[pi-squared]

Anytime someone tells me to do less flying, driving or eating fcking meat, I link to [1] and say: STOP FCKING - or at least stop having children.

The most actionable item (that is of course MUCH harder than not eating meat) is doing something to to convince the nations with most children per woman [2] to have less. But this is not easy - joining organizations that would educate women and doing volunteering or even dangerous work is insanely hard. Not buying meat, recycling and not riding your car seems hard for western people and so you FEEL like you are doing something, but you are not.

I will not have children but do 50 transatlantic flights this year, eat all the meat, hell, I'll even teach myself to drive a car just to show off how useless these individual actions are. You can't convince the world, stop CHANGING the world and change yourself, seek data and find the most actionable item. Jeez!

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individual_action_on_climate_c... [2] http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r...

[_Microft]

You don't convince nations. Educating women, female employment and reduced child mortality make the fertility rate drop precipitously as a result. It's still an ongoing process but peak population growth rate was over 50 years ago.

See https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth .

[trymas]

Why can't we have both?

Why can't we live more sustainably and work on reducing global human population?

[7952]

But I want to feel like I am a good person. That's the reason I don't shop lift or beat up strangers in the street. It won't have any effect on national crime rates, but that is not the point. My individual actions matter to me. I am just a tiny cog in a vast machine.

I think you are just signalling a different kind of virtue. You are scientific, sceptical and ever so smart. But you are not saving the world either.

[postsantum]

I agree on uselessness of individual actions but barring a couple of countries that don't follow the trend of declining number of children as they get richer, it wouldn't work. An entire family from Chad has less carbon footprint than one american teenager