Comment by matt4077
8 years ago
Every single country that has become wealthy has seen a drop in reproduction rates to rates lower than what's necessary to keep population numbers steady–except the US because somehow they managed to be become more religious with time.
Meaning you can make excellent progress towards your goal without committing injustices on an industrial scale. Instead, you get to work on empowering women and bringing education, economic opportunity, and health care to everyone.
Yeah!
Education, social justice, economic opportunity and universal health care are all wonderful things but this is a problem we need to solve -now-. We have something like 100 years by conservative estimates before runaway effects like methane clathrate melt and ocean acidification make warming inevitable and irreversible. Even now, in the "wealthy" USA, abandoning coal power is being described as unrealistic, let alone implementing the sweeping social changes you've mentioned in places like Africa, Central America and China.
"Injustices on an industrial scale"? When billions of people are displaced from the rising coasts, when entire nations disappear into the ocean, when our over-homogenized agriculture fails to sudden environmental shifts leading to widespread famine, we'll wish we had just gotten vasectomies instead.
USA's exceptionalism in fertility is due to immigration not religion.
The only reason the US reproduction rate isn’t lower is due to massive immigration. If you take out the cohort of people who’ve moved here in the past generation, the rate looks much more like that of European nations.