yes, apparently
| we also just had the largest ever recorded jump in CO2 levels
| at 4.7ppm year-over-year and the sea surface temperature data
| over the last year is sobering.
| tech_ken wrote:
| The best news is that your hush puppies are ready:
| youtube.com/watch?v=L7eFdTGC3N4
| methuselah_in wrote:
| With humans burning and producing waste can nothing be like peak.
| They will keep on going. I don't understand why people don't
| understand it's human nature until you don't stop them with fines
| you squeeze the availability of the fossils, they will keep on
| going on. What soul awakening scientists expects is possible only
| in few. Govt have to push people with policies and shift their
| behaviour.
| ISL wrote:
| We may not yet have had the war that ends all wars.
|
| Whenever I think about protecting the environment, I think about
| preventing the catastrophes that are wars.
| xeornet wrote:
| It would seem politicians, especially in the West do not care
| at all about that concern.
| zizee wrote:
| Especially in the west?
| mvc wrote:
| I don't buy that. There's not a single major Western
| politician in government at the moment who's political path
| ahead would not be made easier by the wars currently ongoing
| to somehow stop and thus be able to chalk up a win for
| "increased global stability" and profit at the ballot box.
|
| Unfortunately it's the politicians that are not beholden to
| ballot boxes that have no incentive to stop blowing people
| up.
| benatkin wrote:
| Many will regret being distracted by the world's problems when
| they could have been building their lives.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxYt--CFXK0
|
| > Looking back, my only Berklee classmates that got successful
| were the ones who were fiercely focused, determined, and
| undistractable.
|
| > While you're here, presidents will change, the world will
| change, and the media will try to convince you how important it
| all is.
|
| > But it's not. None of it matters to you now.
|
| https://sive.rs/berklee
| tech_ken wrote:
| Kind of repeating myself from another comment, but the person
| making this comment is basically standing atop one of the most
| singular vantage points in all of human history. To say this
| advice is non-generalizable is an understatement, IM personal
| O. Setting aside that this was the entry point of the ZIRP
| years (unique even among US history), the United States from
| 1920-2020 was basically unprecedented in terms of global
| hegemony, access to material resources, and scientific
| knowledge. Even a cursory examination of the global situation
| indicates that these factors are not going to hold forever,
| probably not even for the next 50 years. I think a prudent
| person has to ask themselves "do I really want to turn off the
| news and focus my entire being on creating a startup? Or do I
| want to have some Plans B-Z in case the Roman Empire falls?"
| It's true you can't fix everything yourself, and many people
| waste their lives trying, but tbh that seems less foolish than
| taking serious advice from an '08 UC Berkley graduation speech.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Wrong Berkl(ee)
| tech_ken wrote:
| Lmao whups
| orthecreedence wrote:
| It's possible to build a life that attempts to solve the
| world's problems. Then you have personal accomplishments _and_
| meaningful social contribution. But your comment reads like
| "who cares about the planet we live on, just do whatever you
| want" which isn't really great advice or a particularly
| sustainable mindset. I'm getting strong Ayn Rand vibes.
| unnouinceput wrote:
| 2B humans out of 8B are in China. You do not have numbers for
| China nor, if you manage to get it, can those be trusted anyway.
| I feel that while the West started the downtrend, China will not
| offset that but surely pass as how much pollutants it spews. We
| are not out of the woods until China gets on board too.
| iamthemonster wrote:
| I think I trust the numbers for China more than your estimate
| of China's population which is out by 43%
| unnouinceput wrote:
| If you really think the official numbers spilled by the
| communist party from there is the truth then I have a bridge
| to sell to you.
| illiac786 wrote:
| I find this title highly misleading "peak emission" would be much
| more accurate.
|
| "Peak pollution" sounds like the amount of pollution in the
| environment will actually _decrease_ going forward.
|
| That is simply not true, it will continue to increase, just
| slightly less fast.
|
| Sorry if I don't feel euphoric right now.
| tmvphil wrote:
| For e.g NOx with a high half-life, you are probably right that
| we are still increasing pollution. For short half-life
| pollutants like SO2 and CO, I would expect this means the
| actual atmospheric levels are decreasing.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > For e.g NOx with a high half-life
|
| Their half-life is shorter than a day. On the same magnitude
| of SO2.
