We have polluted our environment so badly already that fertility is on a global drop. Mean sperm count in the West has dropped to ~50% in the last half century. For the rest of the world it's probably the same given how passionate so many countries are to achieve a Western lifestyle.
Edit: Over the coming 50 years, the "boomers" are on their way out. This might already be enough to relax the overpopulation issue in the West. But if fertility continues to drop, there will be huge issues with ageing populations.
Globally raise standards of living, promote education, and empower women so that they don't feel the need to have zillions of kids. This would likely have to be done via wealth transfer from developed nations to less developed nations.
In order to save the planet this way (the only sustainable way, IMO), standards of living in Western nations will need to decline for at least a couple of decades. After population stabilizes, standards of living can rise again.
Anyone who has family members under 40 should be onboard with this plan, unless they prefer that their relatives' retirement plan be "die in the coming resource wars 30-50 years from now."
> Globally raise standards of living, promote education, and empower women so that they don't feel the need to have zillions of kids. This would likely have to be done via wealth transfer from developed nations to less developed nations.
That all sounds good to me and I think the vast majority would be on board with that. However, it's kind of odd to frame those ideas under the guise of "reducing population".
Very few people talk about the need to actively reduce the global population because it's not something that needs to be talked about - plummeting fertility and replacement rates are going to accomplish the same thing much quicker and the actions you are proposing are already something people care about. By talking about lowering the global population you just risk getting lumped in with a mostly pro-eugenics or antinatalism crowd (which I'm not saying is fair, it's just how it is).
There's a ton of more optically favorable angles from which you can advocate for those changes.
It's not particularly odd once you realize that, historically, higher standards of living, higher levels of education, and giving women options other than having children have been the dominant factors in reducing population growth rate everywhere in the world. They're the primary reason Japan has a shrinking population now.
As for allowing it to happen gradually, if you look at global population growth estimates, things aren't really expected to even level off until around 2100 at about 10 billion people, give or take. That's far too late if we continue on our current course, and having ~30% more people on the planet, all other things being equal, just makes it 30% harder to stop the death spiral we're locked into. Global societal collapse is probably going to happen 20 years before that, but, even if not, continuing to put more humans on the planet for the next 80 years consuming resources is going to make reversing the trajectory towards collapse that much harder.
And, while this line of thought is certainly not pro-eugenics (I don't want to pick and choose which people end up being born), it is explicitly antinatalist to a point. The point is that there just ain't room on this planet for 10 billion of us. And, the reasoning is exactly the opposite that traditional antinatalists use. It's more that human life and human civilization are worth preserving, rather than "humans don't consent to being born," and "all life is suffering."
But, back to the real point, which is why reducing population makes sense at all, the problem we have is that we're just consuming too much of the Earth's bounty every year, and it's not sustainable. Technological progress can help here, and I expect it will be a part of the solution, even though we're not really committed as a planet toward using technology to reduce consumption. But, technological progress aside, the simplest and easiest way to reduce consumption is to just have fewer people consuming.
That is it. That's the argument, that's the plan, and that's really the only semi-realistic way forward that I can see.
Now, about most people being in favor of such a program, the issue is the bit I mentioned about Western standards of living needing to decline for a few decades. People are in favor of a lot of stuff, as long as they don't have to sacrifice for it. Nobody in the West really wants their standard of living to decline, and few seem on board with agreeing to it for the sake of the future. This is why I think we're actually doomed, to be honest, and this is the part I fully and wholly blame capitalism for, but I'd love to see myself proven wrong by the time I die.
