Overview of 2023's CO2 Weekly and Monthly Concentration Data at the Mauna Loa Observatory.

[NNadir]

2. Around 10% of the world's population is reported to live on less than $2 day.

Source: Poverty

Killing all 800 million of them would have very little effect on climate change.

Killing 300 million Americans might have some effect, I think, or perhaps killing a billion Chinese. We might be able to address climate change rapidly by killing both all the Chinese, and all the Americans together.

The problem, I think, has less to do with the raw number of people than it does with the number of people who want to live like Americans, or even like Germans or even, as may be the case for India, like the Chinese.

Who deserves to die so the survivors can declare themselves "Green?"

It is well understood that in cultures where women are well educated, where people feel secure in their homes, where there is reliable and effective health care, negative population growth is observed, for example, Japan and Finland.

I note that countries experiencing declining birth rates consider the event to be problematic, since a reduced younger population is required to support a growing older population.

If one is to accept my belief that this is true that the way to address population growth is to address poverty, arguably the real issue to address is that of poverty as opposed to absolute numbers in the population. I would disagree with those who think that the way to address poverty is to convert wilderness into industrial parks for wind turbines and solar cells and, in addition, covert the Congo River basin into cobalt mines to support batteries.

Clean, carbon free energy has been well known since the 1950's, and began to scale in the 1960's and 1970's. People comfortable with fossil fuels and not with clean. carbon free energy were trained by dishonest marketing to hate clean carbon free energy, engaging in absurd fetishes that still appear here and elsewhere. One can see, for instance, over in the Ennui and Excuses forum, fossil fuel salespeople who are working to rebrand fossil fuels as "hydrogen" (accompanied by exergy destruction) whipping the crowds up into paroxysms of stupidity carrying on about trivial tritium releases at Fukushima.

Maybe we can skip killing off the Chinese and Indians who want to live like Americans, thinking, somehow, that they have a right to do so.

They seem to be doing something meaningful about climate change as opposed to wallowing in fear and ignorance:



Reactor Database.

I could be wrong about this, but I kind of have the opinion that the use of fossil fuels to support the population may have more to do with climate change than the population itself.

I do agree that the carrying capacity of the planet has been exceeded, probably since the 1960's or 1970's, but it's not clear that increasing death rates is necessarily an ethical approach to addressing the problem.