[w0utert]

>> The worst culprit for many people I know is flying. You can eat a lot of meat for the emissions of just one long-haul flight. (Which is sad because flying is great.)

And yet the total CO2 contribution of the world-wide aviation industry is 'only' 2%.

Based on that chart I would say having (more) children is by far the worst culprit. By now I'm really 100% convinced that the only way to save the earth is if everyone everywhere around the globe stops getting more than 2 children per couple, preferably not more than 1, so the world's population can shrink down back to somewhere around 1/10th of what it is now.

I'm 100% serious about this, and it makes me sad and angry nobody is actually really talking about this. Nothing we can do like eating less meat or skipping a holiday will help if the world's population doesn't shrink by a significant factor. It's a very unpopular opinion to have, because everyone likes children, they are the future, they are god's gift, it's a human right to make babies, bla bla, etc. But reduced to cold hard facts, there are simply way.too.many.people.

Yes I know this would absolutely kill our debt-based economies and probably significantly reduce the standard of living in many places, at least in the short-to-medium term, but that's a different topic. Completely destroying the earth will have much worse effect on the economy and standard of living anyway.

[chosenbreed37]

> I'm 100% serious about this, and it makes me sad and angry nobody is actually really talking about this.

Well in some parts of the world people are already having less children. Even in Africa and Asia the birth rates are going down as people (women in particular) receive higher levels of education. So much so that in a few European nations the governments are actively encouraging couples to have more children. The most recent one I heard of is Hungary. I think the same is happening in some of the Scandinavian countries. In the far east (Korea if I'm not mistaken) there are even university courses on dating. In some of these places (Hungary in particular) the preferred approach is increase the birth rate as opposed to encouraging immigration to the country.

[Pelam]

I'm not disputing that the sheer massive number of people on the planet is a major factor in the climate change.

However, the contribution of children in the chart we are referring is dubious. The number is so high that I once googled and found what I think to be the original source. (A couple of swedish researches IIRC.)

They counted the children's and their descendants contributions and assigned them to parents for ongoing year.

There are many problems there. For example if the birth rate would be calculated as 2, the contribution would be infinite.

Also counting multiple generations is problematic, because if climate change is not mitigated within one generation we could be in for Mad Max * Water World.

[ajmurmann]

Another frustratingly neglected topic is fusion. Fusion is really the least painless way to get out of this mess. It should be one of the major investments for every developed country right now. Even if it doesn't work out, the benefits of it does are so big that we absolutely need to throw out full weight behind the research. Yet funding keeps getting cut because it's "nuclear" and no politician currently in power will get to claim the enormous win for themselves.