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this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2024
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Unpopular Opinion
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Are you counting the trash generated by the fact that the DINK couple can afford to go out to eat dinner at restaurants 5 times a week, and travel by plane 4-5 times per year?
You're thinking about human resource consumption as if it's a bell curve, where most are within an order of magnitude as everyone else.
But that's not the case. The wealthy consume literally thousands of times more than the poor, and income/wealth is negatively correlated with fertility, so it can be the case that a single childless millionaire consumes more resources than a dozen 4-person households.
So when comparing the countries where the birth rates have actually fallen below replacement, and where their populations are on the cusp of shrinking, you'll see that as they have fewer children their consumption still goes up exponentially even when their population doesn't.
Taking away scarcity by making fewer people compete for those resources doesn't actually change the aggregate amount of resources consumed. People are perfectly capable of increasing their demand several orders of magnitude if there's less competition snatching up those resources first.
Dear God, who are you friends with?!
?!?!? Who the fuck can afford that?
I'm not sure who these magically able to take vacations people are, but people with kids travel by plane too...
The fact that you struggle to imagine that these people exist in large quantities tells me that you haven't actually fully understood the power distribution of who is consuming how much.
On CO2 emissions, the top 10% emit about 48% of the CO2. The top 10% of Americans (where the cutoff is about $135k) produce about 55 tonnes of CO2 per capita per year, and they have low birth rates.
Yes, but paradoxically having more children makes households consume fewer passenger miles at any given budget, because traveling with children is slow and less enjoyable, and their tickets are just as expensive. So the DINK couple with the $200k budget can fly for vacations and even weekend getaways once every few months (4-8 times per year), but after having kids might only fly on one trip per year. Even with two kids, doubling the number of people in their household, they might be looking at half the passenger miles by taking 1/4 as many trips.
And if eating all the meat in the world and throwing food in the trash and using disposable diapers doesn't compare at all to the consumption involved in traveling out of town by plane, then adding up all the day-to-day stuff the family is doing with kids won't compare to the jet setting couple with the same budget.
Throw in the fact that the people who have the $200k+ budgets are less likely to have kids, and you have the correlation where consumption is negatively correlated with fertility/household size.
You seem to be having two completely different arguments.
People with kids = poor, consume less
People without kids = rich, party all the time
You keep going back to the plane thing. Every childless couple doesn't automatically make them a jet setter?
You're talking about the bottom 90% of the world and I'm saying that they don't consume as much as the top 10%, so I'm focusing mainly on the top 10%. If we're going to discuss resource consumption, the people we talk about should be weighted by the resources they consume. And by that metric, the global rich consume much more, and have fewer children, than the global poor. Therefore, it's easy to point out that reducing birth rates won't actually do much to reduce consumption, because the people who have kids aren't doing much of the consuming.
The jet fuel is just an example of that general correlation, and one of several mechanisms why the childless tend to consume much more. You can argue "oh but all else being equal more mouths equals more resources" but I'm saying that all else isn't even close to equal, so you should engage with the patterns as they actually exist in the world rather than a hypothetical where everyone is equal.