What? This has nothing to do with the rich. This is the tragedy of the commons - other fishers are allowed to use dynamite to fish extremely effectively, so the only way for you to make a living wage is to do the same.
Most of the world's plastic pollution coming out of 10 Asian and African rivers for example.
This is why arguments from educated, intelligent and responsible Westerners that they themselves shouldn't have children in order to reduce the impact on the planet are flawed.
If not for their children with the same skills and views, who else will reign in the Asians and Africans who are busy destroying their environments?
The first thing that the world needs is for all countries to reach a stable population level. This means hugely reducing fertility in some developing countries, mostly by making sure contraception is widely available and that women are educated enough to know how to use it.
I mean the best interpretation of your comment is wishing for an alternate world (in which millions of people would never have been alive in the first place). In the middle the comment is assigning blame for that. At worst ...
I get that dozens of millions of people not being alive would solve your problem ... but I do hope you understand that nobody, especially not those few dozen millions, agree. And that does mean that you'll have to come with a different solution.
When you find yourself in a hole the first thing to do is stop digging.
4
That number seems to be at least greater than 3. So 4. Probably it's more like 3.1 or so.
How did you get to the conclusion that the island of the Philippines can't support (from now, and for a VERY long time in the future, even if perhaps not indefinitely) 3 children per woman ?
Britain or France in the 1800s was equally if not more egregious in terms of disdain for the environment, though they didn't have the size or technology to wreak as much impact as modern technologies allow us to do.
Well I've been to a lot of places with plastic pollution problems and I picked up gobs of that shit off the world's beaches. I can tell you that despite their prevalence, plastic bottles, chip bags, straws, flippers, lids, cups, forks, and knives don't spring out of the ground. They don't grow on trees. Most aren't made in local factories. They are manufactured elsewhere, shipped there, and sold to the locals, each hand in that supply chain extracting a little bit of profit, a huge portion of which is sent overseas, stolen from the local economy.
You can blame locals for being trash monkeys if you want--and they absolutely are--but absent outside influx of these one-time plastic use goods, they'd be piling up paper and wood and banana peels since they have since the beginning of time, and nature would be taking care of it using age-old biodegradation.
Plastic is our mess and its global reach is absolutely due to Western greed.
We need to stop making non-biodegradable garbage. Period. You can blame the last hand to touch it, but the whole pipeline should just not exist. Population will take the better part of a century to stabilize--we need to fix our waste problem no matter what population does, and we cannot wait for some mythical world with fewer people.
Educated people will understand the impact of their kids, and also have a better chance at making a contribution to society, and taking care of their families they do have.
It's funny to me because you're bitching about effective govt spending on the internet..a technology developed by the govt.
Id argue government funding has developed more cures for diseases and more technological advances than any other sources of funding in all of history.
NASA put a man on the moon..
"Tragedy of the commons" is a total strawman.
You want to stop this from happening...give these people enough money to go to the grocery store or get trained for a job.
Its extremely simple.
Even if it succeeds, now you have a bunch of unskilled people who don't need to work. What will they do with their time? There's plenty of examples in the US and other countries of how that turns out.
Who's going to give them money? Taxes?
Unskilled people who don't need to work? You missed my whole point about 'education' and 'training' so they can provide value to make money. I'm not giving anyone money. Just lower the ladder for them to climb up that the rich have pulled up behind them.