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The world has probably passed peak pollution

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Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#71

Post by randomdata »

silverquiet wrote: post #63
randomdata wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

> 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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#72

Post by justin66 »

monero-xmr wrote: post #6
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...

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.

> 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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#73

Post by SubiculumCode »

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 Plastic?

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#74

Post by skissane »

fallingsquirrel wrote: post #33
monero-xmr wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 repr…

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…

> 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

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#75

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#76

Post by lotsofpulp »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #41
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?

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?

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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#77

Post by silverquiet »

randomdata wrote: post #71
silverquiet wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 c…

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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#78

Post by rqtwteye »

iiovemiku wrote: post #8
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...

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 th…

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.

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#79

Post by skissane »

andsoitis wrote: post #60
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,…

> mainstream Americans What is a mainstream American?

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

Re: The world has probably passed peak pollution

#80

Post by skissane »

joshuahedlund wrote: post #64
skissane wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What are their historical and present population and growth numbers?

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)

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