I fear that the likes of Trump in charge will only reverse any progress we’ve made in the West.

It may end much of the progress towards people voluntarily sacrificing for the environment, but I think certain technologies are already on a runaway self sustaining cycle:

• Heat pumps and electrification of residential heat is starting to make financial sense, even without subsidies and tax breaks.
• Electrification of cars makes transportation cheaper. In some countries, much, much cheaper.
• Solar power, during times of day that it is plentiful, is basically the cheapest energy source known to mankind. There is plenty of financial incentive to try to shift supply (through grid scale storage tech) and demand (time shifting things like heating/cooling and car charging) to meet this super cheap source of energy.

Trump can rant about carbon-free replacements for fossil fuels, but he can’t make them more expensive, especially not outside of the U.S.

That’s a good chart, and probably a better metric to use.

Still, you can see the same overall trends: the western world peaking around 2000, with India and China catching up. The question, then, becomes whether and how much the rest of the world can follow the West’s playbook:

• Switching from coal to natural gas for electricity generation (easy for North America, more difficult for Europe)
• Switching from fossil fuels entirely to carbon-free sources like nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal (depends heavily on geography and access to nuclear materials and engineering).
• Switching from fossil fuels to cleaner electrified drivetrains
• Improving energy efficiency in residential, commercial, industrial applications.

This is where the difference is made. Not in changing birth rates.

The big assumption is that the child you have will likely consume carbon-emitting goods and services at the same rate as whatever average they’re assuming.

Breaking down by country shows that people’s emissions vary widely by year and by country:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita

So if the UK spent most of the 20th century, and into the beginning of this century, emitting about 10 tonnes per person per year. Now it’s down to less than 5. Since your linked article was written in 2017 to the latest stats for 2023, the UK has dropped per capita emissions from 5.8 to 4.4, nearly a 25% reduction.

During that same 125 years, the US skyrocketed from about 7 tonnes to above 20, then back down to 14.

The European Union peaked in around 2001 at 10, and have since come down to 5.6.

Meanwhile, China’s population has peaked but their CO2 emissions show no signs of slowing down: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-metrics

So it takes quite a few leaps and assumptions to say that your own children will statically consume the global or national average at the moment of their birth. And another set of assumptions that a shrinking population will actually reduce consumption (I personally don’t buy it, I think that childless people in the West tend to consume more with their increased disposable income). And a shrinking population might end up emitting more per capita with some sources of fixed emissions amounts and a smaller population to spread that around for.

If the US and Canada dropped their emissions to EU levels we’d basically be on target for major reductions in global emissions. If we can cap China’s and India’s future emissions to current EU per capita levels that would go a long way towards averting future disaster, too.

It can be done, and it is being done, despite everything around us, and population size/growth is not directly relevant to the much more important issue of reducing overall emissions.

Those companies are creating the pollution to make the things we buy. They know how to reduce output when demand goes down (see March and April 2020 when COVID caused lots of canceled flights and oil drilling/refining to reduce to the bare minimum to keep the equipment maintained).

Yes, ExxonMobil and American Airlines pollute, but when I buy from them, they’re polluting on my behalf.

Grok appears to be tuned to be more conspiratorial, and skeptical of official sources, while being more credulous of one-off random theories being spouted on the internet. Trump and MAGA world generally benefited from those types of voices when they weren’t in power, but now that they control the government this phenomenon will chip away at their political support from these types of low information voters, right around the time that those voices are being amplified by Elon’s control of Twitter and his new Grok bot.

I don’t think it’s an insurmountable challenge. Just that the ratio is what matters, which means abrupt changes to birth rates might be more problematic than the magnitude of the change over time.

But I also don’t think that a stable population size solves the climate crisis or resource depletion. It might be the case that 8 billion people in 2075 end up consuming way more energy and natural resources in an even less sustainable way than the 8 billion people of 2025.

No, LCOE is an aggregated sum of all the cash flows, with the proper discount rates applied based on when that cash flow happens, complete with the cost of borrowing (that is, interest) and the changes in prices (that is, inflation). The rates charged to the ratepayers (approved by state PUCs) are going to go up over time, with inflation, but the effect of that on the overall economics will also be blunted by the time value of money and the interest paid on the up-front costs in the meantime.

When you have to pay up front for the construction of a power plant, you have to pay interest on those borrowed funds for the entire life cycle, so that steadily increasing prices over time is part of the overall cost modeling.

Even if you take money out of the equation, people need the productive output of other people to survive.

A man alone on a desert island cannot retire. As soon as he is unable to provide for himself, he dies. Yes, he can accumulate certain “savings,” but much of what is needed to survive cannot be banked and used later. Food storage is limited, and any method of long term food storage tends to require additional processing to be edible, so there will always need to be some kind of just-in-time cooking process to keep people fed. Same with shelter, where maintenance needs will always be there, or health care, where real time treatment will always need to be done.

In a society with a shrinking population, there will be an unrelenting pressure to simply stop supporting those who are not productive. And those who are productive will selfishly shape that society to cover their own needs first.

That’s not just capitalism, it’s every economic system. Taking care of our elderly and our disabled is a luxury of a prosperous society. If the ratio goes out of wack, the willingness to continue supporting that luxury may not always be there.

we’ve been fed this narrative that overpopulation is eventually going to destroy the world

It’s always been wrong, and some of us have been arguing against that kind of neo-Mathusian worldview this entire time.

Note that the same view also leads to the incorrect conclusion that population shrinkage will be good for resource management, pollution, etc. If one believes that a large and growing population will deplete the world’s resources and destroy the environment, one might conclude that a shrinking population will help conserve the world’s resources and preserve the environment.

