Quite possibly the most amazing TED talk ever...

[His Lordship]

Population control in any way is just wrong.
Giving into a government that wants to legally kill, stop, or control what people do in the way of family is terrible.
You even slightly suggesting that it is a good thing makes me question if you want us to practice  the ideology of antihumanism.
My post might be off-topic but just the same the belief that the human race is a horde of rats whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order, and that measures are necessary to constrain population to save the Earth is morally wrong.

I have to respectfully disagree with you Rachel.
There are too many humans, more than the planet can sustain in the long-term.
I would never endorse an act of genocide, but we do need to reproduce in a sustainable way and aim for a population decrease.
Any family that wants to exceed two children is either selfish or does not know the dilemma we face.

Rachel, the first 3 minutes are adequate viewing for you to understand my concern.
But please watch as much as you can.
How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth (FULL)

The summary of it is at 11:45:
"If we don't control human population voluntarily, life could end in misery; the productive capacity of the Earth has physical limits, and those limits will ultimately determine how many human beings it can support"

[Rachellove9]

It was only 1:44 to watch.
I watched and didn't see anything at all that changes my view.

Of course we can't be just like gumball machine and pop kids out like it doesn't matter.
But that choice is mine and not for someone else to make for me.
Much like abortion is between the dr and the woman, I feel that birth is a family matter and between the woman and her mate.
I've looked in to adopting children from other countries.
If I can afford to adopt or have my own 6 to 12 children, then who should come to me and say I'm wrong.
My issue with having more than 3 or 4 children is that the children wouldn't have the one on one time with me.

I am not from Africa or have any connection with Africa other than a deep compassion for them and send them money.
I don't approve of the USA's trade policies that included the limitation of a pesticide that wasn't allowed to be used.
It's ban has caused billions of Africans to die and I feel that the USA is responsible for it.

Population control is one of the things I'm passionately against.
I feel in the end the population will be controlled by natural disaster, sickness, wars and ect.

[His Lordship]

Humans cannot trust themselves to be responsible.
In theory I could have zero children (out of concern for the population) and all it takes is for one dumb teen girl to push out four children, and she has TOTALLY undone my life efforts.

If I can afford to adopt or have my own 6 to 12 children, then who should come to me and say I'm wrong.

This comes at a cost. You're thinking from a cellular family view, which I understand.
But you're part of a global community as well and we're all in this together.
What if everyone made that decision? It's not sustainable.
Already, our current population exceeds Earth's capacity to provide, and yet you want us to GROW?
Let me clarify this: Freedom to choose means the population will grow Rachel.
Most people want at least two kids.

Say there is no regulation, and we keep growing.
There will be a mass population decrease due to lack of water and food.
If you're happy to ride it out until disaster strikes and then live with the effects of it, that's where we're different.
I want to prevent it rather than deal with it.

For my whole life I will be a supporter of population control.
I can't think of anything more selfish than people wanting big families at the cost of precious resources.
Every child you have comes at the cost of human life in the future.
You're taking out a loan you cannot repay.

[Mojo]

Very interesting, never thought cattle could be a solution!

I'm still confused about what the cattle eat right at the start tho if they are basically in a desert O_o

[His Lordship]

One more movie for you Rachel. A short one this time.
David Suzuki speaks about overpopulation

[Rachellove9]

I will just agree that you and I will never agree on this issue.
Family matters should remain with the family.
My body is mine to make decisions with.
Why is it okay for a woman to have 12 abortions and you tell me it is not okay to have children that I could afford and build futures for?
It is being hypercritical in my view.
I am seeing it from a very personal view and the world will be a better place from any children I would be raising.

[Ts Stormrage]

Population tends to control itself, though...
It's usual that you see high birthrates at places where there is also a high infant mortality rate... If one of your kids dies, you replace him with another, so to speak...

