For anyone downvoting: People should be incentivized to avoid having kids. It's without question the absolute best thing a random American can do to combat climate change.
Do you feel slighted that your health insurance covers some for cancer treatment or broken legs without providing the others with some "equivalent benefit"?
Health insurance is a gamble. Everyone on my policy goes into it making the same gamble. Some come out ahead, some don’t. That’s what gambling is.
Your taxes pay for a lot of things that you don't necessarily benefit from directly at a precise point in time, but which you or your family will quite possibly will at some point in your life, and unquestionably benefit the society you live in - roads, bridges, libraries, schools, medical care...
Even if you don't want to have kids, you wouldn't even be here if your parent didn't!
Also, I'd argue society would benefit if everyone had fewer children. We'd all be much happier and better off if the world population was half what it was today, I'd wager. We should strive to stabilize the population, not grow it endlessly.
Also, not enough children can be problematic - just look at Japan, which has an aging population and not enough people to work.
Ideally we would have done this when the word was at about 2B, but it's still better to start at 8B than 14B.
And my point about the US is the same[0]. Rather than aiming to keep the population size stable, I'd think goals should be around the size of the working age population, and around a level of growth that's required for the US economy to grow.
I do take your point about the number of people on the planet, but I don't think it's really an issue outside of developing nations.
[0] https://eig.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Heartland-Visas-R...
Basing an economy on an ever-growing population is foolish. We should plan better than that.
I could be so lucky!
I would agree with you if more people having kids was a benefit to society. If anything, because of climate change, we should be incentivizing people to not have kids.
Heh, so, what I meant to say here was more like:
"Even if you don't have kids, you wouldn't even be here if your parents didn't!"
Climate change doesn't matter if there are no people left.
Source?
The combination of our global population and our resource consumptions per capita have devastated ecologies the world over and led to the deaths of innumerable species and biospheres.
You basically have the choice, then - massively reduce the resources consumed per-capita such that having billions of people doesn't negatively impact the planet or displace the last remnants of nature unsullied by human encroachment, or reduce the population so that the people you do have can consume resources without causing a mass extinction event.
When population reduction is as simple as "stop having kids" that is by far the least harmful mechanism to currently living humans to mitigate the ongoing disaster we are causing the planet. Trying to tell the current first world or developing countries to stop building roads, driving cars, building houses, using convenience products like plastics, stop building technologies that require scarce rare earth minerals that require extraction, stop using electric power in its myriad forms, etc is way more disruptive and harmful to those living today.