The population won’t grow infinitely. People have in average two surviving children when mortality rate is high. If mortality decreases thanks to higher living standards, there is a population boom because more than two children survive. Birth rate then decrease to about two children per woman and population stabilizes. You can argue on why this happens, but this is just observation from Europe to Africa, from the Americas to Asia.
Yeah it should be a self solving problem eventually and that would be fine if we had a few hundred years to let it play out. But rising living standards and rising population are both contributing to the climate crisis. The earth cannot sustain uplifting 8 billion people to a European standard of living. We have to put a thumb on the scale somewhere and I would prefer that thumb be ‘have as few children as possible’ instead of standard of living backsliding or slowing the industrialization of the developing world.
This only really requires being proactive about making contraception available to make demographic transition happen faster.
If you had a magic wand that could get rid of 7 billion people without any practical or ethical concerns, it still wouldn’t be a good solution to the climate crisis because the remaining people would still be doing industrialism and capitalism. It would just keep happening.
But perhaps more importantly, I don’t see any way to quickly lower the population without resorting to mass murder. Population degrowth can only be a long-term strategy based in a societal value of coexisting without excessive consumption, or else it’s just an elite class deciding who’s allowed to live and breed.
I think there’s a mathematical issue here: There’s no limit on living standards.
If we decrease the population, they’ll simply want more.
Billionaires buy the second yacht because it’s easier than transporting the first yacht to the other coast.
On a smaller scales, I also buy 3 t-shirts so I can still have a choice of what to wear when the first one is in the washer. The choice is an unnecessary increase in my living standards.
If we go with your suggested figure of 500 million people, and these people should all have EU standards of living, we’d still be consuming more resources than the Earth can provide.
It’s not the 8 billion poor people who are taking the toll on the resources. Removing them wouldn’t fix the issue.
I’d like to think that we can maintain a high living standard by technological advancement, but we do have to be realistic about it. Our living standards in the west are simply unsustainable, even if it was just us on entire globe.
The population won’t grow infinitely. People have in average two surviving children when mortality rate is high. If mortality decreases thanks to higher living standards, there is a population boom because more than two children survive. Birth rate then decrease to about two children per woman and population stabilizes. You can argue on why this happens, but this is just observation from Europe to Africa, from the Americas to Asia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition?wprov=sfla1
Yeah it should be a self solving problem eventually and that would be fine if we had a few hundred years to let it play out. But rising living standards and rising population are both contributing to the climate crisis. The earth cannot sustain uplifting 8 billion people to a European standard of living. We have to put a thumb on the scale somewhere and I would prefer that thumb be ‘have as few children as possible’ instead of standard of living backsliding or slowing the industrialization of the developing world.
This only really requires being proactive about making contraception available to make demographic transition happen faster.
If you had a magic wand that could get rid of 7 billion people without any practical or ethical concerns, it still wouldn’t be a good solution to the climate crisis because the remaining people would still be doing industrialism and capitalism. It would just keep happening.
But perhaps more importantly, I don’t see any way to quickly lower the population without resorting to mass murder. Population degrowth can only be a long-term strategy based in a societal value of coexisting without excessive consumption, or else it’s just an elite class deciding who’s allowed to live and breed.
I think there’s a mathematical issue here: There’s no limit on living standards.
If we decrease the population, they’ll simply want more.
Billionaires buy the second yacht because it’s easier than transporting the first yacht to the other coast. On a smaller scales, I also buy 3 t-shirts so I can still have a choice of what to wear when the first one is in the washer. The choice is an unnecessary increase in my living standards.
If we go with your suggested figure of 500 million people, and these people should all have EU standards of living, we’d still be consuming more resources than the Earth can provide. It’s not the 8 billion poor people who are taking the toll on the resources. Removing them wouldn’t fix the issue.
I’d like to think that we can maintain a high living standard by technological advancement, but we do have to be realistic about it. Our living standards in the west are simply unsustainable, even if it was just us on entire globe.