Population is growing. There are limited resources. One day someone's going to dam up someone else's water and wars will be fought.
I'm optimistic that technology AND population control can save us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Crimean_Canal#2014_Crime...
A video with some narrative around it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aqq8clIceys
One day? Not a major conflict, but still... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_over_Water_(Jordan_river)
I remember taking a university lecture on "water history" and it was... surprisingly fascinating and enlightening.
Some of the earliest conflicts have been over water for farming. The concept of hydraulic despotism describes how the need to control and coordinate water resources across large populations and lands gave impetus for the first civilisations and complex governments, like ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, India, Peru, and others. They developed all kinds of technologies, measurement systems, and bureaucracies to deal with water.
They say that history doesn't repeat but it rhymes. There will certainly be more conflicts over water in the future. We have the civilisational 'technology' of national governments to manage intra-national resources, and we're seeing the active invention of new civilisational 'technologies' of international blocs and more to manage global resources.
The population of China is projected to drop by hundreds of millions over the course of this century, for instance.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/07/asia/china-population-decline...
In poor 1980 China, population was exploding with draconian policies in place.
In better off 2020 China, population is set to decline, the still draconian government policy doesn't really matter.
You make 2 claims: population of the poor in the 1980s was exploding despite the one child policy, and the draconian government policy doesn't really matter in 2020.
It looks like your first claim isn't born out by the data [1]; it's hard to find "poor" population growth vs. non-poor, but rural vs. urban doesn't seem like an unrelated approximation. You can see that urban population was growing at a far faster rate than rural, which is pretty close to flat. Certainly it's likely that a lot of this is the rapid urbanization of China, but either way it doesn't seem like the population of the poor was exploding in the 1980s.
Re: the one child policy not mattering, birth rates were already on the decline before the one-child policy was adopted, and that's likely due to China's family planning initiative in the 70s [2]. And if you look at the Reuters graph, it really does look like that's the defining effect here (birth rates mostly leveled off after the initial steep decline, even after the one child policy was adopted). This isn't 2020-specific, but I think the broader context is more relevant.
(I wasn't aware China had this family planning initiative until just now so, I was wrong above).
So I still think the dynamic that most controls birth rates are women's access to birth control and status of their reproductive rights.
[1]: http://blogs.reuters.com/data-dive/2013/11/18/chinas-one-chi...
Compare the PPP column at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_GDP_of_China (so that's adjusting for inflation and local production and so on...).
So the "poor" group is all of China in the 1980s.
I'm talking about the two child policy not mattering now, because few people are having more than 1 or 2 children. The policy likely mattered more when birth rates were higher (birth rates declined prior to 1980, but then leveled off, in the face of policy meant to discourage births):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#/media/F...
You're doing a post hoc ergo propter hoc thing here. China's GDP increased dramaticaly, China's birth rates decreased dramatically afterwards, therefore birth rates decreased because GDP increased. In order for your claim to stand you at least have to narrow it significantly to "birth rates in China went through the floor once poverty decreased past a certain point", otherwise you have to explain why birth rates didn't subsequently fluctuate inversely with GDP. Further, you also would have to explain why male births so dramatically outnumber female births.
But I think more concretely, the timeline doesn't match. China didn't get above $1000 PPP until ~1990, and at that rate their birth rates should still have been very high [1]. However they'd been under 3 for 10 years at that point [2].
It's much simpler to say that China told people how to not have kids in 1970, the one/two child policies held the birth rate down subsequently, and couples took drastic measures to predominately have male children while also staying under the limit in order to satisfy a sexist culture. That's a more direct, parsimonious, and complete explanation, whereas the GDP argument has to also show why the reproductive education campaign and one/two child policies did effectively nothing, why birth rates fell dramatically before the Chinese people saw significant economic development, and why couples worked very hard to primarily have male children--work that weirdly also had no influence on the birth rate.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_China#Table_of...
It's clear enough that there were other more important factors in earlier periods.
Where these two perspectives really diverge is on the issue of enforcement. If we say women have a right to control their bodies, then the enforcement comes down against entities who deny or limit those rights. If we say women cannot have more than N children, then enforcement comes down against women (and oftentimes their families too, but not always), often in horrific and traumatizing ways. Or concretely, if India decides to implement population control via an education campaign and they are in danger of not meeting their goals, what do they do? Do they ramp up education efforts? Do they look at different women's rights policies? Do they crack down on employers and health care providers who are less than helpful when it comes to access to birth control? Or do they embark on a gruesome campaign of forced sterilization and abortion?
So while I agree you're technically right, I think it's unrealistic to rely on population control to combat global warming, and doubly unrealistic to rely on reproductive education (etc.) to indirectly combat it. I think the incentives and enforcement are too far removed from the problem at hand, and that's saying nothing of the cultural challenges.