this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2023
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traingang
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This is Malthusian nonsense. The United States, for example, is 4% of the World's population but still uses 25% of the world's resources annually. The United States outsources their pollution and their production to the third world, where the labor is cheapest due to imperialism, and then says "the third world is responsible for the climate change because of their carbon emissions! We need to cut down on the number of people!"
You've got suburbanites with 5x the carbon footprint of the average citizen of the third world, you've got billionaires who own thousands of hectares of land, you've got celebrities burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel on 1 minute flights, there are way more ways to cut down on carbon emissions than Epic Meme Thanos Policy. You could start with solar, wind, nuclear, ending fossil fuel consumption, ending wars (which btw, war both reduces the population AND destroys the environment, showing the two aren't as inversely proportional as you think), walkable cities, apartment blocks and public transit, but the reactionary fear of working class people of different backgrounds congregating with each other and realizing they actually have a lot in common, makes the ruling class scared.
Nope, no Malthus, no tragedy of the commons. No eugenics or "policy".
Allow trends to go unaltered. That's all.
Do those other things actively. Energy, design, etc.
Let population decline. We don't need billions of humans. I'm not suggesting anyone goes without, or is curtailed. But nothing compares to the absence of a human. You can make every positively eco choice you can, but nothing will compare to you not existing at all.
There's no way to passively "let" the population decline as long as the birth rate remains above 2 kids on average. People will simply have kids unless most nations adopt something like China's 1 child policy, which I just don't see happening. The population will objectively grow. Even if the birth rate is low in your country, you will get climate refugees from other nations. The population will increase in the imperial core as the region around the equator becomes more unlivable, and the response of the imperial core to those declining conditions is decidedly genocidal violence. Look at ICE. Look at the rafts full of climate refugees being deliberately sunk by fascist coast guards. The message is loud and clear: the imperial core wants to decrease the birth rate of "undesirables" (read: black and brown people from the third world) while maintaining their own standard of living, continuing to wage endless interventions, coups, embargoes, and sanctions, and continuing to exploit the lower cost of labor in "underdeveloped" (colonized) nations. Something's got to give, and it's not going to be the population. It's going to be standard of living.
Population will not forever grow, this is already forecasted by established scientists.
My point is that countries experiencing lower-than -replacement-birthrate should allow it, with the acknowledgement that climate refugees will come to fill their job positions. Over a longer period, birth rate should continue to be allowed to sink, as future humanity grapples with a post-climate-crisis world.
A far flung generation can have new opinions, when they've survived our sins, mastered technology, and can make a new try
To repeat: I don't think any group should be "reduced" via external pressure. Only that groups could be allowed to contract naturally, without policy intervention to "boost" birthrate. Immigration should serve.
wasn't suggesting it will. Just suggesting that if the current birth rates are above 2, there's no way to say that we could passively "let" the population decline if that's not what it's actually doing. Globally the population is still growing. It will either decline on its own, eventually, or someone will implement malthusian policies.