As you’re asking in good faith I don’t see why you’re being downvoted. Population carrying capacity is difficult. We know that given a particular level of tech

As you’re asking in good faith I don’t see why you’re being downvoted. Population carrying capacity is difficult. We know that given a particular level of technology we can support a particular number of people with global resources in the short term. Intuitively it seems like we’re wrecking the environment and we’re in for a nasty fall when we exhaust those resources. However, Malthusian predictions like that - so far - have a bad track record, because with more people comes more innovation, and so far that innovation has been increasing carrying capacity faster than population growth. Ultimately it looks like the world population is going to stabilize as most people seem to prefer smaller family units once they achieve “western level” of child survival expectations and material wealth. Strangely enough it may be harder to maintain a stable population with our consumption habits if it means that technological advance slows down. That said, for most people all the above is unimportant compared to caring for the living. Preserving and extending life and quality of life is fundamentally good, and shortening human lives to “save the planet” is not. So while you can have the macro level discussion along the lines of “do we really want the population to increase,” for most people if you venture into “should we just let the people who are already alive die sooner than they must” is pretty offensive.