Writing at The Atlantic James Plautz is puzzled at why Western politicians don’t mention birth control as a strategy for slowing climate change:
The equation seems fairly simple: The more the world’s population rises, the greater the strain on dwindling resources and the greater the impact on the environment.
The solution? Well, that’s a little trickier to talk about.
Public-health discussions will regularly include mentions of voluntary family planning as a way to reduce unwanted pregnancies and births. But, said Jason Bremner of the Population Reference Bureau, those policies can also pay dividends for the environment.
“And yet the climate-change benefits of family planning have been largely absent from any climate-change or family-planning policy discussions,” he said.
Wonder no longer. Here are the first ten entries in a list of countries with the highest fertility rates:
| Country | Fertility rate |
| Niger | 6.89 |
| Mali | 6.16 |
| Burundi | 6.14 |
| Somalia | 6.08 |
| Uganda | 5.97 |
| Burkina Faso | 5.93 |
| Zambia | 5.76 |
| Malawi | 5.66 |
| Afghanistan | 5.43 |
| Angola | 5.43 |
Of the countries in the top 50 all are either in Africa, in the Middle East, or in Oceania. Among African countries the only countries that do have fertility rates right around the replacement rate are Botswana, Namibia, and South Africa, all of which are majority Christian. I’m not claiming that the difference can be explained by religion—after all, Burundi, Kenya, and Uganda have Christian majorities as well. I would explain the difference more broadly as due to cultural differences.
Furthermore, the second largest country in the world, India, has a fertility rate of 2.51 (China’s fertility rate is substantially below the replacement rate due to the One Child Policy). For comparison the fertility rate of the United States is 2.01, just about the replacement rate.
But it doesn’t end there. In the United State the fertility rate among native-born women is below the replacement rate; the fertility rate among immigrant women is almost double that, roughly three children per immigrant woman. That’s true even when adjusted for income and educational attainment. Interestingly, the fertility rate among immigrant women in the United is higher than among women in their corresponding countries of origin, about 23% higher on average.
The bottom line is that you can’t talk about birth control as a strategy for dealing with climate change without sounding like a racist. And you can’t make meaningful headway in reducing the fertility rate in the United States without controlling immigration.
Of course you can–you just deal with birth control as a voluntary measure rather than the insane racism behind people who rant about fertility.
Honestly, read the article. It contains nothing about fertility and racism; it’s about how voluntary birth control and family planning as recommended solutions mentioned by Hillary Clinton are unpopular on the right.
How you ended up with “Liberals suck because they don’t want to contemplate how the wogs breed like rabbits” is up to you figure out.
I have no idea how you got that from this post. The writer asked a question: why isn’t birth control mentioned as a strategy for addressing climate change? I gave what I think is an obvious answer: because if you take that tack it starts to sound like racism pretty darned quickly, a point the author makes and passes over quickly. Nothing about liberals mentioned in it.
If the point is that the population of the United States needs to shrink, you can’t accomplish that by accelerating the decline in the number of the native-born population. Nothing about race in that. We have white, black, and brown native-born population. If you accelerate the decline in the number of the native-born population there will be substantial forces pushing to increase the population by importing more people and that of itself will cause the U. S. population to grow. Nothing about race in that, either.
I also think that you need to read the cited article more closely. The words “right”, “conservative”, or “Republican” aren’t mentioned. Neither are “liberal” or “Democratic”. And all I’ve done here is put some actual numbers into things mentioned in passing in the article. Or are you suggesting that only conservatives criticize Hillary Clinton?
This is precisely why it’s so hard to have a dialogue about race in the United States. People immediately start flinging around accusations of racism.
Well, you can talk about it and not sound like a racist because people who are involved with voluntary family planning are not racists. The people I’ve known who work for non-profits that do work with family planning are in fact the stereotypical opposite of racists.
And as the article says, these measures do not ‘sound like’ racism. They ‘sound like’, in fact, quite the opposite: liberalism.
But people who go on about fertility and breeding (and not family planning) ‘sound like’ racists because they are racists, and not because they ‘sound like’ racists. This is where I got what I said: you went from an article which was about sensible measures regarding birth control and population growth and turned it into a question about the impression of racism was enough to defeat serious problem-solving, without mentioning that no one was accusing the measures in question to solve the problem of being racist or whether or not people who ‘sound like’ they are racist are in fact racist.
The main impression you leave is that thinking about racism stands in the way of progress, while seeming to insist that the real issues in population growth is congruent entirely with a way that a racist sees the world.
It’s the old “Racism is terrible but let’s be real about these here people folks.” No thanks.
You get more of what you subsidize: our poor and new immigrants pay lower taxes but still reap the benefits of public education and all those welfare programs. The only public places that don’t welcome them are the public universities and the national parks and forests, where few black or brown faces are seen.
Schuler, did you see the new population projections for 2100 a few months back?
Importing Third Worlders into the US, thus giving them greatly increased consumption of resources, including energy, will surely hurt efforts to curb US carbon output. It’s pretty obvious.
It’s also obvious that since the people telling us to curb our output of carbon are also almost exclusively proponents of importing hordes of people from the Third World to the US, that they’re full of shit about their stated goals.
No. Who produced it? I’ll look it up.
I suspect population control as a means to control climate change is not mentioned mostly because it is just stupid. It is so far down the list of what could be talked about that it doesn’t merit attention. Take all of the countries on that list and reduce fertility to one. That results in an infinitesimal change in carbon production. The big producers are the US, EU, China and India. Only India is really growing. Heaven knows that are lots of other, more immediate reasons why India might want to reduce that.
Steve
In China and India the per person carbon production is rising rapidly. You might not be able to reduce carbon production by reducing the rate of population growth in, say, India or Niger but you might be able to slow it down.
However, I’m not proposing it. Quite the contrary. Like you I don’t think it’s likely to be very effective. And, as I’ve mentioned before, I think that technological solutions are the only game in town, at least as long as China refuses to reduce its carbon production.
The crux of it is here.
http://news.sciencemag.org/economics/2014/09/experts-be-damned-world-population-will-continue-rise
Quote:
“A new statistical projection concludes that the world population is unlikely to level off during the 21st century, leaving the planet to deal with as many as 13 billion human inhabitants—4 billion of those in Africa—by 2100. The analysis, formulated by U.N. and University of Washington (UW), Seattle, researchers, is the first of its kind to use modern statistical methods rather than expert opinions to estimate future birth rates, one of the determining factors in population forecasts.”
Sorry for the lack of formatting, but I’m working off my phone.
The particulars are the interesting part. Also, recent events are showing possible limitations to these projections.