this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2024
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Each child born produces as much CO2 as 71 people going vegan for life. That ignores all the other ways humans pollute. Given that 130M babies are born each year, even if the entire planet went vegan right now (forever), it would only offset the next 324 days. If you care about the environment at all, you would focus all of your ire on the the real danger: countries with high birth rates.
However I suspect this has nothing to do with the environment for you. There is a duplicitous tactic employed by vegans which seeks to hijack the environmental movement for moral aims. People such as yourself have a moral problem with eating meat, and you know that many others care about the environment, so you attempt to wed the two. I am of course happy to be proven wrong.
Isn't the calculation misleading? It looks like it calculates the modern lifestyle CO2 and applies it to a baby. So the argument just goes, if no people, then no co2. Which is correct, although completely skipping anything about the actual underlying systemic issues for producing this much co2 in the first place.
This isn't an argument about morality or veganism, the link just seemed like a hit peace against environmentalism
Which in effect tells me that we need to be even more radical in policies to bring this to net-negative. It just doesn't help when there are a lot less people in the future as we need to get net-negative. Fewer people means also potentially less leverage here.
But I agree that we need to split between moral and environmental factors (though it doesn't help when these are often correlated).