Yes, in this case for the simple reason that you are not dealing with the logical argument posted many times already: “if you were correct then things like controlling ozone depletion gases, controlling phosphates in rivers, controlling acid rain, controlling dirty water in developed nations and many other items would be impossible, and yet that has happened many times before while the population has increased.”
On that note and other times I made that point by showing how in the past when efforts were there to get clean water and avoid disease in our cities. There were indeed also early adopters of things like toilets and some even were willing to afford pipes to take the sewer away, of course a lot ended in the rivers like the Thames, but while it was little, it actually helped show many how a bigger solution could be implemented. As it was when government then organized the big water works what not only separated the dirty water from the clean, it also cleaned a lot of the Thames by sending those early adopters refuse into the big pipes of the sewer projects.
Similarly, a lot of the electrical car or solar adopters are doing little now, but they are invaluable on showing how government can eventually get involved with a bigger and more organized effort…
Until we get a better government that is.
I drive a gas guzzler that is necessary to get me where I want to go given where I live. To mitigate, I ride my bike to work on good weather days (roughly 50 km / 30 mile round trip), and try to work at home whenever possible. When there are sufficient charging stations and something electric comes out that can do the job, I will get it.
It’s all of us mitigating as best we can that will make a difference.
No, but I’m willing to wager that Dopers as a whole have not had enough children to replace themselves.
If you had said that policy and projects to increase living standards, and improve education and medical care in poor countries would reduce overpopulation - ultimately helping to protect the environment - then I would agree. And who could object to measures so obviously good in themselves, besides having beneficial side effects? But for the average poster here, their government’s foreign policy has far more effect on overpopulation than their personal reproductive choices.
And it also seems to me that it’s a problem we’ve in large part already solved, whereas how to make western lifestyles more environmentally friendly is a very pressing issue as they are rapidly adopted by people around the world.
I did, though I don’t know how relevant it is. I’ve never seen anyone make such arguments here in the UK, though I guess it could happen in the future. Perhaps it’s a good thing the right does not care about the environment, given what their solutions might be…
And as I already asked you in post 95
i remember overpopulation was a catch-all in the 60s and 70s for the ills of the world and if we just reached ZPG as the boomers died out most of the pollution and such would be little to none and the earth could balance its self out by the year 2 k and if we needed population the governments could use central planning and slowly bring it back up
why it was a “cure-all?” because other than contraception and family planning we wouldn’t have to personally change anything meaningful in the day to day …the change would occur naturally over decades and most people proposing the idea wouldn’t be alive to see the results …
Then we do indeed agree. Those are precisely the things that should be right at the top of the agenda. Not at the expense of other actions, but as well as.
Hitchens said it clearly and said it best and I’ve referenced the point in previous threads on other matters
The welcome side effect of that is a brake on population increase.
OK, but that foreign policy on overpopulation is a conversation worth having yes?
That is optimistic and smacks of complacency. The rate of increase is slowing but still increasing.
By the same logic we see the uptake of electric cars increase and the amount of power generated by coal is flattening out but I suspect you don’t think either of those are a problem we’ve already “solved” and that we can allow them to drop off the agenda.
My climate sins are:
I follow the 68°/72° Fahrenheit rule: 68° in the summer and 72° in the winter. And now that I’m older I’m thinking of expanding the gap another five degrees.
Since my home has a low-flow toilet, I prevent blockages by filling a bucket in the bathtub and adding an extra two gallons of water to heavy flushes.
The Right thinks everything is a religion because it absolves them from rationality, and they believe everyone else has this similarly defective mindset.
Water use is one area that is ripe for simple solutions. It is nonsensical that gallons of water that could be put to use flushing toilets or washing cars is simply allowed to drain away.
Similarly, capturing rainwater for the the same purposes is a no brainer. I recall a thread on here some years ago in which I recommended it as a sensible course of action and was told that in some places in the USA it was illegal to capture rainwater that fell on your property because someone had the “right” to it further downstream. Utter nonsense that such policies are in place and of course the science shows that the logic behind it is bollocks. Only a tiny fraction of that captured water would ever find it’s way into the watercourse, but as is so often the case with environmental issues, never let the facts get in the way.
Oy!
The point is that your initial statement is one factor, but not the main one in dealing with the CO2 emissions. Because there is plenty of evidence that other pollution issues were able to be controlled in the past while even less than now was done about overpopulation. And there is no obligation, nor we are forced to completely fix the population issue before we fix the CO2 emissions issue.
The biggest implication of this objection coming from you is that since more people pollute then removing the CFCs from our emissions (for example) would be useless, hard*, or impossible or horrible to deal with because the silly human governments did not control the population there before preventing disaster for the ozone layer.
Sure, governments and the people might had taken into account the population increase, but instead of that the governments took the big polluters to task and the progress was great, the nerve of them for not looking at the population issue before dealing with the polluters! /s
- it was a bit hard, but the ones organizing the removal of CFCs from our emissions were pikers for not looking at the population issue then /s
we can quibble over figures, but it certainly is an important enough factor to remain under constant vigilence. The original study I linked to was fairly clear abpout the impact of each extra child on CO2 emissions.
At no point have I said that nor implied it. You’ve continued to assume that is what I mean even when I have said, several times now, that it is not either/or. Mark that, not either/or. I was pointing out from the start that overpopulation does not get the visibility in this converstation that its importance warrants. I stand by that.
