Idgaf about replacement rate. I don't want the old to be replaced. I want the economy to get smaller and for the wealth to be better distributed.

Yeah, this isnt AI, its just able to detect and help re-arrange what we already have but it doesnt do anything new.
And we have a lot of info but we dont know everything actually.

Yes. As others in this thread have explained, they're approaching peak coal and that line is not one that you can extrapolate upwards as a straight line into the future.

I also think it's not reasonable to compare a developing/emerging economy with hugely increasing total energy requirements, with ones that already got their polluting growth phase out of the way in the 19th-20th centuries, especially when a very significant part of that coal is burned in the service of making consumer products for the latter. It'd be much more reasonable to compare them to India, which oh look, they are doing much better than in both current percentage and growth rate. Whilst it's true that Africa is doing better in those graphs, they're also not having nearly as much success in production or growth terms.

So overall, yeah it could be better on paper, but it's very much treating perfect as the enemy of good and preaching at a country who built as much TWh solar&wind capacity just in the last 12 months of your graph alone, as the USA has over its entire lifetime.

(I was about to draw a few more conclusions from those graphs but noticed they've left out a bunch of other energy sources for no obvious reason, possibly mischief, so I can't compare - the graphs imply that these regions are replacing coal with solar&wind, but without the data for total consumption including gas, nuclear, hydro etc we don't actually know what the true situation is.)

Smaller economy is fine, I guess -- tho deflation has certainly caused problems in the past. Better distributed wealth is a shared goal. Depopulation, and other forms of Degrowth, are largely driven by eugenicist ideas and are neither necessary nor desirable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW8vkUY93i8

You might notice I never once promoted any such depopulation ideas, simply that the natural negative growth trend as a result of highly educated populations is a good thing that we should not take any action against.

We need less people, we don't need to make the number of people less: it happens on its own.

If it were possible to make a nondiscrimatory policy against growth then that would be great, but we already saw attempts fail in places like China which resulted in skewed demographics. In 1994 in Cairo the UN met and decided the best answer was simply: Educate Women.

We need less people

No we don't. And, S. Korea in particular will need more people than they have available, soon.

Yeah, but my point was that our current economic system can't deal with, not that we can't deal with it in general. Migrating away from the current system would require the powerful to give up their power, which they won't do willingly, even as the walls are closing in. (In fact, when it comes to global warming, the walls are closing in).

They don't NEED more people, nowhere on earth NEEDS more people, as long as you have as few as 12 genetically distinct individuals then life will continue, and even if they did NEED people then theres lots of people all over the world who would love to migrate to SK.

Global warming is independent of population, emissions can be controlled without population controls.

Yes, they do need more people, and immigration is a possible "solve", but right now they aren't getting the immigration necessary -- tho largely due to their own policies.

Global Warming is NOT independent of population.

The population growth almost perfectly aligns with climate change, and the top polluters on the planet are China despite having one of the lowest pollution per capita ratios.

More humans = more environmental destruction

True wealth

Great. We'll wait, then we'll see.

Because the big rationale for it being a problem is that GDP declines as population declines. But GDP is an aggregate measure that's dependent on population, so that's not a problem, it's a tautology.

Systems adapt. Extrapolation based on current state is often fallacious.

Migrating away from the current system would require the powerful to give up their power

Implicit in that statement is a huge and largely unfounded assumption that there's only one possible future state, and that it's as you say it is.

And, even if it means that the powerful are forced to give up power, well, that's happened before and it's not impossible that it'll happen again.

in dire situations

That's just repeating the assumption that's being questioned.

Technically there should be a ratio of young to old to take care of all of the elderly

That's a rule of thumb that assumes a lot of things about elderly people's need for care, how much that's funded by the young, productivity in how that care is provided, and a huge number of other variables.

Lower population will make resource allocation easier and improve quality of life, and obviously is necessary to prevent further environmental damage.

The environmental damage is more to do with bad choices about the mix of technology currently used to power the economy, and the poor ratio of GDP per unit of energy consumed. So I dispute that "obviously."

they got what they wanted and their propaganda worked

So far.

"Natural gas."

Oh, right, the benign-soundingmarketing term for methane.

That depends on the incentives. Society can change those to some extent.

You can't even goose it.

And you're too young to choose it.