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The always-great Kaiser Bauch has a new article, this time on the (dis-)similarities between climate change and the fertility crisis. It's good and there's a lot to agree with, in particular the general gist: None of us will probably be able to do anything about either of those, and all we can do is adapt. Both are global issues that arise from the peculiarities of current-tech, current-culture modern societies, and may vanish or switch in another direction altogether with further increased tech levels or changed culture. Neither is likely to be an extinction-level problem. Both are politically polarized, with one side leaning towards doomerism and/or instrumentalisation, and the other towards denial and/or indifference.
Nevertheless, the article somewhat overstates its thesis, and furthermore I find it interesting to think about how and why the differences exist & are the way they are, as well as some related recent developments & discussions.
So, let's start with some of the most obvious differences. Climate change is a truly global problem in the sense that it's literally impossible to fix locally. This is the reason why the EU/german-style Energiewende is so insanely myopic and short-sighted; Even if it worked relatively fine on its own merits (i.e. reducing emissions to near-zero with minimal damage to the economy) AND if everyone on the entire globe did the same, it still requires adaptions to the already-changed climate. Instead it not only is sold as an alternative to adaption, the rest of the world isn't doing the same anyway, and of course it isn't working well on its own merits, either.
See the AC discourse: I actually think myself that the weather is still tolerable enough that ACs make sense mostly for clinics and for the elderly, we don't even need general adoption. But no, instead EU media is putting out very general anti-AC messaging that we can't have nice things since it costs energy, and energy causes climate change. There was a notable incident where the EU Commission HQ shut down its AC - but only for the lower, peasant floors. Imo it could easily go into a Parks & Rec parody episode, if P&R was capable of looking in that particular direction. All a microcosm of the dysfunctions of the contemporary EU.
Likewise, the instrumentalisation of climate change usually takes a very specific form: Due to its very nature requiring communal solutions, it's easy to combine with general-purpose communitarian ideologies like communism, social justice or "mere" socialism. The "watermelon" (green on the outside, red on the inside) accusation strikes one as very adapt if you just skim through, for example, the Green New Deal wiki page, despite its very pro-slant. Take a look at the "Environmental justice" subsection. But honestly, it's already enough to talk with the average green voter to notice the commonalities. This also directly explains rightwing dismissal: If the most prominent green initiatives blatantly risk torpedoing the entire enterprise by tying it together with completely unrelated, highly contentious far-left pet projects, what does it tell you about how serious its proponents are on the original topic? Nothing good.
So in short, I'd characterize the climate change movement: We pour significant resources into fighting climate change, but in a way and direction that does not and can not fix it. Powerful groups can and do profit from this free money, however.
Let's now look at the fertility crisis. First, I want to to note that it is a fundamentally local problem, in the sense that any given society with a healthy TFR can just simply ignore global fertility dysfunctions (insert Tyler the creator cyberbullying meme, except it's about the fertility crisis and just having kids). It's global only in the sense that it seems to happen everywhere, merely on different timelines. That means that, irrespective of the details of any possible solution it is at least in principle solvable by any given nation state.
Let's now look at the nature of the problem. There's a few candidates: The rise of solitary entertainment (related to the "It's the phones, stupid") thesis, the opportunity cost thesis, or the loss of religion thesis, and a whole bunch of others. I won't go into detail on which I find the most likely, strongest factor, but it's hard not to notice that they are all fundamentally cultural and, in fact, down to personal choices. You actually can simply choose to forego solitary entertainment and spend more time with family & friends. You can just stay religious. You can just avoid education and choose a job that is easy to combine with a family. As the kids say (well, if you have them), you can just DO things.
This now makes the shape of the instrumentalisation obvious: Conservatives and rightwingers more generally have always looked at cultural change through the lens of moral decline, and in the case of the fertility crisis, this lens is actually matching pretty well. It fits even better if you search for contrafactuals: As Lyman Stone points out, conservatives have very broadly more kids than moderates, which have more than liberals. This becomes even more striking if you look at the highest fertility groups, which is basically identical with a list of known religious ultraconservative groups.
So the right tries to instrumentalize the fertility crisis to push for whatever part of these conservative cultures is their personal hobbyhorse, be it female disempowerment, increased marriage rates, or clamping down on modern sex & dating norms, without bothering to look too closely on whether the shoe really fits that well. Which also readily explains leftwing dismissals: It's easy to find stats for any of those issues, showing that each, at least in isolation, does not really fix anything. And if that is the case, and the guy arguing in favor is blatantly doing the same for just about any issue, what does it tell you about them? Again, nothing good.