|
| The one of CO is indeed much smaller.
| mycall wrote:
| I thought greenhouse gasses will increase in concentration as
| the feedback loop of polar region is forcing trapped gasses out
| of the ground.
| gavindean90 wrote:
| I thinks that's been predicted but not observed thus far.
| graeme wrote:
| We have on a small scale. Methane is escaping as the
| permafrost thaws. Boreal forests are also burning down as
| their climate warms. Reduction in polar ice changes the
| albedo of the earth to reflect less heat.
|
| At a certain point sufficient warming could trigger a
| cascade. So far we haven't done that, but it's incorrect to
| say there's been no release of stored CO2.
| david-gpu wrote:
| On the other hand, once it is observed it will be too late
| to reverse.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Importantly, this article is not primarily about greenhouse
| gasses.
| NewJazz wrote:
| Isn't the concept of pollution highly subjective?
| tsimionescu wrote:
| It's really not, for most things. What exactly would you call
| an oil spill or leaded gas fumes if not pollution?
| NewJazz wrote:
| Certain substances are certainly clear cut.
|
| But consider, I dunno, salt? A little built of salt in the
| environment is normal. But a whole lot of it is pollution.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| That's more a quibble over dosage, though, than any
| subjective disagreement on "can too much salt be a
| pollutant?"
| crent wrote:
| I'm no climate scientist but I would think it's similar
| to toxicity/poisoning. You can die from water
| intoxication but certainly you need it to live as well.
| So no, I don't think it's subjective. It seems to me that
| if something is capable of causing harm in a certain
| amount, it's poisonous/pollution/toxic.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Yes, the dangers of Dihydrogen monoxide are well known
| yet underestimated
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Within certain bounds. Climate scientists likely don't agree
| on the _ideal_ CO2 PPM level, while agreeing that the current
| level is not it.
|
| Anyone who wishes to claim pollution is _always_ a subjective
| concept is welcome to drink a few gallons of water from Lake
| Karachay.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > Lake Karachay
|
| From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
|
| > Today the lake is completely infilled, acting as "a near-
| surface permanent and dry nuclear waste storage facility."
| illiac786 wrote:
| Doesn't really matter here, I'm talking about the pollution
| the article is referring to. I am simply discussing the
| concept of reaching a peak in pollution vs. a peak in
| emission of the same pollutants.
|
| Putting the above aside though, I would disagree. Everything
| is subjective except math (and even there, I think there's a
| debate), but I would definitely not classify pollution as
| _highly_ subjective, that makes it sound it belongs to the
| category of things that particularly lack consensus, which is
| definitely not the case amongst the scientific community. Not
| to say there's 100% agreement on all things, but I think
| there's a broad consensus.
| dissuade wrote:
| Aren't all words fuzzy vector embeddings of the context they
| appear in?
| NewJazz wrote:
| Convincing argument, yet ultimately empty worded.
| consf wrote:
| I think that it is primarily grounded in objective
| measurements and scientific understanding
| NewJazz wrote:
| Sure, but interpretation of measurements is a largely
| individual endeavor, one way or another.
|
| And comparison of different, potentially codependent
| variables, is notably relevant.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > will actually _decrease_ going forward.
|
| The ratio of (pollution/living person) will decrease. Unless
| you want to start unaliving people then this is a fixed fact of
| the world we live on.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Is there a reason to care about that number?
|
| Oh I thought of another one, if people smoke more cigarettes
| then the ratio of cancer deaths to packs smoked decreases!
| consf wrote:
| The idea of having passed peak pollution could suggest that we
| are beginning to see positive changes...
| mad0 wrote:
| So a more accurate statement would be that a derivative of
| pollution has peaked.
| benreesman wrote:
| If economic and political capture fail to destroy civilization
| before climate change does I'll be glad because we have science
| for the latter but not the former.
|
| Science almost always gives you a fighting chance but there seems
| to be no motivation let alone research directions on unchecked
| income inequality.
