Carbon emissions = carbon emissions per person times number of people
C = (C/P) x P
Most of what is discussed in YA Global Warming concerns the term C/P
You would like to talk about P instead.
Fine, talk about IT.
But don't try to talk about it by claiming per capita carbon emissions are not important too.
When it comes to practical politics applied to carbon emissions reductions, there is probably more potential with C/P than with P.
So, starting off with the extreme assumption that P is all the matters is not likely to go anywhere.
You can provide a platform for the anti-science copy-pasters who cannot tell the difference between conspiracy theory fantasies and actual science, and who dominate this category, but getting sensible answers to questions about population is something different.
Edit: I disagree with Trevor. By almost any rational reckoning, the earth is likely to be a safer and less uncomfortable place with 8 or 9 billion people rather than 12 billion, and there are plenty of straightforward non-coercive policy measure that could help global population growth continue to slacken rather than accelerate. This indicates another problem with this question. Even the people here who really do know climate science are not necessarily very up to speed on other topics such as economics and demographics. Try another category of YA.
First, forget the 7 years of births followed by 7 years of no births. No point in complicating things. Just pay people a substantial amount to be sterilized after the birth of a first child (or after zero children for those who prefer zero). In the long run this would save a lot of money and population growth would quickly stabilize then decline.
Reduction of population growth--coupled with additional rewards for eco-aware activities--will inspire, rather than control.
Aside from the morality, you're suggesting a policy that wouldn't show measurable reductions for at least two human lifetimes to deal with a problem that needs solutions in less than 30 years.
You mean solutions for "major escalating world wide issues"
like obesity?
http://www.news-journal.com/features/hea...
Sure that can be easily done by a single all powerful world government or emperor .
Simply issue each of the 7 billion of us a daily food ticket good for 2400 calories of the food of our choice.
Everyone still has freedom to choose but no one gets fat, problem solved!
All other world problems have similar simple solutions that would be just as popular as this example.
You dont understand the purpose of these conferences, they are to try and reach a means of enforcing totalatitarianism, they don't care about the environment, they are trying to circumvent democracy.
Organisations like the EU and the UN want more control and they do not want the common public to have a say in it, Communism and central government has been ousted, so instead the marxists have infriltrated organizations like Greenpeace and they are trying to creep in through the back door, well they may not all be marxists but their intentions are the same.
Breathe heavy and piss off a liberal! And btw no government or person will ever have that power. Laws only need to be followed when there are people to enforce them. Better bring a tank.
They are the liberal elites that want to control peoples lives .
Welcome to the wonderful world of governments. Welcome to the real world.
So your simple solution is totalitarianism and genocide? Tell me exactly how do you "humanely" enforce such brutal oppression? This is the true face of the green movement its nothing at all to do with the environment. This is about power. Power over people. Power to do terrible, terrible things. When are we going to learn that this never leads us down the virtuous path.
Population needn’t be the problem it is, and will continue to be, if we were to make better use of the resources we have available.
Taking everything into consideration, Earth has a carrying capacity of approx 3 billion people. For individual resources the figure could be a lot less or a lot more, 3 billion is the overall average. With a current population of 7.1 billion we’re exceeding the carrying capacity some 2.3 times over.
In many cases alternatives are already available. Fossil fuels are perhaps the obvious example, the resources we have took millions of years to form but will be gone in a few decades; once they’re gone that’s it.
In many cases we already have viable alternatives but we’re not using them. Nuclear power (preferably fusion) can quite easily supply all the electricity the world needs but currently accounts for just 11% of global electricity production and the amount has barely changed in the last 15 years.
More info: http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Curren...
In approx 2008 global food demand exceeded production for the first time – even if all the food were equally shared between everyone. There are many reasons for this and some of them are easy to resolve.
One issue which few seem to be aware of is that some of the multinationals are buying and leasing vast tracts of land in Africa and Asia because it’s cheaper to grow food there than it is in Europe or the Americas. They don’t need to do this, it’s purely done for financial gain. The problem of course is that they’re utilising productive land that used to be used to feed the local people (whilst abandoning equally productive land in developed nations).
Another issue, again arising from financial interests, is the rate at which goods are consumed. Pretty much everything we buy from mobile phones to cars, washing machines to TV’s, has a deliberate redundancy period built in – these items are specifically manufactured so that they don’t last.
Mobile phones are perhaps the worst example of this. The technology already exists for all the updates that will be available in the next few years. Rather than releasing a new phone with all available updates the manufacturers release the updates incrementally, thus people buy phones perhaps once a year rather than once every five years. It costs consumers 5 times as much, uses 5 times as many resources, but it means larger profits for the manufacturers.
As for climate conferences and emissions targets… the targets that are set are usually in the form of a percentage reduction against a baseline figure and a target date (e.g. 80% less than 1990 levels by 2050 – this is the European target).
These are gross targets and therefore account for any change in the population. European emissions in 1990 were 7.2 billion tonnes, the target is to get this down to 1.5 billion tonnes by 2050 (they’re currently down to about 5 billion tonnes). Whether the population increase or decreases doesn’t affect these targets, it would however affect the per capita emission levels.
I’m not sure that allowing people to procreate in seven year intervals would be effective, people would just wait until the time when they were allowed to have kids and have the same number, that’s what I would have done. You then need twice as many schools, universities, hospital wards, paediatricians, nurseries etc to cope with the seven year baby-boom, following that they all become redundant until the next boom comes along. Plus, what would happen to children born during the prohibited period, we’d see a repeat of the horrendous and inhumane conditions China created with it’s disastrous one baby per couple policy.
If we can curb our greed, utilise resources responsibly and seek viable alternatives then there’s no reason why the population can’t expand and still cater for the needs of everyone. It’s probable that equilibrium between birth and death rates will be reached in about 100 years when the global population will stabilise at around 12 billion, it shouldn’t be beyond us to accommodate this many people.
Governments hold useless climate conferences and make decisions which are senseless, as, for example, that within a certain period of years the CO2 output is to be reduced by such and such a percent. This is completely nonsensical fussing and posturing because, even if that which is decided were to be achieved, the entire thing is not even a drop on a hot stone. This is because, already in the time between the resolution and its realisation, hundreds of millions more human beings will populate the Earth and produce still more filth and CO2 than the quantity that was decided upon. Therefore, the entire climate conference is counter-productive and idiotic because the only correct solution would be one from conferences concerned with the reduction of the overpopulation, at which resolutions, which are effective worldwide, for the radical decimation of the overpopulation, would be made and carried out and certainly by means of a worldwide, regulated control of births. Overpopulation is the root cause of the excessive consumption of natural resources and food stuffs, environmental damage and world poverty. The implementation of HUMANE global population reduction bringing a halt to births by way of a global effort e.g.. global birth stop for a period of seven years followed by seven years of births, then the cycle repeating over again. Surely this suggestion or something similar offers a realistic and effective solution for several major escalating world-wide issues
