Unfortunately - reducing our impact in the way many advocate has serious consequences on the poor and impoverished. In fact the best way to lower humanity's impact on the environment is to reduce third world poverty and thus reduce population growth. Many scientists advocate a mixed approach - where we work on improving crops so that they'll grow in warmer climates, improve water processing, and in general improve humanity's ability to handle climate change all the while allowing developing countries to use fossil fuels to improve their standard of living. As technology advances they'll move to other means of energy.
"In fact the best way to lower humanity's impact on the environment is to reduce third world poverty and thus reduce population growth."
False. When you reduce poverty in a third world population, they simply breed more. This has repeatedly been observed. If you want to loosely throw around words such as "fact" and "best", then I submit that the following, although potentially unpleasant to you, is closer to the correct usage: "In fact the best way to lower humanity's impact on the environment is to eliminate third world population."
Gapminder has some good data on this, and it doesn't support your claim. It shows that population growth decreases slightly as income per person increases.
Animated, colored bubbles aside, history supports my claim. Gapminder's data is flawed because it mixes Whites with unwhites. For example, when Whites arrived in South Africa, there were so few blacks that the place was pretty much empty. Whites proceeded to create a first world country, resulting in the best economy in sub-Saharan Africa. This drew a large number of blacks, from other countries, despite apartheid. Segregation was just fine with them because their lives were otherwise much better in SA. This led to a rampant increase in breeding, which continued in post-apartheid SA due to the momentum imparted by foreign aid (which wasn't necessary when Whites were in control). Now, the total population of SA is more than 50M, with Whites accounting for less than 5M.
Increase income per person in the third world as much as you want, but there will be no permanent, negative effect on population growth for as long as the population is mostly unwhite because income has nothing to do with character, culture, IQ, and all of the other factors at play.
