We are overloading the planet: Now What?

[bilby]

Birth rates have dropped sharply in some of the world's richest states and are likely to stay low as economic worries leave people weighing the costs of having children, a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said. The total fertility rate dropped to 1.5 children per woman in 2022 from 3.3 in 1960 on average across OECD countries, the report said

News

Just need to stop the poor from having kids and the problem sorts itself.

That's easy to do - just make them less poor.

The average billionaire emits a million times more grernhouse gases than the average person.

A billionaire emits a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person | Oxfam International

www.oxfam.org

But the problem is... those damned poor people.

The average billionaire has far fewer children than the average poor person.

We have ways to reduce both carbon emissions and birthrates. The two are not coupled; A billionaire who invests his wealth in nuclear power likely has a negative long-term carbon footprint. And we know that as populations get richer, their birthrates plummet.

Making poor people into not particularly poor people is massively carbon negative, even though they start doing stuff (like driving cars) that increase their individual carbon footprints, because there are automagically fewer not particularly poor people than there are poor people. Nobody (until you introduced this red herring) was talking about billionaires; To reduce birthrates, all that is needed (ceteris paribus) is sufficient income to provide for retirement.

 

[bilby]

The human population is much too high; this is responsible for many of the problems we face, including climate change, pollution, loss of biodiversity, and more.

That's not even wrong.

Sustaining the population is the driver of all the rest.

If we don't object to a massive drop in human population, then these are not problems - they will solve themselves by killing billions.

Only if we do object to a massive fall in human population are these problems actually problematic; But in that case the statement "The human population is much too high" is bizarrely nonsensical.

 

[steve_bank]

From reporting it is looking grim.

A Nigerian leader called African youth a ticking tie bomb. We are seeing Africans crossing the southern border. Africa has been trying to industrialize but has gotten very far.

Africa has about 20% of global population.

The population of Africa has been increasing annually in recent years, growing from around 818 million to over 1.39 billion between 2000 and 2021, respectively. In the same period, the annual. The reasons behind this rapid growth are various. One factor is the high fertility rate registered in African countries.Mar 22, 2024

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Birth rates have dropped sharply in some of the world's richest states and are likely to stay low as economic worries leave people weighing the costs of having children, a report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development said. The total fertility rate dropped to 1.5 children per woman in 2022 from 3.3 in 1960 on average across OECD countries, the report said

News

Just need to stop the poor from having kids and the problem sorts itself.

That's easy to do - just make them less poor.

The average billionaire emits a million times more grernhouse gases than the average person.

A billionaire emits a million times more greenhouse gases than the average person | Oxfam International

www.oxfam.org

But the problem is... those damned poor people.

I was going to say that I don't consider that a credible source because they misrepresent things badly. Swammerdami beat me to it, though, finding what's dishonest about the data.

And the point is that when you make people not poor they generally choose to have fewer children. This thread is about overloading the planet, lifting people out of poverty will reduce the population with no opposition.

 

[aupmanyav]

Load the Earth, nature will take its own course.

 

[TSwizzle]

Interesting news about falling birthrates;

According to Fernández-Villaverde’s calculations, the combined impact of the yawning misses for emerging market countries and smaller overestimates for wealthy western nations puts the true global population trajectory on the UN’s “low fertility” pathway. That would mean a peak at around 9bn in 2054, 30 years earlier than in the headline forecast.

Financial Times