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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: 4, Informative) by istartedi on Thursday November 07 2019, @11:10PM (1 child)
Got data [childtrends.org]? My takeaway from the data is that the number of children receiving welfare has decreased dramatically from its peak in the early 1990s. This has been consistent through both Democratic and Republican administrators. On the surface the data as presented seem to imply that welfare reform worked, and that the swollen belly of the single "welfare mother" with a gaggle of children at her ankles is mostly a thing of the past. I too, however, lack hard data on the family sizes of people receiving assistance. Also, those not receiving welfare may have moved into the permanent homeless population so it's probably not all rosy.
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Friday November 08 2019, @02:44AM
I grew up in a town where "welfare mom" was a pretty common "job", which paid better than the mostly minimum-wage employment otherwise available to them. And I think you're about right with the time frame that it changed. As I recall there were some pretty significant changes to the system around then that went a long way to fixing the problem. Seems like the average family size has shrunk quite a bit since then.
And I do I think it was a problem, whether or not it was widespread. For the taxpayers footing the bill, and even more so for the poor people being tempted into dead-end life paths by the promise of a guaranteed income. And perhaps most of all for the children born into that situation - severe poverty is a trap that's extremely difficult to escape from, even when you're not surrounded by aid programs whose incentive structures actively discourage you from trying. We stopped encouraging people to have lots of kids, that's a great first step.