Re:Population panic lets rich people off the hook for the cl...
by jl6 on Friday August 28, 2020 @03:35AM
(#24302322)
But the decline in global fertility rates is driven by improving women’s education, access to contraception, improving infant healthcare, and economic opportunity for the developing world - all things which population campaigners have been pushing for decades.
To declare it solved feels like saying we don’t need the Clean Air Act because the air is now clean, when it’s the Clean Air Act which is responsible for that!
Yes, there are encouraging signs that the world population is going to level out, but let’s not take our foot off the gas on all the measures that got us here just yet?
We don't need to.
Overpopulation has already been addressed. Look at the CIA's World Factbook list of countries by total fertility rate. Most countries are below replacement fertility; most of the rest are rapidly approaching that state.
There is only one region of concern, sub-Saharan Africa, and even there total fertility rate is falling quite quickly.
World population is pretty much only growing because of increasing lifespans: it's just momentum. Sometime between 2045 and 2080, momentum will work towards decreasing populations without any policy effort.
Global population momentum is pretty hard to stop, so there's a much bigger payoff for much less effort if we focus on the wealthiest 500 million people in the world.