> Still increasing by roughly 80 million people per year, or more than 200,000 per day (figure 1a–b), the world population must be stabilized—and, ideally, gradually reduced—within a framework that ensures social integrity. There are proven and effective policies that strengthen human rights while lowering fertility rates and lessening the impacts of population growth on GHG emissions and biodiversity loss. These policies make family-planning services available to all people, remove barriers to their access and achieve full gender equity, including primary and secondary education as a global norm for all, especially girls and young women (Bongaarts and O’Neill 2018).<p>Proposals such as this are going to turn off a lot of otherwise amenable people, like myself, who would support more extreme measures to control the climate. It belies a view that there needs to be some kind of world governance structure deciding who does and does not get to have children.
Global climate disruption denialists will turn out to have caused, collectively, more human suffering and just general harm than Mao's, Stalin's, Hitler's, and Pol Pot's regimes combined. Maybe, more than the sum of all despots in history, all the way back to the first towns.