No, not useless, hard or impossible, but potentially incomplete or sub-optimal. It isn’t that it wouldn’t be worth doing but you do risk not gaining maximal benefit from it if you do not ensure that all relevant factors are considered.
No, you are flat-out wrong about what I’m suggesting. Remember, I clearly stated it was not either/or but that if we fail to keep all the potential important factors as part of the conversation that we will fail to extract the most benefit from the solutions we develop. I don’t think overpopulation is being kept as high up the agenda as it truly warrants. You seem to think that it is not very important at all.
Once every summer, blast the a/c, wait till the home gets cold, then get a fire going to warm up.
Already acknowledged. But missing one important bit.
Already acknowledged, what you continue to miss is that you do ignore how the extreme right is using that argument, but there is still another more important bit…
Thing is that you are missing the element of time, One could also make the point that controlling acid rain would be incomplete or sub-optimal (and in fact, many naysayers made that point back then) but most of the people involved then would look at you funny if you proposed to also control the population to control the sulfur emissions, now for sure it would be a factor to take into account yesterday, but even if one could convince all to not have children now the best outcome there for that part of the solution (and for climate change) would be many decades into the future.
I don’t know about you, but while I would approve of the population control, the time constriction meant that the focus should and was on ensuring then that fuel for industry and cars had less sulfur or nitrogen oxides, or to use technology to contain less of it when emitted.
Well, if there had been plenty of time to not worry much about the degrading effects of acid rain, then the population increase would be one big factor to take into account, the point is that even if I agree on that (and previous discussions shows that I did) the evidence was that the other factors are more important, time wise. And the factors are similar here then with the CO2 and other global warming gas emissions.
I stick with the facts as I understand them and change my view only as and when the facts change. I refuse to be held hostage to that type of misuse, I’ll use it in a better way than them because I trust myself (and people like you) to do so.
Absolutely. But to *only *do so leads to an incomplete solution. My interpretation of your posting is that you would be likely to include information on population growth and demographics in a constant search for an optimum solution. Not that you would be hamstrung by it, but that you would give it due consideration. In that we have the exact same approach.
However, If the projections are to be believed then even in a flattening population Nigeria, for example, is on an upward curve towards 750 million. All those people desiring a slice of a high-consumption western lifestyle and very likely to take environmental shortcuts to get there. Such scenarios could dilute or even completely negate the net benefit of the Sulphur or other pollutant reduction technologies. It is negligent to ignore the potential impact of that and negligent not to include population control as a key part of the discussion. Every projection that I’ve seen shows we’re already too late to stop climate change effects. That being the case it is critical to continue to mitigating the effects and stopping it getting as bad but it is also critical to stop putting more people in harms way when the inevitable problems come…which they will.
However, I don’t think that *you *are being negligent in that respect but the wider, simplistic conversation certainly appears to be.
Thing is that others did look at those facts and there is a reason why there is an understanding that the misuse is not only for unsavory reasons, but the facts that you use are incomplete when time is not considered, and it is called a misuse not just because some do use for bigoted reasons, but because the element of time and other solutions are indeed (even unwittingly by the ones that follow this line) given illogical dismissals as we can see coming from you here:
You missed that I made that example about acid rain by taking into account that the increase of the population was not the main factor to take into consideration on the way of controlling that issue:
Well then, time is more essential then. And of course then the less importance given to the population issue over the other solutions that are available now and sooner than waiting for population reduction to show effectiveness.
As pointed before, regarding the wider conversation, it only seems so. Ignoring time is the most negligent thing to do when more readily available factors for the solutions are.
But there are other pedantic reasons that you miss when proponents of change out there seem to not take population into account (while they do).
I still don’t understand what you are getting at with that line. We shouldn’t wait to act on any potentially useful solutions, nor should we ignore the impact of overpopulation in the long term either. We don’t actually disagree on any of that do we?
time is important for all solutions. The sooner you start doing the beneficial things the sooner the impact is felt. Again, I’m not sure where you think we disagree.
So when I say that overpopulation is not prominent in the environmental conversation, your response is to quote a journalist who says he specifically avoids mentioning overpopulation as part of the conversation?
The point was that you did fall for the minimizing of the other solutions when talking about the population in Nigeria, just saying.
And here is important to then report that you are relying on a bit of ignorance, the time to wait for the population item to bear fruit is too long. (unless the mentioning of it does include what the nativists and bigots out there are harping about)
Killing the messenger is easy for you instead of dealing with the points then. Anyone can see how the population issue should be approached, “if you are concerned about the growth in population, make yourself a champion of female empowerment in the developing world. You will be contributing to the most effective solution to the problem without any of the moral baggage.”
Also: at the next environmental event (Or discussion 
), you could ask the income inequality question rather than the population question.
i just don’t know what you mean by that. I’ve not minimised any solutions.I’m going to have to drop that as you’ve totally lost me.
So…don’t do it? don’t worry about it? only look for the short term gains? The reversing of many ecological trends is going to take decades and many are not guarenteed to work nor be free of unintended consequences.
that’s a complete non-sequiter, I’ve done nothing of the kind.
Right, oh, if only I had some sort of permanent record of making precisely that point many times previously. I’ve quoted Hitchens right here in this thread.
bolding mine, I admire your optimism but there is no way of avoiding the moral baggage that comes with speaking out on that.
I would encourage everyone present to ask questions on all the important factors, that is my point.