[roenxi]

Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics.

If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy. As always, I think we should have been building more nuclear plants back in the 90s. And again in the 2000s. And the 2010s. Maybe now we can go wind and solar. But we need lots of something.

[tomtomtom777]

> Pretty sure. Nature, being unconcerned with fairness, has little regard for per capita statistics.

But nature also has little regard for per country statistics. Splitting China into two countries, isn't going to lower their polution.

Using per capita statistics at least allows us to focus on those that are emitting excessively more than others.

[belorn]

Splitting a country is not going to lower the pollution, but equally so does a high populations density not decrease pollution.

[contravariant]

Although we probably do need to explain why the U.S. requires significantly more energy per person to let people live in comfort compared to European countries.

[jrs235]

Hmmm. Could it be our stick houses instead of brick and designs that rely on AC for summer cooling?

[refurb]

Take a look at Canada, it's even higher. That should provides clues.

[toomuchtodo]

The definition of comfort is the issue. There are simply not enough resources for everyone on Earth to live like an American. Maybe Europeans if we stretch with renewables and quickly cut down overfishing and stripmining agricultural practices. My money (unfortunately) is on a whole lot of death and despair from crop failures, drought, and mass migrations due to climate change even if we’re able to rapidly decarbonize energy infrastructure. We waited too long to change direction, and aren’t moving fast enough in the right direction.

[wwright]

I’m really not sure this is the case. For example, we know that we have far more than enough capacity to produce food for the entire world, we just simply don’t do it.

Of course, Americans are very wasteful, and we can’t scale that amount of wastefulness to the entire planet.

[TeMPOraL]

We have enough fossil-fuel-dependent capacity to strip-mine soil to feed the entire world. I'm not sure if we have enough capacity for sustainable food production, and even if, the methods, technologies and supply chains aren't there (and won't be, as long as they have to compete against modern agriculture).

[mathh]

Is it so hard on HN to use specific and appropriate verbs other than “to scale” for any idea related to something expanding or getting bigger ?

[TeMPOraL]

But why, if there's a perfectly good, appropriate enough, and concise term available? Being verbose does not scale.

[wwright]

I’m not aware of what specific or appropriate verb I should have used. Happy to edit the post if you can educate me :)

[throwaway0a5e]

The things you'd need to do to get the world to accept a definition of "comfort" that doesn't include eating meat (vegan definition) several times a week, living and working comfortably climate control buildings and access to a wide array of consumer products would not be pretty to put it mildly.

Making people's standards of living go backwards make them shoot you.

Holding down people's standards of living makes their kids or grand-kids shoot you.

Policy sticks are a time bomb. Social solutions (convincing people to behave in a way that reduces their environmental footprint) only get you so far. We need technical solutions (more efficiency in the entire economy) such that people can eat fish or beef and drive in cars (or have access to functionally equivalent or superior analogues) at lesser environmental cost. The "western lifestyle" (moving target, I know) needs to scale because even if the west manages to reduce consumption enough to have a good impact the masses in developing nations are certainly not going to settle for the status quo let alone a reduction in consumption.

[toomuchtodo]

You need less people, fundamentally. The total fertility rate is declining across the world luckily (except a handful of countries and Africa) [1], but everyone around now is going to have a rough ride until equilibrium is reached (sometime after 2100). Can’t grow your way out of resource exhaustion (renewables excepted).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#country-by-country...

[pfdietz]

It's declining in Africa also.

https://www.worldometers.info/demographics/demographics-of-a...

[toomuchtodo]

Thanks for pointing that out. Our World In Data’s data is out of date [1], I keep poking them to update their fertility rate data but get no response (maybe busy with COVID data sets, I have no context into why).

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate

[makomk]

I suspect that Covid is going to run a coach and horses right through that improvement. The best ways of getting population growth down in places like Africa are education and a strong, stable economy - and it's just trashed both.

[pfdietz]

Actually, the best way is empowering women.

[ForHackernews]

We can also just have fewer people: If you lower infant mortality, educate women and give them access to family planning, all evidence suggests they will choose to have fewer children.

It's much easier for the planet to support a high standard of living for four or six billion people than eight or ten billion.

[throwaway0a5e]

I agree with the premise but the fundamental question is whether we can get from the current status quo to a hypothetical sustainable equilibrium without the squeeze of climate change causing a ton of pain along the way and in a manner that is at least kinda sorta ethically tolerable (i.e. genocide and/or picking who gets to reproduce are not options on the table).

The developing world population growth is peaking soon or looks to be. But standards of living growth there is exploding so their impact will peak at some unknown point in the future. The already developed world is staying roughly static in terms of population and environmental impact per person is declining slowly there. To use a metaphor, it's like we've got a half full bucket, are very slowly siphoning out water and are also half way through rapidly pouring in an unknown amount of water. Will it overflow? Nobody knows. It would be prudent to try to remove more water and pour in less though.

Edit: Anyone care to tell me why I'm so wrong? Is genocide back on the table or are people just annoyed that this is a hard problem with no shovel ready silver bullet?

[swiley]

Do you have a source for this? Because last time I checked this wasn't the case.

[toomuchtodo]

From a quick Google search: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33133712

More depth can explored using keywords like “global footprint” and “ecological footprint”. What’s your source (“last time I checked”)?

[mytailorisrich]

Aggressive population control should be given high priority, yet declining population growth and fertility rates are always depicted as negatives in Western countries. In Europe many countries still have incentives to boost fertility.

It's high time we give up on the fantasy of an ever growing population as a ponzi scheme to boost the economy and finance public spending. We need to face the reality that we ought to have at the very least a stable population and reorganise society accordingly.

In relation to developing countries, any healthcare-related aid should be conditional to implementation of birth control policies.

Globally we really should have a target to reduce population by a few billions if we want to all enjoy life in comfort (~Western country level) on a thriving planet.

Edit: Judging by the reactions, the penny has not dropped yet for some... Hopefully it will before it's too late.

[einpoklum]

> If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy

This is not true. It is possible for 8 Billion people to live in comfort (of course, for a reasonable definition of comfort, which isn't typical US lifestyle at the moment), with the amount of Energy produced right now. _If_ production and distribution, political and economic structures, transportation and habitation systems etc. were to change significantly.

(This is regardless of the Nuclear yes/no discussion.)

[op03]

>> If we want 8 billion people living in comfort, we need more energy

"We want" is language that hides reality. Who wants this? How many people?

As the Trump election (and many other elections around the world) show there is no "we want". Different people want different things. Sweeping that fact under the carpet again and again leads to Paris type meaninglessness. Paris fails because there was never any "we".

All the narratives of fear and blame, guilt and shame that have been tried did not make a dent.

Those who want to do something will do it and those that don't want to wont.

Reconcile to that reality and things will actually move forward.

[Mahn]

"We want" here is a figure of speech. The world doesn't actually care if you don't want other people to live as comfortably as you, because it's gonna happen either way, no country in the world is going to stop pursuing a better quality of life. The real question here is "do we want to figure this out, or do we look the other way".