An often overlooked aspect of reducing one’s environmental footprint is having no children or having fewer children. It’s the only ethical form of population reduction for obvious reasons, and less people means that humanity’s collective environmental impact is reduced.

To my knowledge, China is the only country to have national legislation limiting the number of children people can have through its one-child policy, which has recently been changed to allow two children per family to reduce the risk of having a population where the elderly massively outnumber young people. Of course, this policy needs to be combined with sex education, easy access to contraception, etc in order to actually work.

What would your opinion be on other countries, especially other developed countries, adopting policies like this? Do you think the environmental benefits outweigh the issues caused?

  • @AgreeableLandscapeOP
    4•3 years ago

    Reproductive legislation probably wouldn’t do too terribly much on any sort of reasonable timeframe given how much pollution is produced by multinational corporations versus individuals and families.

    If we’re going to do any sort of sweeping and binding legislation let it be against corporations rather than people.

    Good point.

    • Redstone
      -1•3 years ago

      But dont those corporations pollute to make things for the people? So less people, less things, less pollution by corporations.

        • Redstone
          -2•3 years ago

          That’s very a simplistic view. There is no dr Evil corp that exist just to pollute the world. The real problem is that we (people) don’t give a #$#%$# about the environment when we buy stuff. So why would a company sell stuff green but more expensive than the competition? That’s a formula to go broke, as long as the consumers doesn’t care. And that where I think governments have a role. The should make rules and regulations that make the green chose the more profitable one. But a single government can’t make that policy because than production just leaves your country. Not because company’s are evil, but because if they don’t and the competitions does they go broke. That’s why we have (the beginning) of international agreements like the Paris Agreement. That in my opinion don’t go way far enough.

            • Redstone
              -1•3 years ago

              If nobody buys their oil they will stop . So back to the original topic less people = less polution.

            • @nutomicA
              7•3 years ago

              The problem is that big companies use legal bribery (called lobbying) to prevent governments from doing anything like that.

              • Redstone
                0•3 years ago

                The problem is the politicians people vote for. If you want to change stuff get the right people in the right spot. In the USA more than 74 milion people voted for a guy whu doesn’t give an f about the environment, and quit the paris agreement. Thats the real probleem.