|
| I'm from the United States, a very wealthy country if you use the
| arithmetic mean to calculate prosperity (which is the devil's own
| summary statistic in such matters), but children live in tent
| encampments even in ostensibly wealthy cities and it goes
| downhill from there.
|
| I _hope_ climate damage becomes a relevant problem because we
| have ideas for how to tackle that, arguably even credible plans.
|
| Income inequality is utterly unchecked and will wreck
| civilization sooner.
| diob wrote:
| The problem is that the two are entangled. Those at low incomes
| (heck even middle income), will be disproportionately hurt by
| climate change.
| benreesman wrote:
| I think the problem is that the best and brightest (of which
| HN's readership is a plausible sample) dislikes this
| observation: a great many people who rarely use anything but
| hard rationality still believe that not only will _they be
| the one_ to join the tiny elite (can't be all of them, most
| are wrong by construction), but that this is acceptable.
|
| Of secondary importance is what a depressing commentary this
| is on the ethical caliber of our intellectual elite.
|
| Of primary importance is that only a tennis court and a
| guillotine will stop them, something one hopes we'd all like
| to avoid.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| We've faced a similar version of this problem before, in
| the 1910s and 1920s. What happened in that case was a
| global depression, followed by reforms (in some places) and
| communist/fascist takeovers in others. Then we had a world
| war.
| benreesman wrote:
| Hopefully this disproportionately influential community
| would like to see more of the reform side of things and
| less of the war side of things?
|
| People are always talking about a "post-scarcity" world,
| but isn't that in some sense globally true while locally
| false today? The US (which I appreciate is not the whole
| world but a signal example of having just passed the knee
| in the hockey-stick on Gini) _burns_ something like
| 30-40% of key agricultural outputs as ethanol
| representing a net disaster on emissions.
|
| At what point do we acknowledge that we _actively choose_
| a governing /managing/ruling class that has no upper
| bound on conspicuous consumption? Yachts don't cut it
| anymore, now you're not a player until you've got a
| fucking private space program.
|
| I did very well in my career once and might again, and I
| remember feeling outright guilty when I had a house with
| "his and hers" sinks in the bathroom, that felt really
| opulent (because it is).
|
| Bezos has "his and hers" custom private jets that fly
| more often than many people drive or train (this is
| public record), a huge airplane carrying one passenger
| sometimes daily.
|
| I hear a lot of hot air about universal basic income and
| stuff, but what's stopping our leaders? Corporate profits
| shatter record after record, rank and file workers are
| choosing between basic necessity A or necessity B, you
| could have lower margins and pay people Universal Basic
| Income in the form of a living wage. Then it's not even
| big government or "welfare" or some other boogeyman.
|
| They're just dark triad liars, it's just nonsense, the
| elite are not trying to change the world for the better:
| they're trying to dig deeper moats and build higher walls
| around consumption that's gone from conspicuous to
| fucking genocidal.
| tim333 wrote:
| Peaking nitrogen oxides has made quite a difference for me
| personally living near Oxford Street. A decade ago it had some of
| the highest NO2 levels in the world and I was getting stinging
| eyes and thinking of moving. It's quite a lot better now mostly
| down to the vehicles having less polluting power sources.
| ninininino wrote:
| Peak pollution (that we're aware of).
|
| Given the modus operandi of "manufacture first, find out about
| carcinogenic / animal-extinction-properties second", it's almost
| certainly a given that we've not yet passed peak pollution
| because we keep creating new forms of pollution that are harder
| and harder to clean up.
| riffic wrote:
| we still got forever chemicals, industrial accidents, radiation,
| and microplastics to keep us company for a while yay.
|
| edit: how can I leave out space junk, that's always been my fav.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I just got Hannah Ritchie's book out of the library yesterday and
| I was like oh I think I know where this is from.
| faeriechangling wrote:
| The population still hasn't peaked so I'm doubtful.
| kshahkshah wrote:
| China's population is rapidly declining and India's population
| already peaked and just started declining. More to do
| elsewhere, but is is really not the case population hasn't
| peaked or is about to?
