Yes, overpopulation is a capitalist/racist myth too. It originated in racist eugenics theory and ignores issues of distribution, infrastructure/technology, and disparate impact in favor of fearmongering about poor/brown people having too many babies.
This one pops up a lot, so I’m going to post some links on it here:
Here’s a website dedicated to debunking overpopulation. It’s 101 and simple, but might be a good intro point for some.
Here’s a BBC article on the lack of good basis to even say how many people is the maximum the Earth could support.
A child in the US on average will use 13 times the energy of one in Brazil and 35 times one in India.
The wealthiest 10% of the world contributes 50% of emissions, but the poorest 50% only contributes 10% of emissions.
And even those estimates are off, because much of the energy use in the developing world is spent on resources sent to already developed/wealthy countries.
Within developed countries income has a stronger impact on household energy use than having another child does (with the wealthy consistently using more).
Just 100 companies contribute 70% of emissions globally-replacing those 100 companies with fully sustainable energy would fix 70% of emissions.
It’s impossible for developing countries to generally adopt Western style energy consumption development models on a large scale. And China, one of the larger developing countries whose government is a bit less under the thumb of Western imperialist powers, doesn’t intend to keep trying that either (instead investing in more renewable energy).
So, yes, it’s absolutely not the number of people that’s the main problem, but how resources are used and environmental management practices are done. If you were going to get rid of people to fix environmental problems, you would start with rich white Westerners, the opposite of who gets targeted by “overpopulation” panics.
kaledo-art
2087
discoholicmusic
vaporwave
jacobvanloon
