No it isn’t. The single biggest way to reduce your impact on Earth is so unpalatable as to be literally unthinkable: don’t eat meat and dairy, avoid having children that have children that have children that all want to eat meat and dairy.
Avoid having children that take airplanes and eat almonds.
Avoid having children and your impact on the Earth rapidly zooms out to nothing.
That’s not the only reason or the main reason to avoid having children. But it’s as good a reason as any.
Nobody will mention it at the top of articles though. Children are a joy and a treasure and not having them would be a slight against human nature.
I'm for all sorts of radical action to stop climate degradation. But "just don't have kids" really is tantamount to saying "just don't exist or be human." It isn't just a tough sell, it isn't even what is being discussed.
It’s incredibly simple for me to use birth control methods, barely an inconvenience.
I have lots of reasons to avoid having kids, but it doesn’t hurt that a side effect is I automatically become a top-1% environmentalist in any crowd I’m standing in, without even really trying.
But it would reduce your carbon output, even though as with all things someone else would just consume more to make up for it.
My carbon footprint, or footprint of other kinds, doesn’t constitute a blip on the radar, because mine ends between now and a few decades from now, and doesn’t grow at all into the future, much less geometrically.
And no, "don't have kids" and "kill yourself" are really not actually the same.
“I’m gay”
Hn: so what, everybody’s something
“I’m an atheist”
Hn: yes and?
“I embed sensors under my skin”
Hn: cool!
“I’m childfree”
Hn: why don’t you just kill yourself then?
Tongue in cheek: obviously not all of HN. But this is one of the few alt views / lifestyles that HN doesn’t easily rally behind.
What I object to is the suggestion "just don't have kids" is a viable political path forward on the question of the environment. It isn't a viable path of any kind, political or otherwise.
"Stop being an omnivore" is sound advice for the modern furless ape.
I'm not really advocating anything here, just lamenting the seeming (and somewhat assumed) immutability of it all.
(random but I really appreciated these subthreads, definitely some good stuff for me to chew on)
Why not? It's appropriate to dictate and even advise on lots of things that are personal/private.
We have laws and social norms to keep people from being horrible to their own children, even behind closed doors, but only after those children are born.
My suggestion is for those bits of advice, backed by the government's monopoly on force, to kick in just a year earlier than that.
Carbon taxes/credits are probably possible. Huge public works (build enough solar panels and energy storage station to meet most of our power needs). Big taxes on carmakers for making high emission vehicles, etc. There are lots of policies which can work, and I think the market will, eventually, also probably get there eventually. But just telling people not to have kids is silly.
Or put "eat meat" in there.
"Biological imperative" at the peril of the planet. Idk. It's probably ironic for me to have any opinions of the biological imperative of heterosexual sex but it just strikes me as odd.
I'll go do my own research but now I'm quite curious about this. I guess for some reason I expect people to be better than their urges, but maybe that's foolish of me.
Not having children is not effective at perpetuating the human race, and thus not usually considered as an ecological solution.
That being said, you don't have to have children to be an ecologist either, but you certainly should realise that your efforts are directed towards future humans, not towards the planet which does just fine anyway.
Unless you are cooking up ideas on how to wipe the human race out like some kind of mad scientist, and presumably kill yourself afterward, the fact is, people need to be convinced to modify their lifestyle/culture somehow. Telling them to simply die without children ain't gonna do it.
I essentially don't care about the state of the planet if there are no humans around to enjoy it.
The larger long-term risk to sentient life is that anti-energy people get their way, humanity never reaches the productive output required to become spacefaring, and we get wiped out by an engineered virus or something.
Quick google shows that a Hyundai Ioniq gets around 4 miles per kWh. An average US household uses 886 kWh per month. You’d have to drive 3,500 miles a month to have the electric car use more energy than the entire household.
Yes, there is an energy cost in building the car, but there’s also an energy cost in building the refrigerator and dryer and washing machine etc in the house.
I’m sure some electric cars are worse than the Ioniq, but they’d have to be considerably worse to equal the energy used by a household.
Oh wow. The average German household of three uses 2500kwh in a multi-tenant and 3500kwh in a single family home PER YEAR.
PER YEAR
> I wonder what it would take to get German energy consumption up to a better level.
Jokes aside, you're describing a correlation. America does not seem "more civilized" to me, you guys are just wasteful. Wasted energy does not lead to more civilization.
