this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2025
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Declining birthrates will save the planet. There's already more people than we can sustainability support.
We CAN sustain everybody we have now. It's just billionaires have decided it's more profitable to let a huge section of society suffer. The more suffering for us, the more profit for them. But you have to balance it, so it doesn't lead to revolt.
Thats what ends suffering. Not decreased birthrates, but instead death and revolt of those holding back food and shelter from those that need it, so they can raise prices on unsold units.
Not so sure, we are pulling resources out of the earth at a ridiculous rate. Even with green energy we are still reliant on mining for everything. Goods, fertilizer, the stuff for solar panels. We're going to run out of easy to access stuff sooner or later.
Degrowth is only an option after the dismantling Capitalism. We are pulling unreasonable and unsustainable amounts of resources from the earth. This should be ended but that cannot be done while those resources are owned by capitalists who must by the nature of capitalism expand that extraction infinitely. If we want sustainability through the reduction of wasteful and unnecessary use of resources we need a system that is not predicated on infinite growth in a finite system. We can sustain ourselves and the environment, just not like this.
We can sustain everybody on Earth right now if we all eat beans and rice, give up all meat, stop plane travel, and limit your commutes to ones you can do without a personal car. Even if we get rid of billionaires, the rest of western life is unsustainable at this population.
If you are reading this message on a smart phone, it's already too late, you don't meet this criteria. The only solution for us to sustain your lifestyle is to reduce the population.
That's all hard to do when billionaires are the ones structuring society. The point is we don't get to choose corrective societal actions unless it is an exercise of individual privilege. I would have loved to take the train to visit relatives, but it literally is not an option.
Even if we could (which I doubt) is it even worth it living on a planet that’s this crowded?
That depends where you live. I wouldn't want to live in India, which is crowded as hell. But Half of Canada is basically empty. Half of Australia is basically empty. Some of the states in the USA are basically empty. The majority of russia is empty.
Space isn't the issue.
Those places are empty because it is not easy to live there. And we should leave those places alone anyway.
Australia and Canada are most uninhabited because there's a lot of uninhabitable land. I do agree that a lot of land use isn't efficient, but there is also generally a reason people don't live in central Australia.
The world really is not all that crowded, it only feels that way because our land use is inefficient
More scientists and inventors, more philosophers and artists, more people that share your niche hobby...
The only people who have a problem with that, are hipsters or just like dieing a preventable death.
There's actually more than enough resources to go around, but enormous amounts are lost to waste, corruption, inequality and greed. The world isn't actually overpopulated, but over-urbanized. If it was made more feasible for people to live in the districts, more decentralised and with less waste of resources, human society would look very different.
Urban centers have less waste or CO2 per capita than their rural or suburban counterparts. The problem is our pursuit of ever increasing profits is extremely wasteful but is currently how states gain influence.
Why that direction? Intuitively I'd imagine stuffing the humans into cities would allow more mass transit, fewer cars, more economies of scale, and more area left over for nature. So more like Singapore, less like Texas.
Has anyone ever done scientific research on this question?
"In my perfect ideal world, that we have no path to achieving, we could sustain our large population indefinitely."
It looks like the world can support the current population. Barely.
But yeah, low birth rate is not something that must be solved right now. And it will solve itself eventually. We should be working into making people comfortable, but if people think their current situation isn't good enough to have children, just shut the fuck up and let them be.
Hard to prove, but even the idea that the world can barely support the current population is likely just propaganda trying to reinforce a scarcity mindset.
We could probably pack nearly everyone in the entire world in to an area the size of the United Kingdom, and most could be living better lives than they do now. Population Density comparable to New York City would get you around 7 billion people. Obviously, we can do better than that, but just trying to put it into perspective.
Even for agriculture, you could support the current population with what we've got and a lot more if that was your priority. There are dramatic gains to be made by reducing or eliminating meat and unless we made some new unfortunate discoveries that would 100% get you there, but you might not even have to. We're strong into theory territory and might have to focus on prioritizing fertile land for agriculture but having everyone in the world eat like an average american would likely be doable at current levels if we actually wanted to prioritize that.
Kill* about 15 billionaires and suddenly we can support a lot more people with the same resources.
*Other options available
Not actually true, unless your means of supporting people includes provisions for the extravagances of carbon-based energy and huge amounts of inefficiency everywhere in the supply chain.
If we want to carry on with capitalism as we know it now, yes. And you know it's going to be the elderly, sick, disabled, among the working class population that need to go first. You know, those who can't be forced to work. It's not the poor working class populations who wealthy right-wing policy makers are asking to have more babies.
The world is already on track for around 10 billion people anyway, because there are already enough young people in developing nations who we expect to have families of their own in the next few decades.
So good thing we could carry that many people sustainably if we get our shit together.
Not that I'm against Pokemon inspired sexy times between consenting adults.
"But line must go up."
I know that you are just parroting dangerous ideas, but you need to stop that
While they may be factually incorrect, humanity still sucks so bad with all the ecological ruin they've caused & species they've wiped out that exterminating them completely would bless the entire planet.