The American Excuse

Americans tell me that it is not their fault the world is overpopulated. The fault lies in Asia and Africa where people have large families. Yet each American consumes 11 times the resources of someone living in Asia or Africa. Americans import these resources from all over the planet. Every American kid counts as 11 kids in terms of burden on the planetary ecosystem. Not only do Americans need to reverse their population growth, they must reduce their ecological footprint. Each American woman has about 2.07 children, equivalent to a family of 23 children in terms of drain on the ecosystem.

Action

If your parents were environmentally irresponsible and had more than two children, you and your siblings can compensate to correct the mini population explosion by limiting yourself to four children among you.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 63)

We must change the archaic attitudes towards breeding. It must become socially unacceptable. This is quite a revolution in our thinking. The urge to breed is so strong it will prevail against almost any social pressure. There is no worry about going too far. If we do, we can adjust.

For example here are some approaches that have been tried, not all of which are very palatable:

• We need massive research on birth control that is cheap to administer that works by default. Both parties should need to do something active, (other than have sex), to allow a pregnancy, e.g. take a pill.
• We must provide programs to ensure people are cared for in old age whether or not they have children.
• We must get rid of all government subsidies that encourage people to have children.
• We should provide large cash incentives for vasectomies and tubal ligations.
• We need new technology to attempt to support the huge populations with sustainable clean energy and sustainable agriculture.
• We must start making rude jokes about people who have children. We must call them breeders or other nastier epithets.
• We must discourage religions that encourage overpopulation by taking away their tax breaks.
• We must encourage people to have homosexual relationships wherever possible.
• We should encourage people to keep small pets instead of children.
• We should continue the Bush approach to AIDS (Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome), namely actively encouraging it. We should create some new plagues as well, ones better aimed at those who have large numbers of children.
• We should foment wars to help kill off the young men.
• We should not intervene when crazed dictators such as Hitler, Idi Amin and Pol Pot decimate their populations.
• We should relax the taboos against inter-species sex.

Not all these approaches are equally palatable. Even I don’t endorse them all. However, if we don’t get serious about the more palatable ones, we will be forced to use the less palatable ones instead. People sometimes write me furious that I would advocate such strange measures. I don’t. I merely list what has been tried or suggested.

1. The first homo sapiens walked the earth 200,000 years ago.
2. It took until 1804 for the global population to reach 1 billion.
3. 123 years later in 1927, it reached 2 billion.
4. 33 years later in 1960, it reached 3 billion.
5. 14 years later in 1974 it reached 4 billion.
6. 13 years later in 1987 it reached 5 billion.
7. 12 years later in 1999 it reached 6 billion.
8. Today it reached 7 billion.
9. In 2025 it is projected to hit 8 billion.

You can see the problem, called exponential growth. The more people there are, the more people there are having babies and the faster the population grows. The only remotely palatable solution is to lower the birth rate. Each family must have fewer than two children.

~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 63)