• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    Making a baby is one of the largest carbon footprint things anyone can do.

    The median Indian resident produces carbon under the threshold for a sustainable climate. And that country has some of the highest population growth in the world. Babies aren’t the reason your carbon footprint is high. Coal fired power plants and ICE powered automobiles and AI data centers are what’s driving up the emissions rate.

    The needs of the individual household include not being cooked to death

    The emissions of a single household are minuscule relative to the emissions of international industry. Not having a child will do nothing to discourage Andressen Horowitz or Jack Ma from shoving another billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere in pursuit of a larger ROI.

    We need fewer babies.

    We need fewer billionaires.

    • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      The carbon footprint of having a child will depend on the family it’s being born into, for sure. I don’t know jack about the median Indian resident, but I’m fairly confident that their carbon footprint is higher than zero, so even looking at them as a best case scenario, reduction is still beneficial. And the emissions of industries will reduce alongside the population they target and workforce they deploy.

      AI data centers

      Yeah fuck that shit.

      Billionaires

      Yeah fuck those pieces of shit. Population reduction needs to happen in tandem with guillotine day, as you’re 100% right that the damage they’re doing is wildly beyond the scope of -any- decision you or I could make, good or bad.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Population reduction needs to happen in tandem with guillotine day

        Population reduction is already in force because guillotine day isn’t coming. The whole peril of climate change is that is renders large developed regions and concentrations of people impossible to sustain. But our inability to curb emissions isn’t a consequence of our sheer quantity of people. It is deliberately obstructed by profit-seeking actors in the highest reaches of authority.

        You can kill every Gazan, bomb out every Ukrainian or Russian city, and massacre humanity along the length and breadth of the US-Mexico border. It won’t curb emissions because these aren’t the people burning all the fossil fuels.

        • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          I don’t mean reduction by cherry picking a population out of existence (except for billionaires - their extinction would be a win for literally all other life), but that humanity in general needs to slow the fuck down.

          We won’t. We’re too stupid to act on any consequences beyond the scope of the fiscal year; but we need to.