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From Bloomberg:
Forty years ago, scientists from 50 nations converged on Geneva to discuss what was then called the "CO2-climate problem." At the time, with reliance on fossil fuels having helped trigger the 1979 oil crisis, they predicted global warming would eventually become a major environmental challenge.
Now, four decades later, a larger group of scientists is sounding another, much more urgent alarm. More than 11,000 experts from around the world are calling for a critical addition to the main strategy of dumping fossil fuels for renewable energy: there needs to be far fewer humans on the planet.
[...] The scientists make specific calls for policymakers to quickly implement systemic change to energy, food, and economic policies. But they go one step further, into the politically fraught territory of population control. It "must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity," they write.
Others disagree, stating
Fewer people producing less in greenhouse-gas emissions could make some difference in the danger that climate change poses over time. But whether we end up with 9, 10, or 11 billion people in the coming decades, the world will still be pumping out increasingly risky amounts of climate pollution if we don't fundamentally fix the underlying energy, transportation, and food systems.
Critics blast a proposal to curb climate change by halting population growth
Journal Reference:
William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Thomas M Newsome, Phoebe Barnard, William R Moomaw. World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency[$]. BioScience. doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biz088
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Thursday November 07 2019, @08:44PM (7 children)
It *is* dishonest, but less so than you think. Pick your uniform technological level, and the world cannot sustainably support the number of people currently living on it. This even works for old stone age technologies.
The question is always "Which fewer people?" though. And the answer it always "Them".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @10:43PM (6 children)
Indeed. That is, I think, the real problem with this proposal. When we start talking about who should be having fewer children the vast majority of people will almost inevitably say "those other people over there". And the eugenics arguments won't be all that far behind. Mark my words.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Thursday November 07 2019, @10:48PM (5 children)
It is however a little more reasonable when "them" are having 2-3x as many kids as "us". Nothing wrong with holding everyone to the same standard.
It's when you want "them" to cut down while "us" continue to proliferate that eugenics starts to raise its head.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 07 2019, @11:18PM (4 children)
No, it is not always reasonable. E.g. if your fat ass is already pampered at the same environmental cost as 50 kids in the wild tribes in Amazonian jungle, the net benefit for the environment would be to "eugenize" you and let them live.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 07 2019, @11:45PM (1 child)
Those who go to Amazonia to help people there, deserve admiration. Those who sit in their nice home country and work to undermine their own society, are a cancer.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday November 07 2019, @11:54PM
The straws that you used for that man you tried building, they are already rotten.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 08 2019, @02:47PM
That's a very reasonable argument on the face of it, but think about it for a few minutes.
Are the grandkids of those low-impact Amazonian kids going to be living a similarly low-impact lifestyle? Or are they going to be advancing toward a high-impact Western lifestyle just as fast as their economic opportunities allow?
Trends pretty much everywhere point to the latter, which means that on a century-long timescale the population growth from those low-impact kids are almost as big of a problem as the high-impact ones. And fighting climate change is going to be a multi-century endeavor.
Furthermore, kids are *expensive* - Helping ensure that the poorest people have access to and awareness of birth control puts them in a position to pull themselves out of poverty much more easily.
I don't approve of cramming this down anyone's throat - there's some ugly history of that such as the covert sterilization of women in Africa under the guise of vaccination - that's atrocious, even ignoring the damage it does to real vaccination efforts.
However, making sure the poorest people have the same family planning options and awareness as wealthy Westerners? That benefits everyone.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @08:26PM
If they didn't keep having so many children over so many generations they would have more natural resources available to them per capita and they wouldn't have such a low standard of living. The fact that they kept on increasing their population density is why they have to distribute their resources across more people and hence they have fewer resources per capita. They did it to themselves, why should the people that don't want to have so many children have to sacrifice what they have to give to those that keep on having more and more children with no restraint. If you have many children and your population density is already high you should expect the standard of living per capita to go down, don't blame that on those that chose not to reduce their natural resources per capita by not having so many children.