It is shown that, when you give women some decisionmaking powers in the family and an income of their own, the infant mortality rate goes down, and so does the birthrate... This has happened across the world wherever some extent of womens rights became available... This is why religion, notoriously and often violently opposed to any kind of equality to a dominant male subject, is the bane of human existance... Fortunately organizations such as Oxfam Novib do wonderful work here...

As for population numbers:
Right now, there are 2 billion children, roughly 2 billion people between 15 and 30 years old, 1 billion between 30 and 45, 1 billion between 45 and 60, and a billion between 60 and older...
What we're experiencing now as a population boom is what's known as a fill-up...
Fastfoward 15 years, and you'll have:
Roughly 2 billion people between 15 and 30 years old, 2 billion between 30 and 45, 1 billion between 45 and 60, and a billion between 60 and older AND 2 billion children still, as the rate of replenishment of that bottom bracket isn't projected to speed up any faster than its current pace...
Fastfoward another 30 years and all but the 60+ bracket will have 2 billion... And again and all brackets have 2 billion, making the total population 10 billion...

I did watch that Attenborough documentairy a while back, but I forgot what kind of people we have to emulate in order to live sustainably with 10billion...
I know that if we all lived as americans we'd need 5.5 earths to sustain all of us, Europe not doing much better with 3 earths...

[Ts Stormrage]

Rachel: YOU might be able to afford it... Financially...

The earth cannot support everyone having 12 children... Not if you want to have the cool stuff, like, you know... drinking water that doesn't kill you... Or food...

Mojo: They didn't have to feed them anything, unless they were at an area that was completely strip-mined bare... They just paid someone 5 dollars to find them the nearest grassy patch, and moved em towards that... He began his lecture with sayig that nature tends to fill up the gaps if you let it :)

[His Lordship]

Rachel: YOU might be able to afford it... Financially...

The earth cannot support everyone having 12 children... Not if you want to have the cool stuff, like, you know... drinking water that doesn't kill you... Or food...

And Rachel, I'm not targetting you specifically. Adopting is a very respectable thing to do and I respect that greatly.
That's not contributing to population growth.
Also, 12 abortions are not OK!

What also concerns me is how the planet is getting more stupid.
Less educated people tend to have kids at an earlier age.
These kids are raised in an environment that keeps them uneducated (bad parenting, poverty and lack of schooling).
Then they feed the cycle of stupidity and have lots of kids at a young age too.
What scares me even more is thinking of the possibility that there is a genetic component to stupidity. If there is, the cycle is much harder to break.

On the other hand, people who are better educated wait until later in life to have kids, and they tend to have less.
In essence, there are more kids growing up in circumstances that encourage low intelligence than high intelligence.
I firmly believe that in the developed world at least, humans have been getting marginally dumber over the last few hundred years.

[Ts Stormrage]

Gene, do not underestimate the curiosity of children, and above all the amount of information available to them these days... People teaching themselves in this way become more and more common... It's up to us, as the intelligent ones, to help them filter out the facts from all the bullshit...
Even the dumbest people of all, from the Westboro Baptist Church and other creatard families, plenty of kids have "escaped" their families once they reach adulthood... Louis Thereaux did a wonderful job documenting that...

This is the internet, where bad ideas come to die as they cannot stand up to world-wide scrutiny...

If the picture you painted was true, than average IQ's should've gone down over time... It hasn't...
What HAS stopped is human evolution by natural selection... If I lived back in the days of fires and spears, I would've been mauled by a bear before I had my first pube... Then somewhere along the line spectacles got invented, allowing people with poor eye-sight to see, participate in society and reproduce... Effectively allowing a defect to exist... This is but one example of such defects...

[His Lordship]

I hope you're right, and that escaping those environments is the rule rather than the exception.
As for average IQ's, what we're seeing is a widening of the variance of IQ... meaning less people around the average and more around the extremes.

[Rachellove9]

Just a thought about the stupid raising kids . . .

