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Widespread TVs, lowered infant mortality, women's empowerment and contraception education. Lowers the birth rate all by itself.

• camgunz 6y ago
  I wouldn't think of these first as "population control policies". Like, teaching people about contraception and birth control isn't a population control policy, it's (generally) a women's rights policy. And while it's definitely true that birth rates decline as women gain more reproductive rights, I don't think we should see that as a population control policy, but rather as a human rights policy. Where these two perspectives really diverge is on the issue of enforcement. If we say women have a right to control their bodies, then the enforcement comes down against entities who deny or limit those rights. If we say women cannot have more than N children, then enforcement comes down against women (and oftentimes their families too, but not always), often in horrific and traumatizing ways. Or concretely, if India decides to implement population control via an education campaign and they are in danger of not meeting their goals, what do they do? Do they ramp up education efforts? Do they look at different women's rights policies? Do they crack down on employers and health care providers who are less than helpful when it comes to access to birth control? Or do they embark on a gruesome campaign of forced sterilization and abortion? So while I agree you're technically right, I think it's unrealistic to rely on population control to combat global warming, and doubly unrealistic to rely on reproductive education (etc.) to indirectly combat it. I think the incentives and enforcement are too far removed from the problem at hand, and that's saying nothing of the cultural challenges.