From: lessgovt@gmail.com   
      
   Procreation and Consumption in the Real World   
   The cause of global environmental decline is clear: an immense and rapidly   
   growing human economy. In response, environmentalists should advocate policies   
   leading to fewer people and lower per capita consumption, not one instead of   
   the other. Addressing    
   both provides our best hope of creating sustainable societies and preserving   
   Earth’s remaining biodiversity.   
   by Philip Cafaro, Sept 6, 2023, The Overpopulation Project   
      
   There are numerous threats to global ecological sustainability; one well-known   
   approach speaks of nine planetary boundaries for safe human use of the   
   biosphere. These include the two defining environmental challenges of our   
   time: global warming and    
   biodiversity loss. The first threatens a much less hospitable world for our   
   descendants, the second a world where millions of other species leave no   
   descendants. We are well on the way to creating such a dangerous and   
   depauperate world. Most of the    
   fossil fuels ever used and most of the anthropogenic warming ever caused have   
   been in the last 40 years—and we are burning more fossil fuels and heating   
   the world faster than ever. The number of wild vertebrates declined 69% in   
   just the past 50 years,    
   extinction rates across all major taxa are hundreds to thousands of times   
   above background rates—and these rates are increasing.   
      
   The cause of global environmental decline is clear: an immense and rapidly   
   growing human economy, which was twenty-five times larger at the end of the   
   twentieth century than it was at the beginning. Our carbon emissions are a   
   function of feeding,    
   clothing, housing, warming, cooling, transporting, and amusing unprecedented   
   numbers of people in unprecedented luxury with unprecedently powerful   
   technologies. So are the habitat loss and degradation driving biodiversity   
   loss. Ocean acidification,    
   excessive freshwater withdrawals, toxins poisoning soils and waters; in every   
   case, immense human economic demands are driving the rush past boundaries for   
   biospheric health.   
      
   The obvious solution is to decrease the size of the human economy. Under the   
   “if you find yourself in a hole, quit digging” principle, we might at   
   least pause our ceaseless scaling it up. Unfortunately, humanity has built a   
   powerful global economy    
   around the primary goal of rapid, continuous growth. People want their   
   economic demands met, not questioned, and there are more of us than   
   ever—billions more. Furthermore, a dominant economic ideology espouses the   
   possibility, necessity, and goodness    
   of endless growth. Yet realistically, without limiting growth, global   
   environmental decline will continue.   
      
   Imagine a doctor examining a new patient suffering from hypertension, high   
   cholesterol, hyperglycemia, joint pains, chest pains, and shortness of   
   breath—and weighing 360 lbs. Whatever else she suggested, it is hard to   
   imagine a conscientious physician    
   not prescribing diet changes with a goal of significant weight loss. She would   
   warn the patient of his elevated risk of stroke, heart attack, and diabetes.   
   She might talk up other common benefits of lower weight, such as higher energy   
   levels and positive    
   mood. What she would not do is encourage him to eat three desserts instead of   
   two, while simultaneously scheduling him for bariatric surgery. Yet that is   
   what contemporary environmentalism has become, cheering on economic growth,   
   while advocating    
   expensive and dangerous technological fixes to ameliorate its worst   
   environmental impacts. With this approach, we cannot consider using fewer   
   resources or less energy. In fact, we need to use much more—but we can make   
   this use “green.” We can “   
   decarbonize” our economies, even “decouple” our economic activity from   
   its material impacts altogether.   
      
   We indulge these fantasies to distract ourselves from unappealing realities.   
   The obvious solution to our global environmental problems is also the only   
   feasible solution. As a matter of interspecies justice and intergenerational   
   prudence, the global    
   economy needs to shrink, not grow.   
      
   This is the overarching context in which we should discuss procreation and   
   consumption. In a recent essay in the journal Environmental Ethics titled   
   “Procreation vs. Consumption,” Swedish philosopher Kalle Grill notes that   
   procreation and consumption    
   both have costs and benefits. Therefore, he argues, we should consider these   
   comprehensively when making personal procreation and consumption decisions, or   
   advocating demographic and economic policies for our societies. In particular,   
   we can choose more    
   procreation and less consumption, or vice versa. The implication is that we   
   can use this understanding of costs and benefits to maximize personal or   
   societal wellbeing, however we define these.   
      
   All this sounds reasonable. Yet as I note in a response to his paper,   
   Grill’s discussion of these harms and benefits is marred by several dubious   
   empirical assumptions. He assumes most procreation will have little   
   environmental impact, suggesting four-   
   fifths of the world is so poor and consumes at such a subsistence level that   
   increasing their numbers will not contribute much to total environmental   
   impacts. This view is seriously outmoded, ignoring the rise in recent decades   
   of an immense global    
   consuming class numbering in the billions. For a sense of its importance to   
   global environmental impacts, see the figures for carbon emissions by country   
   income groups in Table 1 below, showing nearly two-thirds of current global   
   carbon emissions now    
   come from middle income countries.   
      
   [TABLE}   
   Table 1. Carbon emissions in 2019 by national income group. Source: Tamburino   
   et al. (2023). World Bank’s division of countries into four income-based   
   groups in 2019: low income (< US $1035 average GNI/capita), lower middle   
   income ($1036–4045),    
   higher middle income ($4046–12,535) and high income (> $12,535).   
      
   Consumption by a growing global middle-class also has helped empty many   
   African forests of “bushmeat” species and fill large swaths of the Pacific   
   Ocean with plastic. Its future numbers matter.   
      
      
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