Really? As an extreme example, are you saying that if our planet only had only 1 million people, we'd have the exact same problem? This holds for 1 billion or 3 billion instead of the almost 8 billion we're going to get to soon.
Population decline will become an issue _economically_. Environmentally, it's great.
Our planet could in principle support hundreds of billions as long as you're not married to the idea of preserving biodiversity.
If we actually talk about the real world, without unrealistic hypotheticals, and without circular arguments, then you can't possibly be right. Every extra human born pollutes and has an environmental impact. We are very far away from bringing that to zero and, unless we do, population growth is an environmental problem.
Not exactly. I'm saying that problems are always caused when negative externalities are not accounted for, therefore the problem of not accounting for negative externalities is literally to account for negative externalities.
The population size is a complete red herring to this basic fact. The fact that a low population entails that we can ignore certain externalities is completely uninteresting.
> Every extra human born pollutes and has an environmental impact. We are very far away from bringing that to zero and, unless we do, population growth is an environmental problem.
It will never be zero. So what? Population growth for affluent nations is already negative. Growth rate falls as a nation enjoys better health care and more opportunities, which is why global population will start falling in about 80 years. Population growth clearly has a form of autoregulation.
What's not autoregulating are negative externalities of common goods, by definition. That's why population growth is not a problem and negative externalities are.
It's really not an issue. Negative externalities associated with the environment is a huge issue, and population decline will become a big issue in about 80 years.