Our climate activists are rightly afraid of humanity's future from humanity's waste and destruction, and they urge immediate interventions and radical changes. The earth's natural environment with the millions of living species living with us is indeed in serious danger. However, many demand unrealistic expectations, such as the termination or radical reduction of industrial production. They ignore the fact that our current way of life, our security of existence, is based on advanced industrial production, without which the destruction of civilization would occur almost immediately, so no government can undertake this program. The society based on advanced technology has a history of almost half a millennium, and in the meantime, the human population has increased tenfold along with the technology, that is, nine-tenths of the population is kept alive only by the continuous operation of industrial technology. Accordingly, a similar proportion of the population lives in cities, while the rest of the population searches for new areas for soil cultivation and mining, which involves the destruction of nature, while the garbage of cities also destroys nature. We have inhabited the habitable areas, and now we are building new habitable areas at the expense of primeval forests, deserts, and seas. But this is a direct consequence of our half-thousand-year-old lifestyle and the resulting ever-growing population.
We can analise the problem in a thousand ways, we can break down the problem into a thousand strands, and we can show that further technological progress is conceivable on each strand, which reduces the problem on that strand. But if we put the threads back together, it turns out that we're either in the same place, or may be we found a lot more potential for human population growth. And this definitely foreshadows something. That the growth of the human population will not stop even after that, since technology has given us new opportunities to further destroy our Earth.
We are human, which means we can think, so we have to see that in the above thought process we have left untouched two things that we considered to be self-evidence. One is the existence of a capitalist economy based on technology, the other is the inviolability of influencing human reproduction, its incomprehensible independence from human action. Anyone who has reached adolescence knows that the creation of children requires human actions, and that they are not independent of human will at all.
As I mentioned above, exclusively the capitalist industrial economy makes it possible for the current 8 billion people to live. Until the population can be reduced to a tenth of its current level and life in a big city is made insignificant, this will most likely not change. Many people lull themselves into the belief that the problem can be solved by a more logical distribution of products, that if the rich will give the unnecessary products to the poor, and then everyone will have enough. But this is very silly, and there is strong evidence that this is exactly the worst solution. It is precisely because of this that population growth is getting faster and faster, and humanity, nature and climate are in an increasingly serious situation. In each case, the gifts of advanced civilization triggered drastic population growth in the poorer, less developed ethnic groups. Transferring products is fuel to the fire. Only adopting the entire lifestyle, a complete lifestyle change could help, but there is no known method for this, it usually does not work anywhere, and of course the necessary resources are also lacking. Because of this, overpopulation has become humanity's biggest problem.
Perhaps one-tenth of the population lives in a society with advanced technology, and the same countries experience (for the first time in history) that population growth has stopped or even declined. Many people do not understand the reasons for this, even though it simply follows from the creation of life-security. Those who firmly believe that their children have a secure future plan to have only as many children as are necessary for this secure future. And those who cannot believe that their children will grow up and make a living, those make a lot of children so that the ones that can survive will survive. The phenomenon partially works this way in animals soo. But unlike animals, man can understand that his ingrained animal instincts are leading him astray, but for this he must be aware of the problems the world is facing.
If we were to take the products from the developed countries to distribute them in the underdeveloped countries, we would eliminate also here the security of existence that stopped the population growth, i.e. we would recreate the problem of overpopulation in the developed countries as well, i.e. we would further worsen the situation. If we want the underdeveloped countries to reach the standard of living and security of the developed countries with further development and assistance, that would not be possible either, because there are not enough raw materials, food, agricultural land, productive power, i.e. the resources are lacking. The Earth cannot support so many people. There are too many of us for that. And distribution, as we see, only causes further population growth. The newer people are not driven by bad intentions to destroy nature, they just want to live, and for this they need space, food and energy, like anyone else who is born. The complete destruction of the earth's environment seems inevitable.
The only way out is the voluntary restraint of population growth. This is not unprecedented, because China has already implemented such a program of its own accord, which has greatly helped both humanity and China. But in the rest of the world, they are cowards to undertake this program, mainly out of fear of religious fanatics, or through faulty indoctrination of religious dogma. Cowardly and power-hungry heads of state deny the problem that threatens our entire human existence, and instead hope that when everything in nature has been exterminated, and there will be nothing left on the bare earth except cultivated crops, then hungry people and their weapons will do the job for them reduction. Of course, this is a self-evident solution for lazy and cowardly people, but it is by no means certain that there would be any living people on Earth after such a war. The uninhabited Earth is fine even without humans, as it was fine before the appearance of humans.
In order for a population reduction program to be set and accepted, the problem must first be recognized and understood. Currently, people are lulling themselves into illusions that the problem of environmental pollution and climate change can be solved with further technological developments. It's a vain fantasy. These problems were brought to the surface and produced by the development of technology, which worsens our situation year by year and hour by hour. Innovations merely postpone the destruction to a later date, but they later cause much more perfect destruction to many more people. The further we go on a bad road, the further we get from the good roads. Of course, innovations help a lot in creating security of existence, but they are basically completely independent of the problems arising from population growth, and by postponing problem of population growth for a longer period, they make our future more and more uncertain.
In order for the inhabitants of underdeveloped countries to curb their reproduction, either incentive or punitive measures must be introduced, or they must actually be guaranteed the security of their future, because if there is security, then reproduction will even decrease by itself. But this requires a stable international environment in which the guarantees set out in such long-term joint agreements can be taken seriously. As long as one state can start a war against another state against the will of all other states, such guarantees cannot be given to anyone. Unfortunately, we cannot say a moment in the last hundred years when there was no war going on somewhere in the world, and no one has been able to act against it so far. This needs to be changed.
