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 Our World In Data’s data is out of date [1], I keep poking them to update their fertility rate data but get no response (maybe busy with COVID data sets, I have no context into why).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