How can population be the issue when a tiny subset of individuals and organizations account for virtually all of the environmental changes?

Overpopulation isn't truly the actual problem. It's merely a symptom of that "tiny subset of individuals" having been allowed to monopolize and mismanage most of the resources and manpower of planet Earth unto themselves as their playthings. Sadly it's a symptom that seriously complicates the matter.

Who manages their limited resources better, a prosperous Japan or a developing Vietnam?

I say "don't have kids" half-heartedly because I actually want them. But I also understand that having them is perpetuating the system which got us here in the first place. You're kidding yourself if you believe otherwise, the way developing nations are coming up should be more than enough evidence of that. If it comes between living rich but destroying the environment, and living in poverty (or really even just less-rich) but keeping nature preserved, people will choose the former every single time.

If you want kids and don't eventually have them purely for this reason then you'll regret it doubly.

The more conscientious people who have kids should at least maintain the number of conscientious people in the world (so I believe anyway, potentially romantically incorrectly).

Religions maintain themselves purely through indoctrination prior to coherent thought, why not use that same hack for actual useful ends. (Hah! I'm such an optimist).

Idiocracy hypothesis says otherwise. The least educated and intelligent have the most numbers of offspring.

In which case 'the conscientious minority' must continue to breed to at least slow the rate of the declining percentage.

And, thankfully, geniuses randomly and repeatedly arise amongst them.

We can disincentivize it substantially by replacing tax benefits for having kids with tax burdens for having kids, promoting family planning and making contraceptives free and easily accessible as possible, making childbirth and childrearing as expensive as possible, etc.

> Religions maintain themselves purely through indoctrination prior to coherent thought, why not use that same hack for actual useful ends. (Hah! I'm such an optimist).

[Citation needed]

I've encountered several examples of people who were raised pure humanist/materialist and became one stripe or another of religious later in life, including

- Simone Weil (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simone_Weil)

- my father, raised by an atheist and agnostic, was an aggressive atheist until his college years when he became a deist (he further converted to evangelical Christianity while in medical school).

- Bruce Greyson, raised a pure materialist but became vaguely spiritual and inclined towards dualism after decades of studying NDEs (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Greyson)

It may not be common to start off atheist and become theistic, but it does happen.

My sister is a born again Christian, so it's not true for her either, but it's definitely true for her kids.

Imma keep working on em though ;)

Global birth rate per persn has been dropping for decades. Absolute global birthdate has been pretty stable for 30 years.