Where does the meme come from about cutting the world population in half for environmental reasons? One sees it around, with various fractions but always substantial and always poorly argued; the latest in the mouth of Bruce Sterling, though to his credit he reports it more as a fear that someone else will do it rather than advocating it himself.
What's with that?
- It's morally terrible, a massacre of unprecedented proportions. For a sense of scale, the entire World War II killed some 3% of world population; so did the Spanish Flu of 1918. Half the population would be like World War II with all its terrors repeated over and over and over for a whole century. It's breathtaking that anyone can contemplate death on such scale and say anything positive at all about the prospect, let alone advocating it.
- Even if it were morally acceptable, or if someone were crazy enough to do it anyway and we couldn't stop them, it would be ineffective. Half of today's population corresponds to sometime around 1970, a time not particularly known for environmental sustainability. In addition, any of the methods suggested or hinted at would pretty much destroy modern civilisation — ironically one of the few known effective ways of actually reducing and reversing population growth — as well as themselves being generally quite environmentally harmful. In the aftermath, a "Mad Max" world would not be a green world.
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