How is it a bad thing?
The only way to deal with climate crisis is to lower the population of the planet down to one billion. Possibly without wars and famines.
The only way to deal with climate crisis is to lower the population of the planet down to one billion. Possibly without wars and famines.
You could easily reduce the resource intensity in the West with some cultural shifts. And the next generation may insist. Without disposable income you want things that last.
Population control is both a completely infeasible and an ineffective solution to the climate crisis.
Both are population control.
Because it conflicts with the internal human desire to reproduce. You effectively are saying "Hey raise your hand if you want your group of people to die out." I'm not shocked that people aren't wild about that.
1) From the article seems like people are loosing their desire to reproduce anyway.
2) I am no expert in anthropology but the need for having children is very complex and is regulated by the multiple factors (economical, social, political, environmental).
As one Bali taxi driver put it to me - "Nowadays you don't need 14 children to tend to a ricefield".
It's pretty clear throughout recorded history that this is not a universal desire. Huge numbers of people have not only chosen not to have kids, many of whom have consciously traded off the opportunity to reproduce in exchange for other opportunities.
I can't say strongly that you're wrong, but I can say your thesis is most definitely unproven, and there is good counterveiling evidence.
Clearly there has and remains enough historical reproduction that humans are pretty much ubiquitous and have affected pretty much the entire surface of the planet. No question. But the why is unknown.
Yes there are of course people who feel a need to duplicate their genes (though to my knowledge I've literally only met one person in my 50+ years who said that this was their desire). However different people have many different reasons to intentionally reproduce and demonstrably, when given the ability, a dominant number opt to limit it (this fact is the launching point of the original article).
The clearest example is economic: birth rate and income are pretty highly negatively correlated (the US is an outlier but when you double click and look at the income data at higher resolution than national, you see the same thing). I could go into examples of why this might be the case but that could lead to an unnecessary flame war.
If one or both of them were likely to die before reaching maturity, and my retirement plans assumed they would pay for my dotage... then maybe I'd have more? But that's not the case; as it is I'm happy with my choice to just have two.
You didn't answer the question. If you can't control your basic instinct it doesn't mean that general population reduction will be a "bad" thing.
Population control doesn't mean anything "inhumane" at all. As one above said, countries with higher levels of education have better control over population growth naturally. That's one of the solutions to explosive overpopulation: EDUCATION!
Overpopulation is a real problem. For the environment, for the climate, and for the future.
Who decides who gets depopulated? And how? What if those chosen to be depopulated don't want their population lower? Historically, not many peoples willingly sign up for their own genocide, there is usually significant war.