Kamala Goes There

There's been a minor flurry over Vice President Harris's latest blurt:

The shocking gaffe happened as the 58-year-old vice president delivered remarks at Coppin State University in Baltimore, Md., on the need to build a “clean energy economy.”

“When we invest in clean energy and electric vehicles and reduce population, more of our children can breathe clean air and drink clean water,” Harris said, eliciting applause from the audience.

While according to the link, the White House said she meant to say "pollution" instead of "population", it's hard not to think this was more than a Freudian slip, and she could arguably have meant what she said. A web search on "climate change population reduction" produces 185,000,000 hits, including many sites at the most respectable NGOs expressing quite radical proposals in ways that make them seem like bromides. Just this past May, an article in Scientific American by Stephanie Feldstein, the population and sustainability director at the Center for Biological Diversity, argues

While many assume population decline would inevitably harm the economy, researchers found that lower fertility rates would not only result in lower emissions by 2055, but a per capita income increase of 10 percent.

Lower fertility rates also typically signal an increase in gender equality. Better-educated women tend to have fewer children, later in life. This slows population growth and helps reduce carbon emissions. And when women are in leadership roles, they’re more likely than men to advance initiatives to fight climate change and protect nature. These outcomes are side effects of policies that are necessary regardless of their impact on population.

. . . Population decline is only a threat to an economy based on growth. Shifting to a model based on degrowth and equity alongside lower fertility rates will help fight climate change and increase wealth and well-being.

But at least for now, world population is still increasing, not declining. The link suggests it's projected to peak at around 10.4 billion in 2086, but this is just a projection, and people like Ms Feldstein are concerned that we're losing biodiversity now. In addition, this review of the traditional "population control" theory suggests it was originally driven by Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb. but

Population control finally met its formal end in 1994 at a ­UN-­sponsored conference in Cairo. In what is now called the “Cairo Consensus,” 162 states rejected the use of population targets as well as the incentives and disincentives used to reach them[.]

Nevertheless,

enthusiasm for the old ideas hasn't died. Economist Jeffrey Sachs, a leader of the campaign to “make poverty history” and combat global warming by implementing a crash program to achieve the UN’s Millennium Development Goals, has cited “population control” as a model, calling it “one of the great success stories of modern times.” Sachs says he favors purely voluntary methods, but he and his allies are playing with a dangerous formula. Declaring a “global crisis” can attract media attention and don­ors.

And the link is talking exclusively about the 20th century Malthusian link between population and world poverty; it has nothing to say about the renewed movement that links not just "population control" but "population decline" with new concepts like "biodiversity" and "equity". The Wikipedia link on Sustainable population summarizes current views from this movement on the optimal world population level:

Climate change, excess nutrient loading (particularly nitrogen and phosphorus), increased ocean acidity, rapid biodiversity loss, and other global trends suggest humanity is causing global ecological degradation and threatening ecosystem services that human societies depend on. Because these environmental impacts are all directly related to human numbers, recent estimates of a sustainable human population tend to put forward much lower numbers, between 2 and 4 billion. Paul R. Ehrlich stated in 2018 that the optimum population is between 1.5 and 2 billion. Geographer Chris Tucker estimates that 3 billion is a sustainable number, provided human societies rapidly deploy less harmful technologies and best management practices. Other estimates of a sustainable global population also come in at considerably less than the current population of 8 billion.

But given the typical climate-change predictions we see now that claim the polar ice caps will melt and Miami will be under water within the next ten years, how much time do we have to fix things? Will electric cars be enough? The link above suggests the 20th century efforts at population control via voluntary sterilization and mass birth control were ineffective, and here we are at eight billion heading for ten. So how do we get back to ten or 20 percent of that before we all drown? It sounds to me as though even the world envisioned by Kurt Vonnegut would be insufficient to solve this problem: the government runs ethical suicide parlors

and urges people to commit suicide to help keep the population of 17 billion stable. . . . The government also suppresses the population's sexual desire with a drug that numbs them from the waist down (but does not render them infertile, as that is seen as unethical and in violation of the religious principles of many).

In fact, the pioneering efforts of the National Socialists at a point-based Final Solution would be laughably inadequate to reduce the world population to just two or three billion before the planet burns up. But this in turn raises the question of just who needs to be culled if we undertake a project at this scale -- after all, it's white people who got us into this mess. Maybe the National Socialists had a point, huh? But we'd need to take their efforts much farther.

Republicans really need to pursue this, particularly because Ms Harris would be incapable of handling any questions about this issue overall in a debate, or even in an apostrophe from someone like Tucker Carlson. Even a blanket assertion that she'd simply meant to say "pollution" instead of "population" would be damaging enough.