But look at how things actually play out. The countries with the shrinking populations are still increasing their resource consumption, and the slowdown in population growth hasn’t slowed down resource depletion in large part because humans don’t all use the same amount of resources. If the population of India shrinks to the size of the population of the United States, but then increases its greenhouse emissions to match that of the United States, that would be bad for the environment despite the population reduction.

A shrinking population isn’t really a problem in itself, but an aging population is. That’s the concern about birth rates, is the worry that unproductive old people will have their lives cut short rather than enjoying a reasonable retirement.

apparently then it was around 20% to 25% as well

No, the unemployment rate was around 20-25% under the traditional definition. It’s currently 4.2% under that definition.

If you want to use this LISEP definition, fine, but recognize that it’s been above 30% for most of its existence, and has only been under 25% since COVID. Basically, if you go by the LISEP definition then you’re saying that the job market after COVID has been better than it has ever been before.

When the definition of unemployed is changed to exclude the majority of working age people without jobs then it is no longer a helpful statistic.

U-3 has used the same definition of unemployed since 1940.

Whatever metric you want to use, you should look at that number and how it changes over time, to get a sense of trend lines. LISEP says the “true” unemployment rate is currently 24.3% in May 2025, which is basically the lowest it’s ever been.

Since the metric was created in 1994, the first time that it dipped below 25% was briefly in the late 2010’s, right before COVID, and then has been under 25% since September 2021.

Under this alternative metric of unemployment, the unemployment rate is currently one of the lowest in history.

My problem with nuclear is both the high cost and, somewhat counterintuitively, the very long life cycles to spread that high cost. The economics only make sense if the plant runs for 75 years, which represents an opportunity cost of displacing whatever might be available in 25 or 50 years.

A solar plant planned in 2025 might be online in 2027, and decommissioned in 2047, replaced with whatever technology/economics are available then. But a new nuclear reactor bakes in the costs for 80+ years, to be paid by ratepayers who haven’t been born yet.

So if in 2050 a 2030-constructed nuclear plant is still imposing costs of $66/MWh on ratepayers, to finance the interest and construction costs from 25 years earlier, will that be competitive with the state of solar/wind/batteries/hydrothermal at that time? Given the past trend lines, it seems economically foolish to lock in today’s prices for the next 80 years.

This paper lays out the cost projections that one could expect with the lessons learned from Vogtle Units 3 & 4, with the tax credits and government guarantees available as of 2024:

https://web.mit.edu/kshirvan/www/research/ANP201 TR CANES.pdf

Ok, current projections are still for the next two AP1000s at Vogtle to be something like $10 billion. That’s just not cost competitive with solar/wind. And it’s also not very realistic to assume that there won’t be cost overruns on the next one, either. Complex engineering projects tend to run over.

Also where did you see they did amortization of solar?

I’m just familiar with Lazard’s LCOE methodology. The linked paper talks about LCOE, so that’s just how that particular cost analysis works.

Vogtle added 2 AP1000 reactors for $35 billion. Future deployments might be cheaper, but there’s a long way to go before it can compete with pretty much any other type of power generation.

But the other misleading part is they looked at 20 years which is close to the life cycle for solar/batteries and not even half the life of nuclear

I think Lazard’s LCOE methodology looks at the entire life cycle of the power plant, specific to that power plant. So they amortize solar startup/decommissioning costs across the 20 year life cycle of solar, but when calculating LCOE for nuclear, they spread the costs across the 80 year life cycle of a nuclear plant.

Nuclear is just really, really expensive. Even if plants required no operating costs, the up front costs are so high that it represents a significant portion of the overall operating costs for any given year.

The Vogtle debacle in Georgia cost $35 billion to add 2 MW 2GW (edit to fix error) of capacity. They’re now projecting that over the entire 75 year lifespan the cost of the electricity will come out to be about $0.17 to $0.18 per kilowatt hour.

Archive.org was distributing the books themselves to users. Anthropic argued (and the authors suing them weren’t able to show otherwise) that their software prevents users from actually retrieving books out of the LLM, and that it only will produce snippets of text from copyrighted works. And producing snippets in the context of something else is fair use, like commentary or criticism.

just spitting the information back out, without paying the copyright source

The court made its ruling under the factual assumption that it isn’t possible for a user to retrieve copyrighted text from that LLM, and explained that if a copyright holder does develop evidence that it is possible to get entire significant chunks of their copyrighted text out of that LLM, then they’d be able to sue then under those facts and that evidence.

It relies heavily on the analogy to Google Books, which scans in entire copyrighted books to build the database, but where users of the service simply cannot retrieve more than a few snippets from any given book. That way, Google cannot be said to be redistributing entire books to its users without the publisher’s permission.

What does an LLM application (or training processes associated with an LLM application) have to do with the concept of learning?

No, you’re framing the issue incorrectly.

The law concerns itself with copying. When humans learn, they inevitably copy things. They may memorize portions of copyrighted material, and then retrieve those memories in doing something new with them, or just by recreating it.

If the argument is that the mere act of copying for training an LLM is illegal copying, then what would we say about the use of copyrighted text for teaching children? They will memorize portions of what they read. They will later write some of them down. And if there is a person who memorizes an entire poem (or song) and then writes it down for someone else, that’s actually a copyright violation. But if they memorize that poem or song and reuse it in creating something new and different, but with links and connections to that previous copyrighted work, then that kind of copying and processing is generally allowed.

The judge here is analyzing what exact types of copying are permitted under the law, and for that, the copyright holders’ argument would sweep too broadly and prohibit all sorts of methods that humans use to learn.