Environment & Energy

Last edited Thu Aug 21, 2025, 04:32 PM - Edit history (1)

There are a few factors which reliably lead to smaller families:

• ”Empowering” women: When women have a choice, not just about abortion, but about pregnancy in general, they tend to have fewer children.
• Better health care: When people are reasonably confident that their children will live to adulthood, they tend to have fewer children.
• Better education. More educated people tend to have fewer children. — This is the underlying social dynamic of The Marching Morons.

"Modern medicine” is a significant contributor to population growth, not just because of a decrease in infant mortality, but also because of an increase in "life expectancy" in general. All other things being equal, as it becomes “normal” for people to live longer, the population will grow.

Without a doubt, a growing human population, especially in the so-called “developed” countries has helped feed this crisis. On the other hand, in retrospect, signs of climate change date back to a time when the world population was much smaller. While we might reasonably say today that the population is far too large, no amount of “family planning” will have a significant impact on the level of greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere or the amount of plastic pollution already in the ecosystem.




Figure from: van Vuuren, D.P., Doelman, J.C., Schmidt Tagomori, I. et al. Exploring pathways for world development within planetary boundaries. Nature 641, 910–916 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-08928-w