Most Places in the World are Unsuitable for Living

Most Places in the World are Unsuitable for Living

We recently wrote an article about how most places in the world have no economic opportunities. Besides the problem of worldwide poverty, most places in the world are just plain unsuitable for living. Being in California, I am in one of the areas of the world that has decent weather year-round. However, many areas around the United States are completely unlivable. There are states like Nevada and Arizona that can reach temperatures over 110 degrees °F, meaning people can barely go outside for a few minutes. Air conditioning is required for living. On the flipside, there are colder northern states, that can get so much snow that it must be shoveled away just for people to be able to leave their homes. People could freeze to death overnight if their heating stopped working. Many island nations have nice tropical weather, but these areas have problems like typhoons and extreme flooding that lead to extreme destruction on a yearly basis.

Forget about the far reaches of Mars or other planets, even the planet that we’re most adapted to barely has suitable living conditions most of the time. We can hardly exist in most areas without using heavy amounts of electricity to cool or to warm ourselves. There is no reason to have children in such a world where it is a constant struggle against temperature, where we have to pay hundreds a month just to regulate our body heat, let alone paying for food or other necessities.

It’s not just that some areas of the world are unlivable now, it’s that they are actively getting worse due to global warming. Climate scientist Dr. Deborah Brosnan stated that 2/3 of the world was under an effective death sentence due to climate change. Large swaths of the world do not have access do air conditioning, but this is just one of the many problems. They won’t just die from the heat, they’ll also die from dehydration, starvation, and resource wars.

An analysis by the World Economic Forum showed that 14 million people may die by 2050 due to global warming. This seems like a low estimate, with a report from the University of Exeter stating that 2 billion could die with 2 °C of warming by 2050.

Breakdown of some critical ecosystem services and Earth systems.

Major extinction events in multiple geographies.

Ocean circulation severely impacted.

Severe socio-political fragmentation in many regions, low lying regions lost.

Heat and water stress drive involuntary mass migration of billions.

Catastrophic mortality events from disease, malnutrition, thirst and conflict.

There will not be deaths only from the heating, but from the mass migration and wars that will follow. We have seen how the migration of only a few million people to Europe has led to nationalists pushing racism and xenophobia as a supposed solution. The migration of hundreds of millions of people is all but guaranteed to end in all-out war between nations.

It makes no sense to bring children into a world which is mostly inhospitable, and one that is becomingly increasingly more so with time.

How often have you heard some patriarchist say something like “Not having children is selfish?”

It’s about one of the most delusional things you can ever hear, because it’s the desire to have children that is the most selfish. There are 8 billion people in the world, many of them engaged in destructive habits like eating meat and consuming far beyond what is sustainable. So hundreds of millions of children around the world live with food insecurity and don’t have adequate housing, yet people want to add more?

I’ve said it in many articles and will say it in this one again. Not having children is one of the largest ways that we can impact things for the better, and it is one of the simplest. It does not require any sacrifice. It gives more freedom for both us and the world. It is just plain wrong to bring children into a world where they will have to constantly work just so they can have the funds to maintain a living temperature. It is wrong to bring children into a world where 2 billion or more could die from the effects of man-made climate change.

You can eat vegan, you can use public transport, you can recycle more. These are great changes that we support. But all in all, we have to break free from the male-created trap of reproduction. No giving birth. ♀