The UN doesn't have the guts to target the task issue: too many humans. And recommend the only solution: one child per couple until we get down to about half the current population.
Didn't work in China. It actually causes a massive "aging population" crisis, some serious gender imbalances, and some weird economic effects throughout the stack.
I mean, if you must be a film and TV dystopian bad guy, Thanos' idea doesn't work.
Birth rate seems to converge to 1-2 children per couple in advanced economies anyway.
Really we should be ensuring access to birth control and education in developing countries along with improving medical services to cut infant mortality (so that parents can be sure their young will reach old age and don't need to play it safe and have many young).
We are getting there slowly, but we could do more.
> The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future
> The forecasting of the future growth of world population is of critical importance to anticipate and address a wide range of global challenges. The United Nations produces forecasts of fertility and world population every two years. As part of these forecasts, they model fertility levels in post-demographic transition countries as tending toward a long-term mean, leading to forecasts of flat or declining population in these countries. We substitute this assumption of constant long-term fertility with a dynamic model, theoretically founded in evolutionary biology, with heritable fertility. Rather than stabilizing around a long-term level for post-demographic transition countries, fertility tends to increase as children from larger families represent a larger share of the population and partly share their parents' trait of having more offspring. Our results suggest that world population will grow larger in the future than currently anticipated.
It is really sad that nothing is done to reduce overpopulation.
Even if the whole world stopped eating meat, by 2050 when the world population will get close to 10 milliards we would produce as much CO2 as now.
All the measures that we could take to reduce the personal impact will just delay the inevitable.
1. Not really, the richest x% own and run the companies, and can spend more, but the mass of consumers of the products are spread across the wealth spectrum.
2. The idea to reduce the population based on some metric is a dangerous road to go down on.
3. By definition there will always be a richest 10% regardless of how many humans you get rid of.
> almost all emissions are caused by the richest 10%
I found this: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-by-income-region but it does not talk about individuals, only countries and regions; it finds that "the richest half (high and upper-middle income countries) emit 86 percent of global CO2 emissions". According to the graph, 16% of world population in high-income countries are responsible for 38% of global CO2. The richer 51 of the world population cause 86%. I don't think this squares with your statement, even if both "almost all" and "10%" were hyperbole.