A lot of people send their children to be raised in daycares.
There is a huge difference in daycare environments.
I'm thinking this could be part of the dumbing down of American children.
If you raise your own children they will take on your language and behaviors.
If you allow a person with low IQ to raise your children maybe they take on their language skills and behaviors.
I'm not sure but I've seen some really smart parents with children that seem not up to standards.
Choosing good daycares could be part of the problem in America.

[Keith]

On the matter of population control, I think people should just have a couple kids, and then adopt a ton if they really want to have many. Obviously it's not a black and white scenario but that's my viewpoint. I wish there wasn't a stigma with adoption, where "you're adopted" is an insult to kids who were adopted and who weren't adopted. Your blood doesn't matter. It's your personality that defines you. Who cares if you're not related to your parents. Personally I'm only blood related to my mom. I won't delve into details but I have no clue what my father looks like, don't know his name, nothing. But I've grown up just fine!

[His Lordship]

 

But I've grown up just fine!

:X

[Wayshow]

I went to daycare from 2-3. The teacher was called Aunt Mimi and she was awesome :)

[Ts Stormrage]

I was wrong about religion being a factor...
However, I now understand better why people are "planning for 10 billion"...

Hans Rosling: Religions and babies

[Rachellove9]

I really didn't get how religion was ever to blame. . .
This video made a lot of sense to me.
If you are poor and need to do all the work yourself you need a small army to help out.
If some of them will be dying they have more just in case to keep up to the standard of help.

I don't need a small work force but I see how it makes so much sense to help the poor get in a better place.
I give to Africa and Mexico as a mission.

Still doesn't change the fact that I am in control of my body and don't want laws or groups of haters to tell me how many children to have.

[Owen]

I really didn't get how religion was ever to blame. . .
This video made a lot of sense to me.
If you are poor and need to do all the work yourself you need a small army to help out.
If some of them will be dying they have more just in case to keep up to the standard of help.

I don't need a small work force but I see how it makes so much sense to help the poor get in a better place.
I give to Africa and Mexico as a mission.

Still doesn't change the fact that I am in control of my body and don't want laws or groups of haters to tell me how many children to have.

I'm a strong advocate that people should be able to do as they please as long as it does not negatively affect the lives of others.

If people could have as many children as they wanted without the problems brought on by overpopulation that wouldn't bother me, unfortunately, with the way the world works, it's not possible.

If you could have 12 children and be ENTIRELY self sufficient, requiring NOTHING from an outside source, then go for it.  But I don't think that would be doable, certainly not enjoyable or easy.

Say you did have 12 children, you need to feed them, provide power/water to wash, feed, entertain and possibly teach, it's not the existence of the children/people that's the problem with overpopulation, it's the resources they require, and the energy needed to provide those resources that puts the strain on the Earth.  Every single person has a carbon footprint, and in a developed country, that footprint is all the bigger.  If you have 12 children, that's a big carbon footprint for that family.

I feel this thread has gone very off topic, considering the speaker stated that if his plan was put into action, it would bring carbon levels down to pre-industrial revolution levels without the need for a change in industry.  This could only be compounded and improved if industry changed AS WELL.

[Al]

@Rachel [spoiler]But it's not about freedom or 'exercising' the right to have a lot of kids, it's about what the consequences are. Eg. Octomom. Raising good kids has nothing to do with it, it's about the carbon footprint humans put on our planet, and to me the ethics of it. I agree with what Gene said on how it's like trading 12 kids for 12 deaths (or however it said, sorry it's late). Humans should take accountability for the planet, or at least for the harm we have done to it.

If I took half an hour showers every day, other people in my house wouldn't get enough hot water.
Or, maybe if I drive a vehicle that has double the MPG of a typical car, I might be able to sponge the damage to the earth done by my neighbor that drives a 5 MPG luxury sports car.
Maybe I can help extend the life of this planet, habit by habit; act by act, and example after another. Isn't our planet a ticking time bomb?

