I love the doublethink some people have of “capitalism can’t grow infinitely” and “population can grow infinitely”. It’s one or the other. The earth has a carrying capacity for whatever standard of living you want to choose and we’re probably well over it for what anyone posting here would consider acceptable. Either population has to decline or standards of living have to decline for people in the imperial core for us to achieve a sustainable and equitably distributed standard of living globally.
I do not understand why some people would prefer having 10 billion subsistence farmers instead of 500 million people living comfortably.
I recognize I’m talking past the tweet somewhat because in my experience it is largely just a strawman. There is a flavor of leftists that cannot see the phrase ‘global overpopulation’ without immediately strawmanning eugenicist genocide as the envisioned solution. As if ‘the earth cannot sustain infinite people’ is an inherently racist idea. The actual ethno-fascists are almost all natalist now, get with the program.
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.