No; It's completely consistent with my model. America is more advanced by a huge margin. It's also evidently a more desirable place to live; the Germany-to-USA migration rate is something like 3x the other direction.
That's a good question. Prices are a good start. Consumer prices seem to be twice in G as in the US. Don't know where you get the "wholesale price is 4x in G". Most of what I can find is that wholesale is usually pretty close.
My guess of what G could do to increase consumption and thus moneys:
- Lower prices (duh). End user power is taxed heavily to subsidize industry power
- Remove mandatory energy labels on all electronics. Who really needs to know how much a TV or fridge is going to consume in power?
- Mandate "power-included" in rents. If you pay a fixed sum, you might as well leave the fridge open to cool the kitchen
- Mandate central heating and cooling. If you only pay a share of what you consume, might as well go full blast on everything
- stop subsidizing energy efficiency for new single and multi-tenant homes.
- stop building solid houses. Plywood walls are fine
Nice comparison on power prices: https://www.iea.org/reports/electricity-market-report-decemb...
I can't find any "average kwh for heating" numbers though. If the US number of roughly 10.000 kwh per year included heating, that could be roughly comparable to what the German average could be. Numbers that I find range from 14.000kwh for old homes with Gas usage to 3000kwh for modern homes with heat pumps.
Would make more sense than the US average being 4x while roughly using the same electronics.
I don't think you can really hand wave away that cost. My instinct is that battery, aluminum, and steel production should be very energy intensive.
The 3500+ pounds of "stuff" in your car is over an order of magnitude more "stuff" than a household appliance just by weight alone.
(Maybe we should forego the other luxuries as well, of course).
All that said I imagine the biggest direct end user energy usage would be the cost of HVAC systems running nearly continuously in inhospitable climates.
When you look at it further, you find even an electric car uses 20-30kWh/100km at highway speeds. That basically a constant 20kW. Driving a car is just stupidly energy intensive and very little can be done about that. Trains and public transport have a huge benefit in energy use per person
I hope to move soon, and being able to walk/bike/take public transit is a priority for where I choose, but it makes me think there are so many places in the US where going anywhere without a car is not a realistic option. Car dependency is a big issue in the US.
Technology let use thrive in places we shouldn't even have lived in the first place, a lot of people just "can't" do anything, that's why we're fucked
It’s certainly possible for another form of transit to exist in this town, but everything was designed with cars in mind and there is little interest in fixing it, because almost everyone has a car (excluding those that can't afford them, but we don't talk about that or the weak economic mobility that lack of proper public transit absolutely contributes to).
There's your answer, yet you hand wave it away. Mass transit for not just intracity but also putting housing close to where people want to go (parks/stores).
My non-US wife often jokes about "US city planning" being an oxymoron, and I just can't defend it.
This is an issue I’m pretty passionate about and while I’ve put a lot of effort in locally to change this, I’ve come to realize it’s not something that’s gonna be fixed in my life time. This is why I intend to move to a place that already has good public transit and good walkability.
I would hope that the demise of gas powered cars would lead to a surge of focus on non-car transportation and improved city/suburban design, but I fear that car dependency will continue on as it seems most people in the US greatly prefer the idea of electric cars to anything else. It’s a shame, as I believe cars themselves to be problematic for a whole host of reasons and I feel our society is missing out on a good opportunity to transition away from them. I’ll keep fighting the fight, but there is only so much one can do.
I grow my own food and meat. I think growing your own food is the single biggest way to reduce your impact on Earth. All that industrial farming and transportation required to feed people. So many people living in single family homes could turn their lawns into gardens and produce _surplus_ vegetables. Several times what their family can eat.
And even people in dense urban areas could have community gardens ie rooftop gardens.
It seems popular to want solutions that doesn't involve any sweat equity. Which I find unfortunate, at best.
When do I Start planting chicken eggs? Ive not had any sprout so far and my garden smells awful.
I wonder when many in those 'rich' countries will learn that they need to embrace that instead of 'build the wall'.
Anyway, I don't think replacement fertility is the right measure here. Replacement fertility could be crashing, but if the ratio of 'modern'* humanity is increasing as it is, then the problem remains ... there's probably a term for this if anyone knows.
* (by 'modern' [super air-quoted] I mean, those who have the wants and desires and ability to get the goods and services of the 'rich' countries).
