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The world has probably passed peak pollution

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Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#111

Post by skissane »

jacobolus wrote: post #102
skissane wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

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 involv…

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

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#113

Post by elijahbenizzy »

Animats wrote: post #2

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...

“Peak baby” is an objectively bad thing

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#115

Post by casercaramel144 »

Lammy wrote: post #59
casercaramel144 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uti…

> 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”.

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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#116

Post by resolutebat »

vondur wrote: post #62
WaxProlix wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the same way that your local power plant isn't solely responsible for the pollution created in heating surrounding homes, it's probably not reasonable to look at the places that have done the fabricating, weaving, injection molding, spinning, etc for the rest of the world as being the major center of pollution. China specifically is decarbonizing fast , and at some expense to their own economy over the last decade…

Regarding China: China accounted for 95% of the world's new coal power construction activity in 2023, according to the latest annual report from Global Energy Monitor (GEM). Construction began on 70 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in China, up four-fold since 2019, says GEM's annual report on the global coal power industry China started construction on 70.2 GW of new coal-power capacity last year, almost 20 times the…

China is simultaneously also adding much more solar, wind and nuclear power than any other country, plus much of the new coal construction is also meant to replace old, horrifically inefficient/polluting ones.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#117

Post by randomdata »

silverquiet wrote: post #92
randomdata wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 wan…

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"…

> 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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#118

Post by grecy »

magicalhippo wrote: post #47
grecy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wow, seeing peak baby is a little scary honestly Are you worried 8 billion is somehow not enough humans?

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.

> 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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#119

Post by skissane »

quesera wrote: post #106
fallingsquirrel wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

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…

> 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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#120

Post by illiac786 »

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.

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