Yeah but what about my love of cruises?
/s
If you really care about the environment,
Don’t breed.
Every child born in the western world does incredible environmental harm, especially in 'Murica
I see this approach to the problem much like telling developing nations they can’t join modern society. The point is correct, more contribution to resource use and pollution is just making things worse. But is just cutting off those who haven’t yet “joined” going to help, or even an answer? The real solutions are much harder, complex, and deeper to discuss, so going for the easy ones is natural. Don’t have kids. Don’t eat meat. Don’t drive cars. Don’t use modern tech. Vote for some other guy. All have their nuances of being the right direction, but are so absolute that it just turns into an argument with no winners, and we still do the things.
we still do the things.
That’s the point
Some of us don’t
I had never owned a car in my life until a year ago (I’m gen-X) when I got an EV. It is either plugged into my solar array, or at work (where they make the world’s biggest electric vehicles)
I eat local food, I eat what’s seasonable, and I’m lucky enough to live in a civilised country with good standards of animal welfare as the norm
I go out of my way to consume as little as I can
So I don’t just talk the talk, it’s how I live my life
And if I despise the people who know that they can be better, but pretend that it’s all too hard and embrace futility while getting something delivered by Amazon and ordering uber eats because they’re lazy and selfish
And it’s great that some like you can live like that knowing you’re the ideal. “We” means society as a whole has to change.
Not having kids isnt really the answer in that it creates a lot of problems for those of us already alive. Not that everyone needs to have kids, but in the general sense. Virtually every developed country in the world is below replacement population birth rates already. Eventually we are pretty much guaranteed to have massive issues caring for aging people as the population collapses after it peaks around 10B people. And thats assuming things stay the same as now, rather than get worse. In some places, like South Korea, its already a severe enough problem that they are converting unused elementary schools into senior centers or adult daycare
The climatological effects of the size of the population are entirely decided by how society operates. We have the technology to exist with 8-10B people in a sustainable way, but the world would have to change in a lot of ways to make it happen. Its not impossible, just unlikely
