So far my best bets have been talking about the Demographic Transition Model - i.e, as wealth goes up, birth rates decline, so uplift the poor and we'll be fine.
I also say that we have enough resources to go around if we stop allowing 1 man to use the resources of 100.
Theres also people with mad conspiracies that the government is trying to decrease birth rates by promoting LGBT stuff. To that I've said I also say that the current system of capitalism is all about growth and making money, and more people = more money. They don't want to thin us down.
What else can I say? It seems to be a very common belief.
The entire continent of Africa produces 3% of global carbon emissions. Carbon production is basically exponentially associated with wealth. Making the top 1000 wealthy individuals live at the carbon emission level of the next wealthiest 1% would reduce carbon emissions more than the entire continent of Africa.
If they really care about environmental destruction, they should support wealth redistribution.
I like to use the stat: richest 1% of humanity are causing 20% of greenhouse gas emissions, the richest 10% are causing 50%.
The entire continent of Africa produces 3% of global carbon emissions.
and woke geoengineering technocrats don't care that their "carbon capture" grift requires stealing their farmland to plant trees
It's more complicated than that as the system we set up actively refuses to fix the logistics and supply issues. As we distribute on the basis of who can afford it not who needs it
I never met them IRL but on the internet it's simple enough to just say "you first".
They're the kind of person to complain about traffic while sitting in traffic. You are the traffic.
Just press them on exactly who they think is overpopulated and why.
Lol, I always go with that too. "I agree, we should start with white pmc libs, they're the biggest polluters" and then they get mad.
It's also worth bringing up that a lot of the early anti-abortion people were also in favor of forced sterilisation of single mothers
the white supremacist / eugenicist roots of population control.
the PMC class has solidarity, do you? :epstein:
There's the fact that every year people produce enough food to feed 10 billion people then throw loads of it away
as wealth goes up, birth rates decline, so uplift the poor and we’ll be fine.
Women's rights are a huge factor along the lines of development. Turns out, when women have economic independence and autonomy over their bodies, most don't want to have more than a couple of kids.
All the points in this thread about who exactly is emitting carbon are great, but this is a good point to raise, too, especially if you're (rightly) calling for widespread improvements to material conditions.
You could point out the amount of waste in resources does more damage.
That a small population like the us takes and pollutes more per capita than like any other country. If population control for the sake of conserving those resources, then they should support the truly utilitarian option and advocate for the destruction of the US.
There's statistics out there that show 70% of pollution is caused by corporations.
Throw in things about the resource/land cost of raising cattle for food, 'cash crops' and the staggering number of unoccupied houses going to waste and you might be able to paint a picture of the fucked up systems in place.
I honestly think white people have too many kids. Like they think they are their own species. Guess what, I think black people should have first rights over all resources before white people get any. I think white people are not gonna exist in 1000 years and good riddance to them considering they started every fucking war.
Not even that, capitalism allows white people to earn more wealth than black people, the amount of debt white people have compared to black people is staggering. Even when generational wealth isn't a factor white people are always richer. It's fucking bullshit and I know we are supposed to fight the billionares and shit but I want to kill a couple middle class white men as reparations.
I don't really think that 70% pollution stat is that meaningful. I mean, we live in capitalism, so corporations are producing the things that we all need -- in addition to the stuff we don't. Does that means that 30% of emissions are caused by subsistence farmers? By the US military? It's unclear what the remainder would be.
How do we reduce the emissions in that 70% while not eliminating necessary production - it's not elucidated by that number.
Ban private property silly! No one has a right to own a car or eat meat. Problem is Americans are too willing to kill for this if they couldn't own it anymore. So we gotta kill the reactionaries before they can you know, react.
Well, of course, but a certain point of that 70% of emissions is from things like manufacture of medicine, growing and harvesting food, running restaurants, manufacture of building materials and construction of houses and buildings.
Like, demonizing corporations for existing under capitalism is not particularly meaningful, when there is a difference between necessary production that would happen without private property anyway and making plastic decorative doo-dads and shipping them around the world for pure consumption.
Necessary is subjective, this is why we need a communist party to decide things for us. Have faith in communism friend.
It's not that subjective everyone for example knows on some level that food is important in a way that random pieces of plastic aren't
Certainly everyone can survive without meat, but no people are willing to kill to be carnivores.
