> I strongly disagree on this. I believe instead that per-capita arguments are helpful because they make environmental hypocrisy painfully obvious.

What do you think about "world leaders" flying jets to meet at conferences and events to agree that commoners have to reduce emissions, when they could have used a telephone and video camera? In any case, the environment doesn't care who emits what ton of CO2 or what humans might be hypocrites about it.

> 1) Meaningful population control is hard, expensive, unpopular and comes with a myriad of (problematic) side effects

It's hard because of perverse incentives.

> 2) Nations care very little about per-capita pollution in the first place

They care very much about it when arguing why they should be allowed to pollute more.

> The very idea that e.g. EU/US would ever even entertain the notion of boosting their population for the purpose of improving per-capita CO2 emission numbers seems absolutely ridiculous to me.

They're absolutely trying to boost population numbers, they explicitly out and say it.

> What do you think about "world leaders" flying jets to meet at conferences and events to agree that commoners have to reduce emissions, when they could have used a telephone and video camera?

I believe we don't require complete elimination of air traffic to hit climate goals and would be restricting it LAST for government use anyway.

So this might be an indicator of too few incentives against air traffic at the very most.

> In any case, the environment doesn't care who emits what ton of CO2 or what humans might be hypocrites about it.

The environment does not care about where the CO2 is emitted, but WE need to if we want to reduce it effectively.

It is VERY obviously MUCH easier and viable to save 1 ton of CO2 per year for a single American (with a baseline of ~15tons/year) than it is to save 200kg each for 5 Indian rice farmers with a baseline of 2 tons/capita. Because for the rice farmer, that might be "no heating during winter", while for the rich westerner it means "a smaller second car for children/wife instead of another SUV".

As long as EU/US emissions are higher per capita they have absolutely ZERO moral standing to argue for harsher regulations in developing nations, and this is pretty much already clear to everyone involved.

> They're absolutely trying to boost population numbers, they explicitly out and say it.

Pretty much every "western nation" has close to zero or negative population growth pre-immigration. This makes the governments job harder because they have to deal with demographic change (=> pensions) and second order effects (like cultural rifts from compensating immigration). That is already more than enough motivation to keep population growth somewhat up, CO2/capita considerations never even enter the picture.

It is also EXTREMELY doubtful that boosting the population in EU/US would help with CO2/capita numbers in any significant way in the first place, because CO2 emissions mostly correlate with WEALTH much more strongly than population density or somesuch, which governments are typically not in favor of decreasing for highly obvious reasons :P

> I believe we don't require complete elimination of air traffic to hit climate goals and would be restricting it LAST for government use anyway.

So you excuse the hypocrisy because teleconferences would have worked just fine. Interesting.

> As long as EU/US emissions are higher per capita

China has more CO2 per capita than EU, and yet they get concessions in those aforementioned hypocritical accords.

> Pretty much every "western nation" has close to zero or negative population growth pre-immigration. This makes the governments job harder because they have to deal with demographic change (=> pensions) and second order effects (like cultural rifts from compensating immigration). That is already more than enough motivation to keep population growth somewhat up, CO2/capita considerations never even enter the picture.

I don't know what you mean. Boosting population in the highest CO2 emitting societies in the world is not a good thing. They do it because of "the economy", because per-capita does obviously enter the picture. If they were actually interested in the environment, they would let population naturally reduce. It's the easiest thing in the world to reduce consumption by reducing population. You need zero new technology, and no changes to lifestyle, and you can achieve large reductions.

Not only in CO2 emissions but in all other environmental footprint. CO2 might have the limelight now, but there are many other catastrophic environmental problems and resource depletion that our massive global consumption causes which have no real solutions.