Nevertheless though, it seems obvious to me that we are failing on fertility for the simple reason that we are hardly even trying. A single look into the lifestyle of the ultrafertile makes it clear that all the personal reasons seculars usually give are basically bullshit as well. The ultrafertile earn less, give more to charity and on top have more kids anyway. And their kids aren't, objectively, doing badly, either. Nor am I compelled by the pronatalists to do anything in any way, at least so far. The instrumentalisation, as it exists, is mostly secluded to online anon accounts or conservative sermons in church. Unlike climate change laws, I can easily ignore them.
If you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, the general advice is to stop digging. The current CO2 levels are not going to make humanity extinct, nor are higher levels. But that does not mean that there is no difference. While we can debate the validity if the IPCC report forever, the basic idea that our future behavior will affect how bad things will get does not seem exactly far-fetched.
In Germany, mitigation of climate change effects will not be that hard. From my observation, Germans are currently rapidly coming around on air conditioning. Berlin is not going to become hotter than Madrid is now (I think), and people manage to live in Madrid just fine. Likewise, a few meters (at most!) of rising sea levels are not really an insurmountable challenge for Europe. (To bad about skiing, though.)
However, people in the global south will likely be less lucky. As an utilitarian, I care about these people and am not indifferent between the QALY losses of different scenarios.
I can also make a motivated argument which is perhaps more accessible to the commentariat here.
I do not worry too much about mass immigration. (I do not think it is a helpful tool to reduce global wealth inequality. I also think it is plainly obvious that our health system would collapse without foreign workers, but that is admittedly an argument for some immigration, not letting everyone in who cares to come.)
I am reasonably sure that if climate change makes conditions unsurvivable in some countries, the people living there will not quietly resign to their fate and die, convenient as that would be. Instead, they will try to emigrate, and Europe will be very much on their destination list.
If we had the will to just not allow them in, that would not concern us (aside from pesky universalists like myself). They are very much not a military threat to us, we could probably drown half of Africa in the Mediterranean Sea on a few percents of our GDP.
But realistically, we will not do that. A decent chunk of our conservatives are Christian, and likely believe that first razing the commons and then keeping your neighbor out of your garden as he starves without them is bad behavior. Perhaps 10% of the population are sociopathic enough that they would be ok with simply blowing up boats, the rest will not stomach it. The 1940s are bygone and will not come back (here's hoping).
As I said, I very much prefer interventions (in the EA sense) in countries of origin to just trying to solve wealth inequality through migration. Anything which makes conditions in the Global South shittier is hindering this approach.
Obviously saying that we need to go to carbon neutrality immediately is not considering the economic trade-offs. But cutting our emissions seems like a no-brainer. (Personally, I would have gotten rid of bloody coal plants long before even considering if nuclear was vaguely bad or not, but that is not the German mentality.)
There are two strong arguments against mass-migration for a smart liberal they need to consider provided they are open to HBD:
They want a European style welfare society. That doesn’t work if you have a large population with significantly lower productive and potentially higher crime rates ruin the commons to enjoy your European style welfare state lifestyle.
The Indian conundrum. I think at this point it’s obvious there are a lot of smart Indians. But domestically no innovation. Can having a society that’s 20% Einstein and 80% much lower productivity innovate? Or does dealing with social dysfunction sap a lot of a societies surplus to do tech/external things?
I don't think you need to believe in Human BioDiversity to see those as significant arguments, you just need to believe in Human Diversity. When one city full of Hispanics can have 100 times the murder rate of its immediately-adjacent city full of Hispanics, it's hard to blame that (and harder to blame that wholly) on genes, but it's also impossible to claim that that's just a wacky happenstance and what's a Central Limit Theorem anyway? There's obviously some kind of strong society-level condition at work here, one that can have effects on the scale of thousands of corpses per city per year created or avoided, and even if it's just cultural attitudes or social support for good institutions or whatever rather than genetics, it's still probably something that isn't entirely discarded and replaced when a member of that society crosses a national border.
If social outcomes were mostly or entirely non-genetic then there would be less of a worry about low levels of immigration, because the immigrants might then completely assimilate to the host culture. But, paradoxically, that might mean we aren't worrying enough about higher levels of immigration, because the ability to avoid assimilating is likely to be superlinear (the more similar immigrants you have around you, the less affected you and they are by the host culture) and will definitely have hysteresis (culture isn't just based on the demographics at the moment, but on how gradually those demographics were changed in the past), so observation of immigration at lower levels from a particular culture wouldn't extrapolate cleanly to predict the effects of higher levels from that culture.
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