Selling “Population Control”

Little Greta Thunberg was extremely effective in making people discover that flying was bad for the environment by crossing over to America and returning to Europe by boat.

Now, “cool” folks also believe that commercial flying should be banned or at least curtailed. Forbidding certain behavior like smoking or forcing Chinese couples into having only one child never works. The change in behavior has to come from within.

In the 70s, when it became clear that tobacco use was killing people, America was able to paint smoking as “uncool” and rather quickly, the habit dropped at a fascinating rate. Our planet deterioration (warming, pollution, etc.) is the direct result of overpopulation.

In 1800, at the beginning of the industrial revolution, the planet’s population had just reached the 1 billion mark. Today, it’s at 7.7 billion and still growing. Stopping that growth would be fabulous before we can begin to think of reversing it to more sustainable levels, but to accomplish this, we need to convince most of the world that it would indeed be a very cool idea.

Concepts like “kids are expensive to raise”, “better have one well-educated child than many that will struggle to find a good spot in society”, “robots are killing jobs, why add to the jobless ranks”, etc. The idea is to make having no more than one kid cool, that’s all.

Sure, there will be plenty of push-back from economist and politicians that like or want continued growth, but by now, we should all know that growth for the sake of it, is killing the planet and all of us at the same time.

Greta, it’s now time to show the world how to use a condom!