Everybody knows what needs to be done. Parenthood needs to be sustainable for the parents. There’s just no political will to implement a policy that will only start paying off in 20+ years. Every politician kicks the can down the road, or implements half-hearted policies.
Edit: Just realised I posted this to the wrong instance comm 😅
You’re making the assumption that with less population, they won’t be able to mess up the environment. I personally find that assumption extremely dubious. There’s no limit on idiocy. Short of us losing technology, it’s a great force and idiocy multiplier.
Can you not put words in my mouth? We’ll run out of non-renewables eventually. Lets have that in a 1000 years and not a 100 please
Unsustainability is unsustainability. Does it matter if we run out in 100 years or 1000? The goal should be to go sustainable, and that is actually MORE likely to happen with a larger population base, as sustainable tech requires a higher tech base, and consequently a larger population base to support it.
It does matter, yes. How great are our odds of figuring out sustainability in 100 years vs 1000? And not just the tech. Also the politics and such.
Perhaps there is a balance. But right now I think we’re on the too much side of things
Human nature being what it is, we won’t be making any progress on sustainability until it’s staring us in the face and has become a survival issue. FFS, we KNEW about global warming and what coal-burning would do back in the 19th century, and what did we do on that front in the couple hundred years since? Literally speed up the process, until we hit survival-level issues.
Oh, forgot to mention previously - population inertia is a thing. While birthrates may have dropped precipitously, it takes a long time to reflect that in actual population figures. So much so that every scientist speaking on the issue takes pains to state that the reducing birthrate will not affect our current environmental woes. For better or worse, we’re stuck with our current population size to figure out the environmental thing. The birthrate issue is not about the current catastrophe, but the upcoming one.
Did you miss nuclear and solar existing? China’s investments? Heat pumps? We’re not standing still on progress. It’s just not enough
Yeah. How much of that progress, as a result of sustainability focus, came about solely in the past 2 decades? You’re proving my point, that we just don’t do something about future problems until it’s become a today problem.
Quite a bit, we have not been standing still. New salt based batteries have been announced recently. You’re going to have to explain how this proves your point tho
We can predict a disaster 2 centuries in advance, and yet accelerate the onset of the disaster until it’s almost too late to avert it. What makes you think humanity would do anything useful if they had a thousand years? We’d just revert to our old behaviour because the urgency wasn’t there any more.