Why is it always childless atheists who reeee the hardest about "climate change"?

[StrixLiterata]

15 hours ago, Im_IRS said:

and at some point will develop a bigger carbon footprint per capita. So it's all in vain anyway.

The standpoint of "everyone else isn't helping to solve the problem, so it can't be done and therefore we don't have to try" is sensical only if the problem is just an inconvenience. Global warming is that for now, but is eventually going to be apocaliptic if not stopped; so the fact that other countries are not making an effort is a futher reason why we should.

 

On that note, helping the European Union become more industrailly powerful will help in the long run, since it's member countries are already diminishing their emissions. I don't know how much Russia cares about the enviroenment, but if they do even a bit, USA, Russia and EU together could have the power to sideline China and India from the global market until they reign in their pollution.

[BTGBullseye]

On 3/17/2021 at 7:00 PM, Im_IRS said:

When your political rivals are so distraught with the prospect of a dark future that they voluntarily remove themselves from the gene pool. 

Seems like it's mostly the self-labeled "smart people" that do this though....

[Im_CIA]

On 3/17/2021 at 9:47 PM, Kraken said:

To be honest I find this sort of disingenuous. I'm not sure whether you're insinuating it's liberals only that are not having children, or assuming that all millennials are liberal. Or it's by country fertility rates.

Anyways your source literally talks about why Africa tends to have higher fertility rates and what that means- It doesn't really mean anything for us. Africa is growing financially and technologically but unless they become a source of something we (Americans) direly become dependent on (that we aren't already dependent on China or Saudi Arabia for) I don't see why it would be an issue. Overpopulation as most people interpret it is a myth anyways. Populations always stabilize naturally (and in some extreme cases such as China, artificially) due to resource constraints (at least usually in sustainable constraints.)

As has been pointed out before, India and China are in a lot of the cases the leading cause for climate change and we can't really do anything about it (besides not burning our own forests and shit like that.) So really in any case we're pretty screwed unless there's a major sharing of knowledge of/materials for clean energy and/or Nuclear Energy to developing countries and/or China and India. But that probably won't happen because we're A. probably incapable of such massive scale industrial production because of course we'd want to sell it to them, B. (rightfully) scared shitless of nuclear weapons proliferation. (It doesn't really matter in the case of India and China though, they already have nukes.)

 

For your first point, there is correlation between fertility rates and political affiliation.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advantage

 

For the rest of it, I thought a part of what you were originally saying that not raising kids some sort of act of environmental justice. Well whatever the reasons, by all means, (don't) go ahead.

[Kraken]

On 3/24/2021 at 6:30 PM, Im_IRS said:

 

For your first point, there is correlation between fertility rates and political affiliation.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-conservative-fertility-advantage

 

For the rest of it, I thought a part of what you were originally saying that not raising kids some sort of act of environmental justice. Well whatever the reasons, by all means, (don't) go ahead.

The source you linked even mentions at the end that this doesn't really mean anything in terms of whether or not conservatives will magically become a majority because they had more kids.

Also no, wasn't really going for it being an act of environmental justice. It might be a reason (or one of many contributing reasons) for some people but I don't know whether or not it's a significant amount. I don't think it's a significant factor to most people though. I blame the economy more than whether children born right now will live through the future, rather than thinking that by not having kids I'm magically reducing emissions. Because it's heavy industry/powerplants that tend to do the most polluting. Not having a kid seems really minor in comparison to that.

[Mira]

15 hours ago, Kraken said:

Because it's heavy industry/powerplants that tend to do the most polluting. Not having a kid seems really minor in comparison to that.

To be fair, said heavy industry and power plants only account for that pollution because they meet a demand from consumers, so if enough people were to stop reproducing that would in theory bring down emissions in the long run, were it not for the fact that any benefits resulting from this decision would in all likelyhood not really go into effect until long after the methane deposits in the Arctic are released into the atmosphere and catastrophic climate change events become inevitable.

Generally speaking though, if I may stray from the topic at hand a bit, it bothers me how disdainful some activists are towards changing one's individual behaviour/consumption patterns when the entire way we've structured our economy and essentially our entire way of life are inherently unsustainable. In my view, to transition towards an emission-neutral society on a global scale before the climate crisis assumes its most ruinous form would require a string of miracles at this point but it will be impossible to achieve without limiting people's access to fuel, meat, etc. and if one currently has the financial means to start accustoming oneself to that future then I see no reason not to do so.

Edited March 28, 2021 by Mira (see edit history)