|
| edit: well according to: https://ourworldindata.org/world-
| population-update-2022
|
| it'll be 2083 (!) before we peak in population
| bionhoward wrote:
| Tell that to the toolbags who leave their truck idling while they
| use multiple gas powered lawnmowers, trimmers, leaf blowers!
| barbazoo wrote:
| People leaving their cars/trucks idling with no one inside are
| on the same level as those still throwing their cigarette butts
| on the ground. I guess we can't reach everyone or some people
| just don't get it.
| nostrademons wrote:
| It's interesting to revisit the Limits to Growth study [1] in
| light of these recently-declining exponential curves. Somebody
| did [2] and found that we're basically on track for the model's
| bleak predictions.
|
| But the _way_ that the model 's predictions have come true is
| different than what's been popularized. Instead of mass die-offs
| from famine and pollution, we're seeing population collapse
| because of birth control, declining fertility, and the rising
| (opportunity) cost of raising a family. Instead of seeing a
| collapse in industrial output because of declining resources,
| we're seeing a collapse in industrial output because of market
| saturation and a shift toward services and online experiences.
| Instead of pollution growing unbounded, it's actually declining
| because of green technology and de-industrialization.
|
| The world is still trending toward a dystopian hellscape, but the
| dystopian hellscape is not a barren planet where nothing grows
| and we've stripped everything bare, it's a dystopian hellscape of
| everybody glued to their device and ignoring social interaction
| or family formation because Fortnite is more interesting.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Limits_to_Growth
|
| [2] https://www.vice.com/en/article/z3xw3x/new-research-
| vindicat...
| detourdog wrote:
| It might be more like the "dark ages". The people got along we
| don't know what they were doing but the result was the
| "renaissance".
| 2four2 wrote:
| The growth in power of megacorporations has been coined a new
| type of feudalism, so dark ages might not be a bad
| description.
| maxwell wrote:
| They were called such due to the decline of written material:
| the written record went "dark" compared to antiquity and then
| modernity.
|
| Definitely in another dark age in that sense, due to the
| postmodern decline of meaningful written communication on
| paper.
| detourdog wrote:
| That is what I see. The amount of disposable content has
| made actual information hard to see.
| robohydrate wrote:
| I've been playing Fortnite almost every night for 5+ years
| because it is more interesting than doomscrolling on my phone!
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| The distinction between the two scenarios is the original,
| theoretical scenario did not foresee the negative feedback
| loops that actually occurred. It's a pretty glaring miss when
| you're trying to make predictions.
|
| This is why I was always skeptical of dystopias that depend on
| overpopulation. If life is so miserable why would people
| continue to have so many children?
| cvwright wrote:
| "life is so miserable" and yet "so many children" was
| basically most of human history
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| This was well before birth control became widespread. When
| you can decouple the fun part from the responsibility that
| comes with it, you do so. Hence, why the fertility rate has
| been falling below replacement around the developed world.
| jackcosgrove wrote:
| Infant and child mortality was very high. Empirically the
| high birth rate did not always lead to overpopulation -
| overpopulation waxed and waned despite the persistently
| high birth rate.
|
| The sci-fi dystopias about overpopulation never really come
| up with a mechanism by which the birth rate remains high
| despite low infant and child mortality and low economic
| need for human labor. It always seems to boil down to
| "people are controlled by irrational instincts".
| Fatnino wrote:
| There's an old cemetery in Redwood City. Very roughly
| speaking it was active for about 100 years between 1850 and
| 1950.
|
| There are multiple grave markers listing children that died
| under the age of 10. Like a family had a 4 year old die,
| then had a baby 2 years later and then 3 years later buried
| that baby in the same grave as their older sibling.
