IMHO a voluntary reduction in human population by a few billion through reduced birth is a perfectly viable, sustainable long-term strategy; all the drawbacks and criticisms appear when someone wants to encourage that with various means (i.e. not fully voluntarily) or when it's posed as some solution to things which need a faster reduction than possible this way, e.g. climate change won't be prevented even if we went totally zero-birth for a decade but the current population kept the current emission rates.
It doesn't even have to be voluntarily in the sense of "making a decision to". More like voluntary in the sense of "have no specific need to".
In the most developed countries, children are now more of a burden than a gain, which is why women are having fewer of them every generation.
Not only because they're expensive, but because they are often born unhealthy (physically, mentally, or both) and are a large, often unrecoverable blow to most careers.
Since we don't need children to work on the farm or to let us move in with them when we're old (er, less than previous generations, anyway), it becomes purely a "nice-to-have" decision.
And then if somebody does voluntarily have children, they don't have much of a leg to stand on when lecturing others about their impact on climate change.
I get your point and am on neither side of the fence here, since I do not think, we should rely on individual action at all.
I just want to add to the conversation, that somehow your reasoning strikes me as a bit selfish. It is of course true, what you are writing. Still reading it, makes me sad. I am missing some higher meaning. Who cares about a career in the end? A career in our system is just a story of someone, who exceeded at providing value. But for whom, if you do not have kids?
I am missing a bit of Kant in there. A little bit of "You get one (life), you give one back." We (including you) just cannot all do it like that, if we do not want to end our lives rather uncomfortably. So again something about ultimate maximes and what they should be.
What's selfish about not having children? To whom or to what do I owe bringing a child into the world?
It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
You have misunderstood: I'm not suggesting childfree people are better than people who have children.
I'm suggesting childfree people have a negligible impact on climate change compared to people who have children.
You can bring "moral high ground" into it wherever it seems applicable, but I have not done that. I've said only that it's hypocritical to criticize a person for their climate impact while simultaneously making a thousand or a million times more of a climate impact.
> What's selfish about not having children? To whom or to what do I owe bringing a child into the world?
Since life can just be given to the next generation and you have already gotten yours, it would be logical to return the favor to the next person and give a new life.
I did not say, that it actually is selfish. Maybe it is not. It just came off a bit like that to me, as I read your comments.
> It's more likely the opposite: a lot of people would agree that their parents' decision to have children, particularly at a time when they couldn't afford them or lacked the mental strength to care for them and raise them in psychological safety, was selfish.
Sure. Although most people would surely still choose to live.
I don't owe having children to your children, or to you.
You can have children if you want, but I'm not requiring that of you.
If your children take care of me late in life, it's because they're exchanging their work for money. And the reason they're obligated to exchange their work for money is because that's the economic system into which their parents decided to bring them.
It is absolutely incredible that your sensible comment gets down voted, but it says a lot about the diseased state of mind of some of the people commenting and voting here.
The "career" is a great lie and joke. Imagine choosing to exterminate your heritage in order to please short term goals of politicians or company owners who at best see the career worker as a cost center on a spread sheet.
Long term the population is flatlining and dropping and the price of renewable energy with it.
But even if it doesn't and even if we're forced to make hard choices, the hard choice won't be "should I skip my vacation flight?", it'll be "should I skip raising a CO2 machine?".