this post was submitted on 08 Jul 2025
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The single best thing you can do for the climate is not existing. The next best thing is not having kids. The lifetime of consumption of a person is out of the equation without that person. Until we figure out how to live sustainably on this earth, overpopulation is a real problem.
Edit: To be clear, I want you to still exist with us in this world. Especially since I don't believe in any kind of afterlife. I'm just stating a tough truth with no clear action statement, besides maybe figuring put how to live truly carbon-neutral. Some things are just a catch-22.
You first, buddy.
If not, this is just a slippery slope argument to "those other people shouldn't exist/have babies". That's just the door to eco-fascism.
I'm not calling out any single group, but speaking broadly about all humans. How does that jump to "those other people"?
I mean maybe. A lot of people today aren't having children bc of the general state of things and concerns around climate factor into that
I dunno, canβt it still be a good thing to put this option into the zeitgeist, in an otherwise pro-natal by default society?
Even though I know that on an intellectual level having kids is a choice, it still feels like a big adulting checkbox. That feel may be biological, but itβs influenced by society too.
Im sorry if it makes me an ecofascist, but that Trailer park welfare mom with 6 kids and her 4 baby daddies that have 2 kids each of their own are a problem.
and there's plenty of other cultures with a similar problem of having too many kids and not being able to provide for any of them.
*those are real problems, and people arent insane for criticising them. *
not to mention more of then than not, those kids grow up poor and have miserable lives, who go on to repeat what their parents did. starting the cycle all over again.
Nobody is saying people cant have kids, but there's a line of whats reasonable. This isn't the middle ages where you have a gaggle of kids because you need manual labor for the farm and you expect half of them to die before they reach 20.
Oh, so you get to decide who gets to have kids and how many? And the "trailer park welfare mom" is your problem? Like, the straw(wo)man you made up with ingredients from classism, sexism and eugenics?
Yea, that makes you a regular fascist. The "eco" is just the excuse.
And notice it's the woman who is the centre of this made up problem. Not the dads. Not the poverty, not the system or lack of access to birth control options.. Wonder why he didn't bring up the Nazi billionaire with his hareem he keeps in his million dollar compound...
No it's the loose woman in a trailer park.
You can have honest and valid concerns about overpopulation. But you aren't going to get any respect from me if it comes out of your mouth like that.
I mean, the "I'm sorry if it makes me an ecofascist, but" line was a dead giveaway from the start.
First mistake was assuming I was looking for respect from a comment section on the internet.
Well if that was the first mistake in my comment, seeing how it's the last thing I said, then I think I rest my case.
You're right, I Unintenitonally used a straw man argument. and what did you do, turn around and you used one right back, insenuiating that I think I get to decide who can reproduce.
give me a fucking break.
Would you rather have ecofascism or the extinction of all macroscopic organisms?
That being said limiting birth rates is a responsible thing to do, and we can see clearly when wealth inequality forces people to have fewer resources they will just choose to not have children. Otherwise every country wouldn't be whining about birth rates being too low.
What a bullshit dilemma.
And you are wrong that wealth inequality causes the drop in birth rates. The birth rate was higher in the Dickensian times of Britain compared to now. If anything, it is wealth equality, universal positive rights, and women's liberation that tend to make people have fewer kids.
A ecosocialist world is a sustainable one. An ecofascist world is just a death spiral.
An ecosocialist world would not allow wealth inequality to become this bad.
It's a biological fact when resources are constrained that a population will plateu.
We don't live in one. The challenge is to make one.
Mice and fleas don't have medicine, feminism, research centres and agriculture. Look at the world around you. In societies with high degrees of scarcity and high infant mortality, humans have tended to have a lot of babies. This is true now, and it was true historically. On the flipside, in societies with high development indexes, humans tend to not have many kids. From Japan to Sweden to Cuba, you see that fertility rates inversely correlate with human development. These are just observable facts.
The vestiges of mutual aid left in our society do not meaningfully counteract every generation having 1/2-1/4th of the resources their parents did.
These resource constraints limit population growth, humans are smart enough to see what's coming, and many voluntarily don't reproduce. We're already seeing wealth inequality force our birth rate decline.
the countries that are panicking about birth rates are also the countries that think they're going to be at war in the next generation or two. And the demographic situation is already bad in the countries that aren't already shooting.
Look at how bad things were before it started, and what 3 years of full scale war has done to Ukraine and Russia, they have more or less succeeded in signing each others death warrants as nations