More than 11,000 scientists from a broad range of disciplines signed a new editorial declaring a “climate emergency,” but other researchers immediately criticized one of the proposed remedies: halting population growth.
“Still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year or more than 200,000 per day, the world population must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced,” reads the piece published in BioScience on Tuesday.
The authors note that effective means of lowering fertility rates include making family-planning services more widely available, improving education for girls and young women, and increasing gender equality.
But rich nations generally already have flat or declining birth rates, so the proposal largely seems directed at fast-growing developing nations in Africa and Asia.
Specifically, the UN projects that nine countries will account for more than half of projected growth between now and 2050, including (in descending order) India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt, and the US (where migration is expected to be the main driver of growth).
“A bunch of white people in the developed world saying population should be reduced is the definition of an imperialist framing,” Arvind Ravikumar, an assistant professor of energy engineering at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, said on Twitter.
Joseph Majkut, a climate scientist and director of climate policy at the Niskanen Center, a think tank based in Washington, DC, says the suggestion is highly problematic from a political standpoint.
It feeds directly into the perception among conservatives that “climate science and its conclusions are the product of an ideological movement,” one that prioritizes nature over humans.
A scientific rationale for a smaller world population could also be abused to justify more aggressive tactics of population control or racist attitudes toward growing parts of the developing world.
To some, the proposal drew to mind darker periods in the environmental movement, when various organizations and figures promoted pro-eugenics and anti-immigration views.
The UN projects that the global population could grow from around 7.7 billion to 9.7 billion by 2050, and peak around the end of the century at 11 billion.
Fewer people producing less 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.
Others note inconsistencies in the BioScience paper’s proposed remedies to climate change. Notably, the authors also say the world needs to shift economic priorities away from growth in gross domestic product, and toward meeting basic human needs and reducing inequality.
Read rest at MIT Technology Review
I propose a more compelling argument to control and reduce world population. We can only make and store a finite amount of ice cream. If we swell in numbers up to 11 billion people on this planet, just think what it might take to keep ice cream supplies in sufficient quantities! I suspect it cannot be done. We must do all we can to contain the number of humans just to make sure everybody who wants and needs ice cream is able to obtain what they should have. Oh, and yeah . . . the climate will be happier about that too (somehow).
Make them all report to the Disinigration Chamber their names have all come up
War, famine and pestilence are the usual inhibitors. You wonder which these idiots favor.
I totally agree with the scientists. And I am ready to kick off a New World Depopulation program starting with them.
If Margaret Sinclair had kept her legs crossed, we would never have had to endure the idiocy of her son, Justin Trudeau . Yes, let the Lefties sterilize themselves.
So now its Population Control maybe forced abortions and steraliztions the legacy of Paul Ehrlich and THE POPULATION BOMB which he was totaly wrong about it all yeah this whole Global Warming/Climate Change is just a excuse to depopulate the earth of all humans this is Agenda 21 were looking at
“The authors note that effective means of lowering fertility rates include making family-planning services more widely available, improving education for girls and young women, and increasing gender equality”. Sounds good to me. Not nearly as bad as your paranoid fantacies