It's polite data analyst speak for, "We need immediate and globally-coordinated _radical_ action" (action being the key term) Edit: We're not fucked yet. Apotheosis of hope.
No, return to old style living won't save us, because the planet can't sustain our current population levels with old-style living. Unless you want to trigger civil unrest and kill many people, the solution has to be technological. Renewable energy and improved energy efficiency can do it, it just needs a few trillion dollars of investment.
Triggering civil unrest and such is not really required to reduce population sizes: as we seem to be tracking ca. +3.5 C increase in average temperatures by 2100, the reduction in population levels will happen automatically by extinctions of animals, disease, extreme weather, flooding of coastal areas, loss in crop productivity, droughts, melting ice cover, societal unrest, and so on.
Renewable energy will have a hard time winning globally unless cheap dirty stuff like coal and oil is made much more expensive through taxes or other means. There is also active resistance from the fossil fuel industry too.
The parent didn't say population growth, they said population. There's way more people currently alive on Earth than the planet's carrying capacity under 1600-level tech, to which we'd had to backtrack globally if we wanted to fix the climate crisis through reducing consumption alone. This is unacceptable for pretty much every reason.
We either find technological solutions to this problem - both on the emission end and on the sequestration end - or climate change starts killing people (and making more people kill even more people). It's that simple.
Population growth is slowing itself. So we have that covered. And now what? Turns out, it's not enough, not even before considering that 2/3 of this population is still in developing countries, which are going to increase their emission levels in the pursuit of decent quality of life.
And thus population control is critical... QED. We don't have that covered at all at the moment: We are already 7 billions and will possibly be 11+ billions by the end of the century. That's insane.
Let's not forget that emissions are only a tiny part of the pressure we put on the environment.
Unless you plan on killing the top 90% GHG emitters over the next fifteen years or so, reducing population levels is not an option. Slowing population growth is important, but it's not a solution.
One of the problems we have is people not being able to take a long term view. Everything has always to work within 5 years... Result: nothing is done.
What I wrote should have started at least 30 years ago. As the saying goes, the next best time to start is now.
You're right but in my opinion, we'll either figure out how to live carbon neutral more or less regardless how many people we have in the next two decades, or catastrophic climate change will ensure that the projected population rise will never happen.
Luckily, we don't have to go back to 1600-level tech, even if our energy output falls to 1/2 of what it currently is.
Vaccines, and reducing child-mortality (and other health care), for example, are not inherently energy-intensive. Neither is massive computing power and storage (data centers are ripe for being carbon-neutral).
What might happen is that we'll have 1 farmer supporting 100 people, instead of 1000, so we'll end up having a larger agricultural population, but not as large as at the end of 19th century. Consumption WILL go down whether you like it or not, even though you might find it politically unpalatable at this point in time.
This might have the additional benefit of slowing down population growth even more, resulting in sustainable levels. It might also result in a healthier population as we embrace reduced consumption and maybe slightly more physical labor.
> Vaccines, and reducing child-mortality (and other health care), for example, are not inherently energy-intensive. Neither is massive computing power and storage (data centers are ripe for being carbon-neutral).
They may not be that emission-dependent in principle, but their supply chains might. Remember that for any technology we want to keep through changes, we also need to keep its entire supply chain in some form - from raw material through all specialized processing steps, plus populations and transportation required. These may not be so easy to decarbonize, though I do have high hopes, especially if and when electric vehicles finally take over.
> This might have the additional benefit of slowing down population growth even more, resulting in sustainable levels.
Or it may have the exactly opposite effect - accelerating population growth. So far the only thing that seems to solidly correlate with population growth is the development level, and that correlation is negative. I.e. as countries become wealthier and consume more, their population growth rates decrease.
No, those growing countries are not the ones producing the most emissions. Top priority is getting the first world to cut down it's emissions and make green technology accessible for developing countries so they don't follow the same path
Population growth is not conveniently forgotten, it's brought up constantly in any discussion. It just isn't the cause of our current situation and won't be significantly adding to it in the time frame that the west needs to adjust
Increasing population will be a contributor in the future if we do not change our technology, but that does not matter because even if everyone but the west (who has a stable population level) stopped emitting carbon we'd still be screwed
Focusing on reducing population is literally preemptive optimization on something that may or may not be a problem depending on the trajectory of energy/production over the next 10 years. It is also just a polite way of saying eugenics
It is already a massive problem and it will only get worse.
Again, emissions are only a small part of the pressure we put on the environment.
Deforestation, loss of natural habitat, dwindling fish stocks, pollution at large, and indeed emissions: These are all caused by ever more people needing ever more resources.
This has nothing to do with eugenics, which has a completely different meaning.
