When I lived in China local people would ask me why Americans (at that time) only had an average of 2.5 kids. “But you can have as many kids as you want!” they would exclaim in disbelief. Looks like they’ve figured out having kids isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Having children in a modern country where birth control exists, women are college educated, have careers and also have some say over whether or not they want to have a child, as well as education and healthcare being expensive, really impacts a population. I’m sure the fact that most children survive to adulthood nowadays, unlike in earlier times, has something to do with it, too.
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I think I can see a solution to that timebomb problem 
Climate change is a global problem I guess, so the solution should also be global.
Grrrr… Damn you “concept of nation states”.
People concerned about global climate should focus on what they can do. The most effective actions for individuals are
- Create fewer children
- Do not drive an internal combustion vehicle or drive much less
- Don’t eat meat
- Keep your appliances updated with the latest energy saving models
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It is not true that China or other socialist countries have led the way in reducing emissions. China emissions went up 50% in the last 10 years and 15% yoy in just the first quarter of 2021. They are building coal plants as fast as they can. They build solar, yes, but only sell to suckers in North America and Europe.
Not true. While they’re still catching up they are moving as far as they can in the renewables uptake.
China added 77 terawatt-hours hours of coal power last year and 0.048 terawatts of solar. China now uses more than half of the coal in the world (53%). China generated over half world's coal-fired power in 2020: study | Reuters
Bringing this discussion back to the thread title which focuses on California, the New York Times has an article about monastics at a well-known Zen center near Big Sur who draw on their meditative practice to assist in fire-fighting efforts near the center:
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This is not true. They are rapidly switching to non-carbon fueled power systems just as we are. For China, it became more of a crisis because of the air pollution that liquified coal created.
Also, you should look at the advances they are making with electric vehicles. They’ve developed a way to switch out the batteries of electric cars so drivers can continue driving rather than wait for a recharge. Basically, it’s a carwash size building the car drives into, and then an automated machine swaps the battery from underneath. It’s quite amazing what innovative solutions are happening in East Asia that we don’t hear about in the US. Here is a video from NHK covering the latest auto show in Shanghai this year.
I’m sorry, but the numbers don’t lie. They are adding vastly more coal than solar. I was once puzzled why so many Westerners are so quick to defend China, and I think the reason is that they desperately want centralized control but are unwilling to accept that managed economies have been much worse for the environment than freer markets.
Wow. Very interesting!
Not sure what is your basis for this assessment.
From the perspective of emissions per capita, US and other free market economies sits well above China:
Map of countries by CO2 emissions per capita, 2020 - knoema.com
I guess something like this, showing changes in carbon emission over time. This stops in 2016, but the trends have continued, or in the case of China, accelerated. It’s even more dramatic per unit of output.
Buddhism already contributed for 2500 years by having the celibate monks and nuns order of the Sangha, and definitely lay people are welcomed to join. Those who are young and wish to join are encouraged to actively not have a kid in the world, not even to have a girlfriend to be free to join.
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It’s a tempting correlation, and obviously, all things being equal, a lower population will create a lower carbon footprint. The graph posted by @faujidoc1 certainly seems to support this.
“Seems”, however, would be the operative word, because all things are most decidedly not equal. A graph of human population overall masks the actual culprit, which is economic growth. Carbon emissions track economic growth closely, and if we distinguish between cultures of high economic development and low development, we will see that population growth in poor countries makes little overall impact on global warming.
One reason to be cautious of this framing is that it can easily slip into racism, since poor countries are mostly not white. If a Californian decides to have no children, this will make a much larger difference than a Ghanian who makes the same choice.
As others have pointed out, population growth usually slows down with development.
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Yeah, I messed up on the video link. I had seen it on an NHK segment and that video looked like the one I had watched. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to be available on YouTube. It was pretty amazing. It was an “of course” type of idea when I saw it.
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This is because China continues to suck up all of the manufacturing capacity of the world, and now is also building out a pretty huge middle class. Yes, they are the largest carbon emitters at this point. Our line of the graph looks respectable, but you have to remember that we don’t build manufacturing capacity anymore, we ship it to other countries instead. I’m not sure how much this is true of Europe, but I believe much of their consumer goods are now coming from China as well, so they’ve likely made the same transfer of capacity to China. Essentially, the world’s manufacturing base has been concentrated there for the past 20 years as a Faustian bargain by capitalists who like the profit margins they get from Third World labor.
Given that their economy grows over 5% a year during bad times, and the population is something like a billion people who are rapidly moving into cities, it’s difficult for them to keep up with the power demands, much less switch the existing infrastructure over at the same time. The biggest problem that had was the lack of anything but coal when they began this “compress the Industrial Revolution into a single generation” project, so the air pollution was pretty terrible at one point. They’ve been building a large number of nuclear plants, but there’s only so many nuclear plants you can built in a single year. I mean, there are physical limits to this stuff, and China has been pushing them beyond anything seen in human history before.
It’s a bit laughable to call China’s economy “planned” or “Communist” at this point. It’s a Chinese economy, in the sense that China has always been a centralized state. Communism served the purpose of helping China maintain their independence and unify coming out of the warlord period before World War II and Japanese invasion. Since Mao died, they’ve been transitioning away from Communism and towards something that’s an Asian hybrid of Western and Eastern, much like Japan has done.
Really, East Asia in general, including Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan has blown by America, and we’re falling behind as we spend our time having inane arguments like this that ignore reality in favor of twisting factoids into talking points. We aren’t the “can do” country anymore; we’re now the “we argue to avoid doing anything” country.
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Point taken, and of course it’s madness that we (the world) don’t aim for negative growth right now, until we sort out something a bit more sustainable, but also …
Well sort of… If people didn’t travel around the place that is. To be clear where I’m coming from… I was born in India. I live in the UK. My parents, grand parents and for as far as we can see back (not far) were all born in India. I’m a product of empire. I know a lot of immigrants to the UK. We don’t really have proper numbers for immigration and emigration in the UK. I’m guessing it’s no different in other countries.
So people moving around the world to places with “more resources” is also a problem. But then we’ve got the ‘population timebombs’, mentioned above too. This is quite complex, right?
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In the Digital Economy, people don’t have to physically move either. With Work From Home becoming a viable prospect thanks to COVID, corporates are realizing that even knowledge work can be shifted to the developing world.
Currently, knowledge workers are paid differently according to their nationality. Ostensibly, this is due to the different levels of pricing power in different economies (that the difference persists even for different passport holders within the same economy is another matter). With the outsourcing of these previously middle class jobs, economic prosperity in the West is bound to decline affecting their way of life adversely. Of course, economic prosperity in the East will increase, but perhaps their consumption might not increase to the same extent?? Wishful thinking I fear, because who is there who will not upsize their way of life, given economic ability?
And then there is the ever present threat of War. People don’t take kindly to seeing their neighbors overtake them. And the only real export the US is going to be left with are highly technological weapon systems. The US has already declared its intention to militarize space. Throw in autonomous armed robot drones and mass kill biological platforms (What exactly was the US funding in Wuhan, anyway?)… all a highly toxic cocktail of Trouble.
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It is. More significant than the absolute number of population is the number of people moving. It is the movement of people, I believe, that will be the tip of the spear when it comes the consequences of climate change. The numbers of refugees is going to skyrocket, and we have zero planning or capacity to deal with it.
Me! 
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