Yes, necessary is subjective. I am fully for a planned, efficient economy with necessary production. All I'm saying is it is meaningless to say 70% of emissions come from corporations, without differentiating what is being produced by corporations that are doing that emitting. Like of course corporations do the majority of emissions, we live under capitalism. It is a statistic that does not provide any insight.
It's fine if whoever you're talking to doesnt ask any follow up questions or think too hard about it.
I guess I don't see what the statistic is saying. What is it supposed to suggest? What is included in the non-corporation emission? For me it's a number that doesn't give insight if I continue to think about it.
Since most people don't really like to read, show them this Renegade Cut video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exheGjFGNko
On a side note there are lots of people who believe global overpopulation is a problem but also think that "Western nations" need to increase their birthrates.... i.e. they're super racist and eugenicist.
My position is the compromise: overpopulation is kinda real but the big problem is the population of the first world countries since we use tons more resources per capita
Overpopulation has core truths and extreme ecofascist dangers. It is all about the framing of the problem and therefore the space of solutions.
The challenge with sustainability is that it is caused by many human activities and how we organize production, many of them directly feeding into one another, mitigating or amplifying negative impacts. For example, single-use glass bottles are heavier and has a higher GHG impact from transportation and production than plastic bottles. If we had plentiful and clean energy in production and transportation, however, the equation starts to tip towards glass (and even more so if bottles are reused). Many impacts can therefore be thought of as conditional (glass worse with dirty energy, transportation, single-usr). The flip-side is that one-at-a-time changes are marginal. If your toolkit for addressing sustainability is one thing at a time and you evaluate expected impacts independently, ya fucked up your analysis because they're not independent.
Overpopulation has this exact same problem of framing. In current conditions, if the only thing you did was decrease the population and kept everything else the same, environmental destruction would decrease, probably proportionally. This is an truth, at least so far as these things can be. You will fail to convince people, possibly even yourself, if you deny it. There are large coalitions of climate scientists who agree and publish widely on it and they're not just being ecofascists, they're trying to build plausible models and this appears as a variable.
And just like with other sustainability issues, it is almost always only considered as a marginal impact. That is how it stands out: if it's the only thing you change, it seems pretty good compared to only using a certain kind of bottle or improving housing insulation. In addition, it really stands out because you can factor in population size as impacting all levels of sustainability that involve consumption. In a world of marginal solutions, it stands out.
The first threat of ecofascism is that both psychologically and absorbed propaganda, decreasing population size immediately brings up ecofascist solutions. The most obvious are genocidal monsters, but slightly more subtle discourse will lead to it. The idea that China or India or Africa have too large of populations in particular and should be blamed for these problems and "rein in" their populations. The effect is a new form of imperialist apologetics that justifies an increase in their relative mortality. Ecofascism.
The second threat is how this framing ignores the possibilities when you move outside of marginal interventions and start thinking holistically. Holistic solutions are necessary to create a sustainable world, but they're usually ignored because they aren't just one independent variable you can tweak in a model, they're thousands of interacting ones. Ecosocialists see this in the necessity of revolution: all of industry needs to be completely overhauled in the interests of the people rather than capitalistic profit-seeking that is only good at producing a fuckload of consumer goods to our general detriment. We need to be inspecting and changing every aspect of production, including materials acquisition, parts manufacturing, logistics, agriculture, waste management, and acceptable technology use for, e.g., energy production. These things are necessary and the ecofascist consideration is to their detriment because it centers a marginal "solution" that won't actually solve the problem but will create scapegoats.
The core truth is that making these necessary changes to industrialized society will allow a much larger "carrying capacity". Therefore, the ecofascist focus on overpopulation is the image of a settler champing at the bit to massacre a bunch of indigenous people so they can eat the remaining food rather than learn how to farm. We need to learn how to farm and we don't need to massacre anyone. Let's just learn to farm.
Don't even humor these outrageous theories, I shouldn't have to explain why overpopulation is bullshit and your "friend" is a chud for thinking these things. Get a new friend.
Honestly even if over population is a problem there are non-eugenicsy, non-coercive ways to discourage population growth. Thailand had a pretty successful campaign of encouraging family planning and contraception use that curbed their population grow.
These articles might help:
https://jacobinmag.com/2019/04/children-climate-change-family-guilt
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/10/class-war-climate-change-overpopulation-carbon
