• Restaldt@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      No… its simply not. Maybe Jimmy John and Mary sue having a dozen offspring in missouri are a slight part of the problem but your average person have one or two is not the problem.

      As with everything in this world: Its the corporations. They are the problem. No amount of reuse, reduction, or recycling by any individual would even register on the graph of emissions/carbon footprint when compared to even a tiny company

      I do agree that its irresponsible to subject yet another human being to the future we are careening towards

      • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        I mean, I get what you are saying, but if for a few generations only every 10th family would have only 1 child, GHG emissions would fall drastically. Having a kid basically more than doubles ‘your’ own carbon footprint.

        Is this the only, the necessary, or the preferred way? Ofc not. Is it the biggest impact I can personally have on global warming? It is (voting, protesting, buying local & sustainable helps, but whatever you are doing the kids are doing it too).

        It’s sad bcs there are so many ways we could solve this (at least achieve carbon neutrality, tho we need more than that now), but short-term profits of the current elite would suffer a little tiny bit so we can’t do it.

        But additionally now we do need to prep to mitigate consequences and damage control (on top of green/ESG investments) … I wonder if all those profits will be used to finance this …

      • Jack@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        117.7 tonnes of Co2e per kid per parent per year in the USA (58.6 tonnes average when including all the poorer countries).Wynes et al. 2017

        A conservative estimate is that we need to emit less than 2.1 tonnes in total per person per year to try to prevent catastrophic Anthropogenic climate change. Girod et al. 2013 (life expectancy/2050).

        117.7 > 2.1

        We need a fertility rate of about 0.01 for several decades.

        Human overpopulation is not only the biggest contributor to push us into a climate-change tipping-points cascade, it’s also the root cause of almost all its other causes. It’s also the root cause of unsustainable habitat loss and pollution. It’s also the root cause of factory farming and industrial fishing, which causes more pain and suffering every year than all other atrocities ever committed combined.

        As for corporations, they’re not burning the planet for shits and giggles - they’re psychopaths doing it because billions of people are choosing to buy their goods and services, which they want but don’t actually need.