> you'd stop having so many kids and would lower your population density, on the path to which most European countries are already on
You make it sound like you believe this is a good thing while people who are actually experiencing population decline are not having a good time.
Whether it's countries like Japan and Russia desperately trying to encourage births, China lifting its one-child policy, villages in Italy paying people to move there, desolate post-industrial towns in the US rotting, etc - everything points to population decline as a strictly terrible thing.
Like you, I was also born in Latvia. In 1980s, the country had 2.6 million people. Today, something like 1.9 million - 27% decline in 40 years. You may celebrate this from the CO2 point of view but I think the more obvious interpretation of these numbers is "Latvia is dying." It saddens me to see this. I am not sure whether the land will just be empty or it will be populated by people from cultures who have not reduced their children (history suggests the latter) but - are you sure this is what you want?
Also, taken to the extreme, your logic suggests not just reducing kids, but mass suicide/homicide. After all, if we care about CO2 above all else, why wait a generation for the number of "emitters" to decline, when we can just solve the problem today?
None of this is to say that reducing emissions isn't important and there are a ton of great ways to do that (new energy sources, reduced commuting through better and better communication tools) coming on-line that I am really excited about. But destroying future generations to move this metric doesn't seem right to me.
> You make it sound like you believe this is a good thing while people who are actually experiencing population decline are not having a good time.
It can be a good thing for managing emissions and the entire planet not becoming inhospitable, while at the same time being a bad thing for people in these societies in the short term.
Demographic transition phases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition) are inevitable - growth cannot continue forever with limited resources and it therefore makes sense to put social mechanisms in place to cope with a significant part of the population aging at any given time.
The fact that this is not the case is simply a failure in choosing the right priorities as a society, not some absolute truth. If anything, you should be asking where your tax money goes and whether there's enough to take care of the elderly that have worked their entire lives in the service of the country, instead of that responsibility being passed down to their kids.
> You may celebrate this from the CO2 point of view but I think the more obvious interpretation of these numbers is "Latvia is dying." It saddens me to see this.
While i share this emotion, there are cities out there that have larger populations than this entire country. I agree that the history of cultures should be preserved, but certain osmosis and naturalization of other cultural elements is inevitable in all but the most xenophobic and isolationist societies. That's not a bad thing.
Countries and cultures dying out, or becoming a part of something larger (e.g. a mix of the Baltic cultures, for example) is completely natural, regardless of how any single person might feel about it - though it also takes place over hundreds or even thousands of years, so there's no need to worry about what will happen in your lifetime in that regard. What do countries even matter, if we're all stuck on this rock together?
> Also, taken to the extreme, your logic suggests not just reducing kids, but mass suicide/homicide.
This is a strawman that feels dishonest and that i will not engage. While the argument is "technically true", it's also one of those that are insane enough not to warrant further consideration.
Rather than nitpicking, it instead makes way more sense to simply live a responsible life yourself, because you didn't choose to be brought into this world, and to consider when and whether you can afford the large amount of resources that are necessary to have a child or even many. You don't need to be a nihilist to be responsible.
Then again, i do believe that many of the people who should give this a thought don't and therefore have to support the large families of their own making, that they oftentimes cannot, all at the expense of not only society, but also the quality of life that their kids have.
Thus, moderation is probably for the better in life in most cases, as is introspection. Don't bring too many kids into this world if you cannot take good care of them. Don't bring too many kids into this world if the fact of them existing is likely to make things worse environmentally/otherwise. If you do bring kids into this world, be the best parent that you can be and teach them all that you can. Never make babies just because that's what your biology tells you to do, or what society expects you to do.
It's not like you can't be a parent at all, though. And that's hardly destroying the future generations.
> You can't assume the amount of people on the planet as some sort of a proxy for well being, by that logic life was 2x worse in the 1960s
I know this isn't quite what you were getting at, but child mortality rate is commonly a proxy for well being, is a major factor in the global population increase, and was >4.5x higher in 1960: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-child-mortality-ti...
So, in some sense of it, population size is a proxy for well being (at least for now).
> So, in some sense of it, population size is a proxy for well being (at least for now).
It is only a proxy for as long as you ignore the last stages of demographic transition or haven't reached them - because in most countries with good health care and safe living conditions, the populations eventually stall or even decline, even though the quality of life doesn't necessarily have to (in lieu of bad political decisions being made).
That said, i do believe that child mortality is probably a more accurate indicator in that regard, since that would be directly correlated to how good the healthcare is and would remain low in the later stages.
You make it sound like you believe this is a good thing while people who are actually experiencing population decline are not having a good time.
Whether it's countries like Japan and Russia desperately trying to encourage births, China lifting its one-child policy, villages in Italy paying people to move there, desolate post-industrial towns in the US rotting, etc - everything points to population decline as a strictly terrible thing.
Like you, I was also born in Latvia. In 1980s, the country had 2.6 million people. Today, something like 1.9 million - 27% decline in 40 years. You may celebrate this from the CO2 point of view but I think the more obvious interpretation of these numbers is "Latvia is dying." It saddens me to see this. I am not sure whether the land will just be empty or it will be populated by people from cultures who have not reduced their children (history suggests the latter) but - are you sure this is what you want?
Also, taken to the extreme, your logic suggests not just reducing kids, but mass suicide/homicide. After all, if we care about CO2 above all else, why wait a generation for the number of "emitters" to decline, when we can just solve the problem today?
None of this is to say that reducing emissions isn't important and there are a ton of great ways to do that (new energy sources, reduced commuting through better and better communication tools) coming on-line that I am really excited about. But destroying future generations to move this metric doesn't seem right to me.