I just gave a talk in hot Dallas in late August 2022. Here are my slides. During my 20 minute remarks I tried to make several points.
Point #1; Billions of people are urbanizing. These individuals seek to raise their incomes and improve their quality of life by urbanizing.
Point #2; As they pursue their own version of the “American Dream”, they will increase their fossil fuel consumption. Poor people do not own new, energy efficient durables. They live in lower quality housing and consume used durables that are cheaper.
Point #3; In the short run, this will increase the greenhouse gas emissions in the developing world.
Point #4; Induced innovation could attenuate the link between GHG emissions and consumption of transport and housing services.
Point #5; Urbanites have fewer children and this will help to defuse the “Population Bomb”.
Point #6; Education and urbanization go hand in hand and such education increases the likelihood that a person is an environmentalist who is willing to pay more to protect the environment and reduce climate risk.
It strikes me as obvious that accelerating economic growth in developing nations, especially Africa, will accelerate the demographic transition. You are the first person I've seen make a similar point, "Urbanites have fewer children and this will help to defuse the “Population Bomb”. Yet ironically most environmentalists are knee-jerk hostile to economic growth. Jason Hickel and others argue for de-growth, which would be catastrophic.
At a minimum I'd like to see empirical estimates of the environmental harms from a specified increase in GDP per capita compared with the environmental benefits of slowing down birth rates. I've never seen anyone bother to do this.
Of course one reason that both you and I think this way is that we both studied with Becker.