World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency
dx.doi.org> Still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, or more than 200,000 per day (figure 1a–b), the world population must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity. There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on GHG emissions and biodiversity loss. These policies make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women (Bongaarts and O’Neill 2018).
Proposals such as this are going to turn off a lot of otherwise amenable people, like myself, who would support more extreme measures to control the climate. It belies a view that there needs to be some kind of world governance structure deciding who does and does not get to have children.
Not necessarily. There are routes to social change (which the world is largely following but not nearly fast enough) in which the average family (average woman?) undergoes a voluntary, unsolicited reduction in fertility. These are the routes they mean when they discuss policies that "make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women"
See, this is either a serious proposal (reducing global fertility) or it isn’t. If fertility reduction is one of the means necessary to avert what is, allegedly, an existential crisis for civilization I don’t see how a “voluntary” program gets it done. I’m certainly not going to volunteer. Do I get socially shamed later for having kids (the fiancé and I want at least 3, hopefully more depending on career timing)? It’s also a little strange to outright claim that more education for women means lower fertility. I understand that that is usually the result, but it seems to run against a lot of the equity rhetoric I run into wherein the goal is actually to preserve a woman’s right to have a family while maintaining a career.
The issue here is mostly with the countries in extreme poverty. Countries with average fertility rate of 3 and higher. Women in countries with the highest fertility index often do not control when they get pregnant. Having 6 and more children is rarely effect of conscious family planning. It's effect of lack of education, lack of access to contraception, forced sex in marriage etc. Sometimes having many children is an insurance policy in case some children will die before they reach productive age. We really should be addressing this type of issues underlying uncontrolled population growth. People should be able to choose when they want to have children, how many children they want, they should be educated on how to provide for their children, and certainly people should not be afraid that some part of their offspring will die. It has nothing to do with penalizing having children like they did in China.
I really recommend, "DON'T PANIC — Hans Rosling showing the facts about population". He shows how family planning looks like in practice in countries like Bangladesh, so that westerners can imagine what are we talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
Dealing with global warming is going bad and we should panic about that, but humanity is making great progress on controlling population growth.
There is really no issue with you having 3 children. Western population will be declining anyway as fertility rate in western countries is mostly below 2.
Just please, support political, systematical change in your country emission policy.
It does preserve their rights to choose to do whatever they want. The statistics bear that when given the choice of access to the services, women will statistically choose them, and also voluntarily, and without solicitation, choose to have fewer children. I can't see an evil force here that is infringing rights of nefariously undermining anybody's freedom.
Global climate disruption denialists will turn out to have caused, collectively, more human suffering and just general harm than Mao's, Stalin's, Hitler's, and Pol Pot's regimes combined. Maybe, more than the sum of all despots in history, all the way back to the first towns.