The average American's carbon footprint is 190x that of the average Niger citizen. Until that changes, population growth in Niger isn't a worry from a climate change perspective. Though it could still cause geopolitical instability in that country and its neighbors.

Unless you think that Niger will persist in poverty forever, or that people born in Niger never move to the US or Europe, then yes, it's still a worry.

It's pretty well-established that a nation's fertility reduces as it grows richer. So Niger will either remain poor but irrelevant to climate change. Or it'll leave poverty behind, but also cut its birth rate.

Either way, only what developed countries (and China, India, Brazil, maybe Nigeria and Indonesia) do today matters in the fight against climate change. There's no one else to point fingers at, unless you're looking for an excuse to do nothing.

As a percentage of total population, the number of people who emigrate from a poor country like Niger to a developed country is quite small. And they'd likely be poor there too, and consume fewer resources on average.

By the time the developing world develops and slows their birth rate they'll have a massive population. They have a big population now and are growing fast. If we don't actually solve global warming the addition of billions more wealthy people will be a huge environmental burden.

I think "doing nothing" is what people who advocate reduction of consumption and having fewer kids are doing. Those plans won't be implemented and they won't work. What I'm advocating is technological development to solve the problems related to global warming.

> I think "doing nothing" is what people who advocate reduction of consumption and having fewer kids are doing. What I'm advocating is technological development to solve the problems related to global warming.

You may think so but that's not the case. I don't know of too many vegan-organic-bike-riding-hippy types who think we shouldn't invest in grid-scale storage, renewable power, carbon capture, or more efficient heating & cooling, manufacturing, or transportation systems. Arguably the only tech many of them oppose is nuclear power.

We need both - reduction of consumption and technological development. People who think just one or the other will be enough are deluded.

(Voluntary) reduction of consumption has the side-effect that the electorate becomes more agreeable to measures such as carbon taxes. An SUV and burger-loving electorate will never vote for them, because they would make SUVs and burgers more expensive. Without carbon taxes, there's no market mechanism to control emissions. And there's less funding for technological development or subsidies to green tech.

So you're saying letting people from Niger immigrate to the USA is the worst possible thing for the environment?

The USA is basically set up to grind natural resources (and people) into money without concern for anything else so that's one way to look at it.

Interestingly, excluding the people part, that’s the same description given about Bitcoin and it’s environmental impact.

Bitcoin is closer to a deity for which people sacrifice their electricity as an offering. Meanwhile Americans are merely fulfilling their selfish desires. Bitcoin can work with 1 KW of power just as well as it can work with 1 TW of power.

A big part of that 190x footprint is all the stuff the US makes and exports to other countries.

It’s silly to attribute it all Americans.

And what about all the crap America imports from all over the world? (I use "America" as a shorthand for the entire developed world. We're all responsible)

I keep being told that America doing anything to reduce emissions is pointless "because China builds a new coal plant ever hour" or something factoid like that. But China does a substantial portion of the world's manufacturing. So if you're giving America's emissions a pass, you should give China a pass as well, right?

The USA has a massive global trade deficit....

One dollar of trade is not always the same amount of CO2.

My point is that we are actually under-counting our CO2 emissions (if we simply go by emissions per capita) because we consume more imported goods from other countries that have expended CO2 to produce them than we export.

And my point is we’re not necessarily under counting.

Doing online advertising produces much less CO2 than say running a steel mill.

Online advertising increases demand for goods and services in a directly measurable way and also directly consumes energy.

Niger is actually a great example for illustrating that better health (e.g. infant mortality rate) and economic outlook results in dramatically falling birth rates. Current birth rate is 6.7, but it was 7.5 only ten years ago: https://knoema.de/atlas/Niger/Fertilit%c3%a4tsrate

In my view the people of the developing world have their challenge - figuring out how to make their people wealthy, healthy, educated, and safe. People in the developed world have the challenge of figuring out how to scale. The answer to scaling cannot be "Maybe we'll just have fewer people or be poor."

While I don't agree on the premise here. There's never gonna be the one thing solving the whole problem. It's gonna be the sum of a million little things. Don't let good be the enemy of perfect.