I think having a ton of kids works the same way. Not all humans get a nice place to live. If I gave birth to 8 children now, EIGHT good children that I raised and that (I hope) will live in jolly good big townhouses, which unfortunately will deprive several hard-working and deserving immigrants, homeless, even my own descendants down the line won't have a place to live. Or, I could have made the easy choice to lessen my impact, and had two children, and saved space on this earth for 5 other families places to live in. I want my descendants to enjoy however much time as possible before this thing self-destructs. There is an expiration date on it right?

Like NightShade said, the way continents live right now, it'd take more than x planets to sustain, and etc. That's the point it makes...it's selfish. And it's foolish. We're running out of space. Food. Everything. Air. "The world could use one less man." What's the cost of a planet? 12 kids? But we can't trade lives for another planet, the universe doesn't care.

On a personal note...being 1st generation American-born-Chinese (ABC), most of my parents and uncles and aunts have one child because of China's one-child policy. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/9933468/336-million-abortions-under-Chinas-one-child-policy.html

As a child this logic drilled into my head when I was younger. My parents told me overpopulation was srs bsns. You can bet my native family's been affected by it. Like you, I thought it was "WRONG, it's very wrong...that's so horrible." Even though my parents weren't bound to these laws, I am an only child. But hey, it works. And the 'commie leaders might have shed tons of carbon footprint, maybe bought some more time for the planet. For me, it doesn't represent a right or wrong, whether I believe in abortion, whether I believe in god or not, but it makes the point that overpopulation is serious, and measures need to be taken. Overpopulation needs to be Lordship'd.[/spoiler]

I was going to say this in the first few posts, but didn't have the time. I can never get enough of TED, or informative videos and YT channels. We can swing the topic back to how the industry would need to change...you mean cool things like:

http://blog.ted.com/2013/02/27/an-electric-vehicle-you-can-carry-in-hand-sanjay-dastoor-at-ted2013/
http://www.thetorquereport.com/tesla_model_s_rear_new.jpg ?

I'm waiting to see a car that can switch between gas and electric. The Tesla is great, I got the opportunity to tour one a few weeks ago. In a nutshell it saves 7x more money compared to a gas car. It's a 4 door that can seat 5, plus 2 baby seats in the back. Goes 0-60 in 4.2 or 4.4. But it's limited to about 250 miles, so long distance traveling imo isn't very feasible. Charge-time does its job.

Personally, another one of these little projects in the back of my mind is to start a business that sells sustainable plastic products. Or maybe...I don't know...start a company that creates, manufactures, and sell every-day products that aren't based on petroleum-based based materials :$. I grew up working in my dad's (un)sustainable plastics company. (But only because there weren't any other options!)

Graphite thing made me jizz btw.

Think of all the plastic cups (beer pong anyone?), bags, garbage bags, grocery, plastic forks and knives, etc. The process to make most these things, in a nutshell, the definition of un-sustainability. Yeah, I'd have made millions farming off the green revolution, which is something business partners laugh about all the time...because the thing is there has yet to be a practical way to manufacture these "green" products. That's why sticking tape on graphite is so important, why it won a Nobel Prize. Until the engineers invent a way, until the mechanics invent the machine, until the countries allow them to sell (overseas trade laws, business laws, intellectual property and etc.), each is a battle in itself.

There's also the politics of the plastics business. If you haven't noticed recently, your local grocery store has probably banned single-use bags and/or has made you pay a few coins for a paper bag or re-useable bag. Politics won't stop people from littering the planet with these, which science says takes about 1000 years to degrade from earth. People need to be educated about sustainability, biodegradable material, and so on. Like I said, that's only the start of the battle.

Good news is, I'm starting to see some growth overall. In the natural field (cattle pooping into desert), AND technology, that'll help us reduce our carbon footprint, save the planet. Another example is harnessing the planet's natural energy resources (wind, solar), and how it can we get it to people's houses...cause they cost a lot, etc. etc.

[Ts Stormrage]

Earth day today :)