There are other species on this planet too, you know. What about them?
But seriously, I always see the planet as on a finite timescale anyways with the lifetime of our sun being the limiting factor (which is interesting because it's the sun that gives us all our energy for the most part ignoring nuclear). Once the sun goes kaput that's it, we better be intergalactic by then. So I wonder can we think of perhaps maximizing the number of civilizational hours spent under the sun on Earth. Is that a good framework to go by. Put another way say the sun goes out in the year 10,000, and we are to judge two scenarios
A) humans go extinct in the year 7,500 B) humans go extinct in the year 9,000
All else being equal what scenario would people prefer and why.
7500 - 9000 is just a wishful thinking ... we won't make it there without functioning ecosystems
Not having kids and consuming like crazy won't save anything.
https://ourworldindata.org/contributed-most-global-co2
Who has contributed most to global CO2 emissions?
(Don't forget we've outsourced our manufacturing to China)
https://www.businessinsider.com/climate-change-worst-places-...
Countries contributing the least to the climate crisis are feeling the worst of its effects
That's not so true now, China emits as much CO2 per capita as Europe does, and quite a bit more than the greener European countries (e.g. France, Sweden, the UK). This remains even after adjusting for consumption rather than production.
Maybe not now, I was talking about cummulative footprint. Even now China is a third of EU + UK + US together.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co2-emissions-...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions (see 1950-1980)
It seems obvious that it's US & EU who made the China the polluting giant it is now.
> Not having kids and consuming like crazy won't save anything.
Most of the people on this site are American or European. You are the problem you name.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/africa/2020/
They currently use a tiny fraction of the energy the west does (and pollute a tiny fraction), they'll eventually catch up in "quality of life", with all the comes with it (exploding energy consumption)
And it's even more of a tragedy of the commons than simply not eating meat/dairy.
This number is not based on evidence. I clicked through the links on this number, and it traces back basically to guesses that say if there are 100 million species on earth and if 0.1% of them go extinct every year then, well, that divides into that number. If you try to look up specifics - birds, for instance - you'll find that far fewer bird species have gone extinct in this century so far than the pace of the last century[0]. Which is actually encouraging! We are up against big odds but the immense efforts put into conservation are not hopeless - it's working!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bird_extinctions_by_ye...
Global study of 71,000 animal species finds 48% are declining
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/brv.12974
More losers than winners: investigating Anthropocene defaunation through the diversity of population trends
https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/news/2023/april/almost-half-o...
Almost half of all UK bird species in decline
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-current-mass-extinction-is-...
The Current Mass Extinction Is Already Far More Dire Than We Realized
https://www.businessinsider.com/germany-insect-population-fl...
A 27-year study found the amount of insects flying in the air has declined 75% — but no one knows why
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/18/a-wake-u...
‘A wake-up call’: total weight of wild mammals less than 10% of humanity’s
https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/xrml3d/alarming_re...
Alarming report warns 1 in 8 bird species now facing extinction
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2022/08/2...
As many as one in six U.S. tree species is threatened with extinction
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/13/almost-7...
Animal populations experience average decline of almost 70% since 1970, report reveals
Also the 'single biggest way' to become unhealthy, weak, and scrawny. There is no conceivable way that the (putative, but questionable) negative externalities of healthy food consumption outweigh that.
Also, given that anti-meat activism tends to be either quasi- or literally religious (in the case of groups like Seventh-day adventists), of course my prior is that any anti-meat activist can dump a huge pile of link spam saying "hey, check it out, every problem is actually caused by that thing I don't like". This has little bearing on my posterior distribution, because every time I've looked into specific claims about emission equivalence or deforestation, they are methodologically very dishonest (typically by tricks like falsely equating protein quality or assigning revenue in bizarre ways).
That's a fair point. Another athlete I do follow who is ripped[1], has been reportedly Vegan since he was 2. Generally speaking when I think of building muscle in the gym, I think of protein powder and supplements as opposed to eating ever larger quantities of meat; I don't think that's controversial? AFAIK the only thing you need if you are vegan is a Vitamin supplement.
I'm not a Vegan promoter or anything -- I'm not even sure what a Vegan eats for most of their meals (but would love to learn). But having some background in nutrition I'm skeptical there's any shortcoming to being Vegetarian, Vegan, etc, that a very simple supplement (i.e. like one regular vitamin) wouldn't overcome.
