The more "obese westerners" give in aid to keep poor people from starving the more those poor people procreate at their current high birth rates and the more aid needs to be given in the future, eventually it will reach a point where westerners are far poorer and less able to give aid and the poor people they were giving aid are no better off either just a lot more numerous.
If we want to help in places like Africa then it's self sustaining infrastructure they need, not handouts. What you're describing is basically world socialism and the end result of that will be that everybody except a tiny few suffers in poverty.
Well for starters Africa is a massive continent so the needs will differ greatly, have you ever been to an African country?
I'd 100% agree with you that things like self sustaining infrastructure are much better investments if we want poorer countries to prosper. China is pretty good at it although I'm convinced they have ulterior motives and the benefits of the infrastructure they're building in Africa mainly benefits the Chinese.
While I'm glad the UK is one of the leaders in giving aid, I don't think it's transparent enough and too much of it is not spent on things that would actually reduce poverty. Sort that out and the problem you mentioned doesn't exist. No matter where you go in the world reductions in poverty tend to lead to fewer kids being born, from a humanitarian and environmental standpoint it's in everyones interest to be spending on green self sustaining infrastructure.
I'm an advocate for something less capitalist and more socialist but I don't have the knowledge to suggest what that would be. Socialism involves public ownership of the means of production which is something I didn't mention in my post. There's plenty of resources to go around, it's the waste we need to be addressing because it's ridiculous (for example) for western countries to be throwing away so much edible food when there's people starving.
You are as bad as Thunberg, Human population at 7 billion has ruined the entire world. Look around the clothing these experts wear going to research climate change putting microplastics everywhere. If you are a human right now you are a problem, If you wear polyxxx clothes you basically shed plastic everywhere. So lets see pristine wilderness Antartica has microplastics in the snow now. How about Space? Yep it might even end up making humans bound to Earth unable to escape a minefield of litter look up space debris! Or what about the lowest part of Earth? Yup Marianas Trench has litter and do not get me started on the idiots who littered Everest for thier own egos oxygen tanks dead people and plastic clothing are all over the highest place on Earth.
Now for the History, How do you even call it climate change when they will not even talk about how the climate used to be? Europe and the UK like most of the world was deforested, And in Medieval times this accelerated wildly. So if you go back to before this started and you watch Ray Mears you learn that long before Britain got near 100,000 residents you could not see the sky bar river courses Britain BC actually had jungle canopy like the Amazon but with native species like Oak. Tree species were much much larger and back also and then you had bear and wolves in the UK and in mainland Europe you had a massive forest from Poland to Germany/Netherlanda with European Bison. So the land area they cut down if you look up the history and facts is easily 25% of the worlds tree cover. It probably equals the size of the Amazon and considering the tree size was much larger it must have seriously altered the oxygen levels and climate. The world we live in now is but a shadow of what it was meant to be so climate change is basically deforestation and human population. But you might not hear much about this because A history is a rare thing to study and B trees can not be exploited and taxed like humans. If you ran the world and were going to bail out in 90yrs you would want less trees and more of those juicy farmable humanoid$.
The number of people isn't as important as the way we're choosing to live. The first half of your post highlights this, alternatives are available, more sustainable ways of living are available but people are not utilising them as much as they should for whatever reason. This is where I'll side with Greta, putting pressure on business and governments to shape our lives to be more sustainable is something I fully support. I don't believe individual responsibility is as crucial as some people seem to think it is. People need to be told what to do and the society we live in should be moulded to make these choices as easy as possible for people to utilise.
Look into the reasons why people are cutting down forests, there's efforts to get people to avoid the causes of this (e.g. not eating land intensive meat/crops) but people are so hell bent on 'ma bacon!' that it continues*.
I'm happy to be disproved but all I've been taught and read indicates that cities are more efficient and sustainable than rural living. Apartments and high rises result in fewer trees being cut down than if everyone lived in houses.
*slightly disingenuous as change is hard, and the issue isn't exclusive to meat eaters
According to the UN it's possible there will be double the number of people on the planet by 2100. Normally this leveling out only happens with more of a middle class, usually a middle class forms from a baby boom. I don't think the world can afford a baby boom to be honest.
I think small scale conflicts and mass migration will be the story of the next 100 years. I feel quite privileged to have lived in this time of relative comfort.
Channel 4 news did a great piece on declining bio diversity last night which is good to see as climate change always seems to get talked about but never the fact that species are dying at unprecedented rates and arable land is disappearing fast.
Aren't we currently seeing a baby boom in these poorer countries?
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/
And that mass migration and conflict will only get worse with climate change.
It's a tricky situation, the current 'rich' countries were allowed to grow in ways that damaged the environment. If we allowed poor countries the same freedom they'd probably be a lot further ahead than they are now but the need to be 'green' is probably stunting their growth which has many pros and cons. As the first post I quoted pointed out we need to be helping these countries meet their needs in sustainable ways, it's a shame that some richer countries are getting more isolationist and people are starting to demand an end to foreign aid.
Biodiversity has always been talked about but it does seem to be perceived as one of the less important issues. I have seen an increase in talk about biodiversity, at least in terms of veganism which is a good thing but yeah, I'd agree with you that it isn't as high a priority as it should be.
Yes, this is a global issue. Those growing population zones though are a bomb waiting to go off, they are either going to do things the right way to sustain the population and not just increase pollution, over farm, deforest etc and give their citizens a good standard of life, or they don't do this and they become even more hellish places to live and everyone leaves and the real mass migration to the west occurs.
Hopefully they take the former path. I think for me this is where I dislike the attitude of 'well if those countries aren't going to help why should we bother'. Being green and sustainable should be the goal for all countries, western countries should be leading by example and providing blueprints for other countries to follow. Hopefully that will be enough to reduce the barriers to entry and make it a more ideal path to go down in the future.