[BashiBazouk]

I think it would be fantastic to drop the world population to a sustainable two or three billion. The "problem" is the house of cards built out of debt. Large debt from government borrowing to your large mortgage is that it assumes a growing economy and inflation will reduce it's relative value over time. Go the other direction and it all falls apart pretty fast.

On the other hand the quickest way to realistically reduce emissions by half is to reduce the population by half. And yes, I know the numbers do not work out as linearly as the flippant comment would assume...

[bryanlarsen]

> On the other hand the quickest way to realistically reduce emissions by half is to reduce the population by half.

That's nonsense. A reasonable time period for halving the population naturally would be 3 generations, or about 100 years.

We already have proof it can be done faster: Britain has halved their emissions in 35 years.

We need to do a lot more than halve CO2 emissions, and we need to do it in a lot less than 100 years. The goal is net zero by 2050. And while that's a very difficult goal, it's not a completely impossible goal either.

[exoverito]

Britain halved their emissions primarily because the West has been deindustrializing and offshoring their production to China. Global CO2 emissions have still increased significantly in the past 35 years, so these national figures are mostly just accounting tricks.

Also if things get bad we can just use stratospheric aerosols to cool the Earth. Terraforming would be like a thousandth the cost of trying to completely replace all energy infrastructure by 2050. I'm not opposed to building more sensible energy production like advanced fission, but given how slow, inefficient, and expensive infrastructure has become in the West I wouldn't bet that net zero happens by 2050, especially without decimating the middle classes.