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The world has probably passed peak pollution

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Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#121

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

skissane wrote: post #7
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 - 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,…

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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#122

Post by nyokodo »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #121
skissane wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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,…

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 lo…

> 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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#123

Post by soperj »

dalyons wrote: post #85
Retric wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s misleading because they are idling their existing coal power plants more often. Essentially they are using new coal as demand following peaker plants rather than base load power generation. “In the first decade of the 2000s, plants were running around 70% of the time. They're now running around 50%.” https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/china-coal-plants#... . By comparison China added 217 GW of PV in 202…

Also critically they don’t have to build these coal plant to be economically used in the same way as free market states do. They’re building them mostly as a hedge - if they end up barely used , which is likely given renewable trends, that’s ok for state owned power. It makes everything a bit more expensive, but you can’t exactly vote for an alternative. If they need to get used a lot for whatever reason, no one is u…

How do you vote for an alternative in the US?

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#124

Post by kiba »

randomdata wrote: post #56
silverquiet wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#125

Post by benreesman »

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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#126

Post by ipaddr »

casercaramel144 wrote: post #115
Lammy wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pl…

Why not encourage through policy and taxation changes? Invest in culture that promotes. Restructure society to encourage having babies at an earlier age.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#127

Post by diob »

benreesman wrote: post #125

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 (whi…

The problem is that the two are entangled. Those at low incomes (heck even middle income), will be disproportionately hurt by climate change.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#128

Post by [deleted] »

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...

[deleted]

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#129

Post by sMarsIntruder »

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...

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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#130

Post by vouwfietsman »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #121
skissane wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 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,…

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 lo…

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.

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