[newnewpdro]

> How can it be too many people when a person in one country uses 20x as many resources as a person in another?

A non-uniform distribution of resource use and overpopulation are not mutually exclusive, both occur simultaneously.

[chillwaves]

Pithy response but not in line with reality. If we are talking about climate change in the context of globalized economies, then it should be understood that US demand and lifestyle is contributing more to the problem than a poor guy living in India.

[newnewpdro]

India still has a number of people comparable in size to the entire US population living without any electricity, and that's arguably a failure on India's part. I agree that this should be understood.

I'd also take it another step and point out as India makes progress on pulling its overpopulated disaster out of poverty it will quickly surpass the US in absolute CO2 emissions because of how many people there are. This is especially true should they utilize their abundant coal reserves in the process.

Just look to China's CO2 emissions. It's already nearly double the US as of 2013 [1], while they still have plenty of room for growth on the quality of life axis.

All this crap is only problematic because of overpopulation across the planet. It requires the huge numbers of people to produce such volumes of emissions that we're altering the global climate. We can bicker and finger-point all we want about which group arrived at the western high-consumption lifestyle first and enjoyed more of it before everyone else got there, but it's ignoring the elephant in the room; that there's far too many people to simultaneously live this gluttonous party globally. The more people there are, the less equal things must be.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...