Climate change, ecocide, many if not most international conflicts, the housing crisis, fossil fuel consumption, and countless other issues are simply proportional to the number of humans on the planet.
Yet directly addressing that fundamental problem is almost always the very last thing proposed, or even talked about.
Currently there's about 8 billion people, and estimates predict it will stop at 10 billion people and start to derease in the second half of this century.
So you're calling a temporary increase by 25% "elephant in the room", meanwhile the difference between resource consumption in USA (14 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) and the world average (4 metric tons of CO2 per person per year) is over 300%.
Strangely I see more people volunteer the lives of others than their own to fix the planet. Never much initiative there.
It worked for the first world.
(This is, as I understand it, a very basic summary of Bill Gates' approach).
If anything we're a few decades away from a rising panic about increasing them again.
Totally false, CO2 emissions coming from the US have fallen as the population has risen. No, that's not because of offshoring.
These things are caused by economic structure and government policy (independent of population) and technology efficiency (which gets better with more people, not worse). Examples being whether or not you're allowed to build apartments or beef is subsidized.
That doesn't change the fact that all else being equal, half as many people emit half the amount of CO2.
You're going to kill half the country and keep average household size, age, income structure and ability to build nuclear power plants the same?
It is so easy to complain about overpopulation. But how would you solve it?
1 child policy? Didn't work out great in China. Some can have children, others can't? Doesn't exactly seem right. Culling? Yeah, no-one wants genocide.
It's a very complex problem and people are very fast to complain about it, without thinking much about what actually to do.
I think it's likely the one child policy contributed a bit, but a substantial part of the decline is clearly also due to economic development.
However, the West's strategy of writing moral panic books like this and then not actually reading them did allow us to defeat China (who read the book, actually did it and now has a demographic crisis) so that's something.