What do you make of the DINK couple that has foregone their reproductive rights for the sake of "environmental concerns" but still get themselves a couple of pets and treat them as upper-middleclass children. One would say, disabled children that are never going to become productive members of this society and most likely will be dead by age 16.
Maybe there would be enough room in this world for the people we already have - at least for long enough that the correction in overpopulation comes from the fertility rate rather than otherwise - if those of us at the top of the pecking order would not insist on wasting so much real wealth in our natural but unexamined impulses.
This may sound like a pedantic complaint about your point, but the fact of the matter is that the average DINK couple who decides not to have kids is going to be using massively less resources, despite having a lavish lifestyle as a substitute. I agree that discretionary resource consumption is a perhaps-underrated concern when compared with raw population, but the point you're making really has nothing to do with that.
Well, if you assume an average life expectancy of 98 years, but I'm not sure why you would do that.
1) I'm not obsessive enough to think that making an estimate of life expectancy far in the future is a good use of time when it has no impact on the point I'm making.
2) More directly: more than 25% of 16 y/o's are expected to live to 100[1]. We're talking in this thread about rich DINKs in high-income countries, and income and life expectancy are correlated; According to a recent study by UMich, those in the top quintile of income born in _1940_ have a life expectancy at age 55 of 90 years old[2]. It seems an extraordinary claim to say that life expectancy won't climb by (at least) another few years for the richest cohort of people in the world over the next ~century.
If you're going to be childishly pedantic, at least try and be accurate.
[1]http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/aug/04/live-to...
[2] http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2014/04/18/the-richer-you-are...
I'm aware that life expectancy at age 55 is not the same as LE at age 18, but at-birth life expectancy numbers aren't available broken-down by income, for obvious reasons. It turns out that (unsurprisingly), the rich have a very low mortality rate before age 55, so this doesn't particularly skew the numbers.
My first thought would be that as a DINK with pets the resource usage of my 2 spayed and neutered dogs which weren't bred on a puppy farm is miniscule compared to even one child who goes through diapers, clothes, eventually builds a house, and will forever contribute to filling up our landfills. Furthermore that one child is unlikely to be spayed and neutered so they will contribute to exponential population pressure.
Whatever the resource consumption rate is for owning spayed and neutered pets (per couple per year). It's eventually going to be dwarfed by exponentially increasing resource consumption rates of "productive members of society". I really would prefer if people would produce a little less.
Generally speaking, high birth rates correlate with poverty. Improve standards of living, particularly for woman and disconnect access to medical & family planning resources from religion and birthrates decline. If you don't think that 50% of your kids will die before reaching adulthood, you don't have 12 children.
The 1 million pound gorilla is our collective failure to look past our tribal/national boundaries.
The first and foremost "pollutant" source of environmental damage and degradation are humans. Simply speaking, the only way that humanity has any real chance at fighting global climate impacts is by limiting and reducing reproduction. But it's a really difficult topic to talk about, let alone even just bring up. It's the 1 million pound gorilla that cannot be seen for all the gorilla blocking the view.