Most protein powder is whey-based (not vegan). Whey protein is generally inferior to muscle, connective tissue, etc. but it's typically a lot cheaper. It's better than plant-based alternatives though. Plant protein efficiency is terrible compared to animal protein efficiency, so any moderately muscular vegan is likely eating prodigious quantities of mediocre protein sources like peanut butter.
> AFAIK the only thing you need if you are vegan is a Vitamin supplement.
This is what some vegans will tell you, but you only need to look at the ones saying this to know it's not true. I know some vegans who could be mistaken for non-vegans from a fitness standpoint, and they put quite a lot of work into maintaining their diet. More than just taking a few vitamin pills.
OTOH, you can achieve better results by just eating a lot of steak...
BTW, famous vegan athletes almost never start vegan, and tend to quickly retire due to increased injury rates and slowed recovery.
Otherwise it's just a load of bull ;)
> 'single biggest way' to become unhealthy, weak, and scrawny
https://old.reddit.com/r/veganfitness/
It is the position of the American Dietetic Association that appropriately planned vegetarian diets, including total vegetarian or vegan diets, are healthful, nutritionally adequate, and may provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases. Well-planned vegetarian diets are appropriate for individuals during all stages of the life cycle, including pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood, and adolescence, and for athletes.
- American Dietetic Association
A vegetarian or vegan diet can be suitable for everyone, regardless of their age.
- NHS UK
A plant-based diet is based on foods derived from plants, […] with few or no animal products. […] Well-planned plant-based diets can support healthy living at every age and life-stage.
- British Dietetic Association
> they are methodologically very dishonest (tricks like falsely equating protein quality)
For adults, protein from two or more plant groups daily is like to be adequate.
- WHO
> anti-meat activism tends to be either quasi- or literally religious
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vWbV9FPo_Q - Melanie Joy, The psychology of eating meat
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7JE8j5Ncmw - James Wildman, Think
> every problem is actually caused by that thing I don't like
Plethora of studies has confirmed that (animal) agriculture is one of the biggest destroyers of our environment. It's mostly animal products consumers who reject latest science and choose to be ignorant of those problems.
I've had my mind changed (sometimes in significant ways) many times on HN. I would love it if vegans were correct on this topic, but unfortunately their epistemic rigor tends to be extremely bad and as far as I can tell they are pretty uniformly incorrect when they make claims like this.
I think if you understood my objection, you wouldn't have bothered trying to convince me with links from organizations that exist solely to transmit low-quality information to midwits, like the WHO or random advocacy/lobbying group websites.
The types of information that would convince me are e.g. epistemically sound research papers, and I can almost guarantee that I've read more of those than you have if you think random quote clippings from the WHO should have any impact whatsoever on anyone's priors.
Sadly, your response is unfortunately quite typical of veganism enthusiasts on this website. Very condescending, but completely devoid of any kind of useful information.
Your towering intellect, armed with an exclusive collection of "epistemically sound research papers," surely eclipses the feeble influence of organizations like the WHO.
How foolish of us to think their information could impact anyone's priors.
Your insightful critique of veganism enthusiasts, while devoid of substance, certainly showcases your unmatched condescension. Thank you for gracing us with your profound wisdom and invaluable lack of useful information.
Avoiding meat and dairy is ‘single biggest way’ to reduce your impact on Earth
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Rapid global phaseout of animal agriculture has the potential to stabilize greenhouse gas levels for 30 years and offset 68 percent of CO2 emissions this century
https://www.colorado.edu/ecenter/2022/03/15/it-may-be-uncomf...
The animal agriculture industry is the leading cause of most environmental degradation that is currently occurring.
https://plantbasednews.org/news/plant-based-lifestyles-imper...
Plant-Based Lifestyles Now ‘Imperative’ For Survival, IPCC Climate Expert Says
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/320356605_Agricultu...
Agriculture production as a major driver of the Earth system exceeding planetary boundaries
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/abandon-industrial-agri...
"We are in the middle of the sixth extinction with as many as 274 species going extinct every day—we have lost an average of 68% of all bird, fish, mammal, amphibian, and reptile species in the past 50 years—and the decline is continuing at more than one percentage point per year. Agriculture is the largest cause of these declines—86% of those species threatened—with animal agriculture (60%) the salient perpetrator."