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Another Idea about pollution .

Get to the source of the problem - Too many humans being born.

Rather than fine people for having too many children (doesn't work and would create more problems), how about rewarding people for not having any?
 
Most of SE Asia the birthrates are way down, limited social support makes people restrict their families
 
Fatmarley said:
Get to the source of the problem - Too many humans being born.
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From an economic perspective that is highly questionable in the west at least. As I understand it in many “developed” nations like the UK, Japan, much of Europe the birth rate is below that needed to meet future pension and other taxation requirements etc.
 
Tony L said:
From an economic perspective that is highly questionable in the west at least. As I understand it in many “developed” nations like the UK, Japan, much of Europe the birth rate is below that needed to meet future pension and other taxation requirements etc.
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So it's not fewer young people that is needed, it's fewer old people.

We need a pandemic that reduces the number of old people.
 
Fatmarley said:
Get to the source of the problem - Too many humans being born.

Rather than fine people for having too many children (doesn't work and would create more problems), how about rewarding people for not having any?
Click to expand...
Its ignorance such as this that allows whole nations to be manipulated by those in power.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
By weight, human beings are insignificant.

If everyone on the planet were to step on one side of a giant balance scale, and all the bacteria on Earth were to be placed on the other side, we’d shoot violently upward. That’s because all the bacteria on Earth combined are about 1,166 times more massive than all the humans.

Comparisons to other categories of life similarly demonstrate how very, very small we are. As a sweeping recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds, in a census sorting all the life on Earth by weight (measured in gigatons of carbon, the signature element of life on Earth), we make up less than 1 percent of life.

There are an estimated 550 gigatons of carbon of life in the world. A gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons. A metric ton is 1,000 kilograms, or about 2,200 pounds.

We’re talking in huge, huge, mind-boggling terms here.
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Cheers,

DV
 
Darth Vader said:
Its ignorance such as this that allows whole nations to be manipulated by those in power.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
By weight, human beings are insignificant.

If everyone on the planet were to step on one side of a giant balance scale, and all the bacteria on Earth were to be placed on the other side, we’d shoot violently upward. That’s because all the bacteria on Earth combined are about 1,166 times more massive than all the humans.

Comparisons to other categories of life similarly demonstrate how very, very small we are. As a sweeping recent study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds, in a census sorting all the life on Earth by weight (measured in gigatons of carbon, the signature element of life on Earth), we make up less than 1 percent of life.

There are an estimated 550 gigatons of carbon of life in the world. A gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons. A metric ton is 1,000 kilograms, or about 2,200 pounds.

We’re talking in huge, huge, mind-boggling terms here.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Cheers,

DV
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Just considering the non-human majority of carbon-based lifeforms:

  • How much CO2 rise in the atmosphere is it responsible for?
  • The amount of hydrorcarbons it has extracted?
  • The extent of rainforest it has destroyed?
  • The numbers of species it has made extinct?
  • The area of land it has poisoned?
  • The weight of plastic it has put in the oceans
And how does that compare to what our tiny proportion of carbo-based life has done to the planet.

The only mind-boggling thing is your inability to acknowledge it's about effect not population size.
 
Fatmarley said:
Get to the source of the problem - Too many humans being born.
Click to expand...
This is one of those statements that is partly true, but gets in the way of understanding. Firstly, it obviously misdirects attention away from the lifestyles of the people being born (all of which are different, some of which are sustainable).

Also, it is simplistic to think only in terms of number of births: let's walk through some numbers.

Start with 1bn people. Assume all live to 80. All have one child each (two per couple). After 100 years, there is a massive difference (28bn vs 3bn population) between the population one hundred years later if the children are born to young parents (age 20) or old parents (age 40).

My maths could be wrong, here, but the argument remains valid. It's not much use talking about the number of births if you don't know the intervals between generations.

In short, the simpler one's solution is, the more likely it is to be incomplete.
 
laughingboy said:
This is one of those statements that is partly true, but gets in the way of understanding. Firstly, it obviously misdirects attention away from the lifestyles of the people being born (all of which are different, some of which are sustainable).
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I'd have thought a desirable outcome would be a world in which we all have a decent lifestyle whilst producing minimal greenhouse gas and living a long, happy life.

The present monoculture of 8 billion and rising humans is unsustainable and displaces many other species from the biome by monopolising resources, one of which is simply physical space.

At a guess i'd say we can't do this with much over 1 billion humans.

Maybe we should reinstate and upgrade the old Indian policy, a Naim system for each vasectomy?
 
Seeker_UK said:
Just considering the non-human majority of carbon-based lifeforms:

  • How much CO2 rise in the atmosphere is it responsible for?
  • The amount of hydrorcarbons it has extracted?
  • The extent of rainforest it has destroyed?
  • The numbers of species it has made extinct?
  • The area of land it has poisoned?
  • The weight of plastic it has put in the oceans
And how does that compare to what our tiny proportion of carbo-based life has done to the planet.

The only mind-boggling thing is your inability to acknowledge it's about effect not population size.
Click to expand...
Bacteria are responsible for a lot of this and they certainly have done more to make the world the way it is than humans, if an holistic view is taken. As an example, how many organisms have been killed by bacteria? Countless billikns. How many made extinct? Millions agin, and nobody knows how many.
 
dweezil said:
At a guess i'd say we can't do this with much over 1 billion humans.
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1bn takes us back to the number of people in 1804. We'd need a lot of vasectomies and Naim systems to get back there!

There's an interesting graph on this Wikipedia page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_milestones. It shows that the population of Europe is about 750m and is projected to stay around that level. So, perhaps one question should be: what is it about the societies of Europe that creates this effect?

It is not wealth: the US, which emits 16.2 tonnes of carbon per capita annually, is adding to its population every 28 seconds. https://www.census.gov/popclock/

The UK's population is also rising. We emit 5.8 tonnes per capita annually. https://ourworldindata.org/per-capita-co2
 
stevec67 said:
Bacteria are responsible for a lot of this and they certainly have done more to make the world the way it is than humans, if an holistic view is taken. As an example, how many organisms have been killed by bacteria? Countless billikns. How many made extinct? Millions agin, and nobody knows how many.
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So do we need to worry about bacteria-caused climate change than man-made climate change.
 
stevec67 said:
Bacteria are responsible for a lot of this and they certainly have done more to make the world the way it is than humans, if an holistic view is taken. As an example, how many organisms have been killed by bacteria? Countless billikns. How many made extinct? Millions agin, and nobody knows how many.
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Err, without bacteria we would be buried in crap (literally), except we wouldn’t exist because the “human” body contains more bacterial cells than human ones, the majority of them providing useful services.
 
hc25036 said:
Err, without bacteria we would be buried in crap (literally), except we wouldn’t exist because the “human” body contains more bacterial cells than human ones, the majority of them providing useful services.
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absolutely true. Also true that bacteria have killed more animals than humans can ever dream of. Both bacteria and humans are part of the great circle of life, neither intrinsically good nor bad.
 
Bacterial contribution is unavoidable, but it changes gradually, probably over geological periods of time. It doesn’t suddenly shift and cause disruptive change over the course of decades or a few centuries. That’s the problem we face - change is happening too rapidly for normal adjustment mechanisms to cope with.
 
stevec67 said:
absolutely true. Also true that bacteria have killed more animals than humans can ever dream of. Both bacteria and humans are part of the great circle of life, neither intrinsically good nor bad.
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The point is that those animals/humans would not not had existed to be killed by bacteria if there were no bacteria. Disney would call it the circle of life or some such cack….
 
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