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| >If life is so miserable why would people continue to have so
| many children?
|
| This right here is why I'm child free.
|
| First, My own upbringing did nothing to equip me to properly
| raise a child. I simply cannot trust myself to do a good job.
|
| Second, why would I bring a child into a world where each
| year will only be worst than the last, and their lot in life
| is to suffer the decline of the natural world and perhaps
| civilization as we know it until they themselves have to make
| the same choice? I'm sure _someday_ the future will look
| brighter but it sure as heck isn 't today, or any time in the
| next 50 years.
| rrr_oh_man wrote:
| _> First, My own upbringing did nothing to equip me to
| properly raise a child. I simply cannot trust myself to do
| a good job._
|
| With this realisation alone you might be in the top
| percentiles of the population.
|
| _> I 'm sure someday the future will look brighter but it
| sure as heck isn't today, or any time in the next 50
| years._
|
| And yet it still might be better than at least 99.98% of
| human history (50 out of 300k+ years).
| rshannon3 wrote:
| Isn't this the exact premise of the movie Idiocracy?
| wing-_-nuts wrote:
| Don't worry, I'm one of the idiots.
| sophacles wrote:
| > the original, theoretical scenario did not foresee the
| negative feedback loops that actually occurred
|
| Several of those feedback loops came from people seeing the
| theoretical scenario and the evidence for it mounting. Like
| literally the phrase "if we don't do something - this will
| happen" is the rallying cry. It's silly to say it was an
| oversight in the model that shows that things need to be
| done.
|
| > If life is so miserable why would people continue to have
| so many children?
|
| Something humans like to do to escape misery is: sex.
| crznp wrote:
| LtG summary from the intro:
|
| > 1. If the present growth trends... continue unchanged, the
| limits to growth on this planet will be reached sometime
| within the next one hundred years...
|
| > 2. It is possible to alter these growth trends...
|
| > 3. If the world's people decide to strive for this second
| outcome rather than the first, the sooner they begin working
| to attain it, the greater will be their chances of success
|
| Far from "missing the negative feedback loops", I think that
| amplifying that feedback was the whole point.
|
| Also, we're only halfway through the original period, so it
| seems premature to declare victory.
| cs702 wrote:
| _> The world is still trending toward a dystopian hellscape,
| but the dystopian hellscape is not a barren planet where
| nothing grows and we 've stripped everything bare, it's a
| dystopian hellscape of everybody glued to their device and
| ignoring social interaction or family formation because
| Fortnite is more interesting._
|
| Even though your statement is meant to be evocative, as opposed
| to factually descriptive, it sure feels to me like it captures
| the zeitgeist.
|
| Which is... disappointing, upsetting, sad.
|
| I suspect that, like me, you _hope_ you 're wrong.
| hpeter wrote:
| I emit less methane than a few years ago, since I changed my
| diet. No gluten and lactose.
| idunnoman1222 wrote:
| Really do forever chemicals go away or something? or do they mean
| the peak output of pollutants because that's not the same thing
| at all.
| Dibby053 wrote:
| I'm skeptic.
|
| United States. Population: 335M. Vehicles: 305M.
|
| Germany. Population: 85M. Vehicles: 52M.
|
| India. Population: 1428M. Vehicles: 79M.
|
| China. Population: 1400M. Vehicles: 500M.
|
| Ethiopia. Population: 121M. Vehicles: 1.2M.
|
| Nigeria. Population: 230M. Vehicles: 13M.
|
| Indonesia. Population: 279M. Vehicles: 23M.
|
| etc.
| hi-v-rocknroll wrote:
| Recently launched MethaneSAT locates anthropogenic ultra-emitter
| methane plumes to their sources. CH4 GWP is ~70 in 20 years.
|
| _Satellite images show biggest methane leaks come from Russia
| and US (2022)_
|
| https://archive.ph/eYig4
|
| https://www.iea.org/reports/global-methane-tracker-2022/over...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Nord_Stream_pipeline_sabo...
| (2022, 400k t)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aliso_Canyon_gas_leak (2015-2016,
| 100k t)
| atleastoptimal wrote:
| Now it's time to bring pollution back. Without sulfur dioxide
| warming will accelerate. As many people pointed out it had been
| accidentally load bearing on warming
| gavin_gee wrote:
| Perhaps the planet but definitely not the mind.
| jmakov wrote:
| Probably not. Nice try
| greentxt wrote:
| Reminds me of Fukuyama, and yes I know he wasn't saying that
| exactly.
|
| Pretty sure this is not true as long as birth rates are
| declining. What is that saying about assumptions...
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