Machine, I didn’t see this before I just responded with the same point. It is so refreshing that you can see this. I don’t know why it is so hard for others, other than the urge to have babies is so strong that it blinds people. My wife says that’s the only purpose of mankind, so I should quit carping about it.
It’s interesting, though, that the urge to have children is social, and not biological, while biological evolution causes people to assemble in societal groups for survival, so it’s related. My wife wanted children when we were first married, and our disagreement about it caused a temporary separation. We reunited when she agreed to give it a couple of years before revisiting the question. She completely lost the itch, when not scratched for two years, and now thanks her lucky stars we never had any.
That is a good example of how many that do reach for the FUD do forget, since technology is a big reason for the degradation it is a problem that can be solved by changes in our technology. Of course controlling the population at the same time is important, but one big thing that many contrarians miss is that one very important result of education and economical progress is that families then **do **control the number of offspring they get (they figure out on their own how costly it is to have many children).
The access to education and economical development then are very important things to do, not only for the fight against poverty all over the world but also to fight climate change. Unfortunately many conservatives do think that helping developing nations to leapfrogdirectly to new ways of making and distributing energy is a sin (as many conservatives tell us: ‘why waste billions on an item that is a “hoax”?’).
For someone who came of age in the “fifties and early sixties,” the OP seems not to have paid any actual attention to what he thinks is the most fundamental problem we have. He came of age in time to read The Population Bomb, and apparently stopped there.
There was once a fairly direct logical pathway by which one could assume even a sustainable increased population was antithetical to curbing global warming – when it correlated with deforestation. It doesn’t anymore. As for the hand-wringing over water, it is cruel and incorrect to blame the problem on overpopulation: the vast majority don’t have access to enough water to waste it–that’s the fault of the privileged. And it’s actually a pretty solvable problem. Stop the privatization of water resources, change the Western hemisphere’s diet a little, invest in desalinization.
If the OP wants to respond to environmental issues by forgoing children, that’s his privilege, although I suspect that even so, there are large families in the world that have left less of a mark on the environment just through relative lack of consumerism. But his assertion that intellectually inferior babies are part of the problem is factually as well as morally repulsive.
So, who gets to decide who lives and who dies? And at what age do they decide if a kid displays “adequate intellect?” How do we stop the “unworthy” from reproducing – some kind of mass sterilization program, or just good old fashioned genocide?
A bunch of deaths would just make that perfect day come more quickly. The OP’s screed reminded me of white supremacist attempts to take over the Sierra Club–“the environment isn’t the issue–all those illegals are!”
Overpopulation is a red herring. The root problem is agriculture. Destroy all farmland on earth and ban all forms of agriculture, and the problem will fix itself.
Regarding my statement that more people today are living under abject conditions than there were people on the planet when I was born.
There were fewer than 2.4 billion people on the planet when I was born in 1943. UNICEF reports that about 2.5 billion people today live without sanitation, for one example.
There are tons of data available about this subject, and a person can interpret it anyway he wants to.
Never thought I would ever agree with anything coming out of your keyboard:
And one of the biggest (soon the be THE biggest, in my estimation) technology companies is already leading the way: Google is no longer just for “finding” answers - they are creating them. We’d be headed back in the direction of a healthy planet If we could just get the chemists and physicists to pitch in and figure out how to post-process the CO2.
Too bad economic incentive trumps environmental incentive every time. No pun intended. :dubious:
They are. And I’m sure the OP is one of them. I found it odd that there’s nothing there about clean energy or the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere even though the OP is supposed to be opining about climate change, but I assume that’s just a limitation of my feeble intellect.
From what I understand, the OP advocates an authoritarian regime that licenses children, and there appears to be something there about eugenics whereby only correct children are permitted, notably those that meet the OP’s standards of genius. I believe one can also read an implication there of well-intentioned mass murder, whereby a sort of Final Solution is imposed on a majority of these carbon-emitting humans to which the OP has taken such a dislike.
And here we are with our heads in the sand trying to figure out how to use all this abundant clean energy that’s all around us so that we stop polluting the atmosphere! It takes a genius to think outside the box and realize that the real problem isn’t CO2 or nitrous oxides, it’s us!
Oh, man, the first few words of that started off so well!
We almost took care of the population problem in the 90’s. It seems the Germans almost released into the wide use a bacterium called Klebsiella planticola that had been modified to increase the production of lactose fermentation of agricultural wastes. The residue would have been used as fertilizer. The new bacteria, would over time, kill any plants with roots. In theory it could have spread from any field it was used on. Not much left without plants with roots. Plankton maybe. We’ll screw up soon and the population problem will take care of itself.
OK. The idea that brown people have inferior intellect and need to die is yours.
Or, is this just your projecting on the OP to enable you to call out RACIST as an ad hominem attack to try and scare people away from listening to the non-racist message?
Of course, using (perceived) intellect as a criteria for birth is pure poppycock. You’d never get people to agree what level is adequate, or even how to evaluate for it. Besides, every attempt to improve humans through selective breeding has been ineffective to disastrous. Diversity seems to be much more important than any specific trait when it comes to genetics.
Someone made a good point: It’s often the world’s richest 1 billion people, who consume a vast deal of resources and emit lots of trash and pollution, who pull their hair out by the roots and panic over overpopulation and claim that the Earth’s population must be reduced. In the meantime, many of the other 6 billion leave a much smaller per capita footprint on the environment.
In other words, wealthy polluting Americans pointing the finger at the large African population.
As someone who has never had children, I like this logic, as it absolves me of responsibility for anything.
For example:
“OK, I may regularly commit sexual assaults. But you know who the real monsters are? People who have children.
Because even if they never do such a thing, the two-child family may end up with a dozen descendants, and if some proportion of them commit sexual assaults, the total sexual assault footprint may be much higher.”
The only difference between this argument and Machine Elf’s is that he’s omitted the first line – the part where any culpability whatsoever is acknowledged.
By simple math, there are ~4.9 billion people today who live WITH sanitation, more than twice the number of people who were alive when you were born.
Incidentally, when you were born, there was a massive global war going on - the most destructive in history - and it has not (yet) been repeated, which I take as a positive sign.
