This is not true. A lot of places are quickly running out of fresh water.
Which is still a result of capitalism and corporate greed.
Yeah in many cases, but that’s not the case for a lot of the world. The Middle East and North Africa especially, as well as remote mountainous areas like tibet that rely on glacier melt as their only sources.
As someone who conserves water usage whenever possible, and is a long ways off from success, that’s simply not true.
Very few societies actually use water responsibly by design. Agriculture and industry are water-subsidized, removing incentives. Daily practices are wasteful, appliances are wasteful, plumbing and infrastructure is wasteful, policies are wasteful, the culture is disrespectful.
There is artificial scarcity but there is also real scarcity. We do use more renewable resources per year than the earth renews and as such as we behave now we are overpopulated. Personally I like modern things and even though I reduce, reuse, recycle maximally I don’t live like the amish or on a commune or such. If we did we would not be able to have our current population anyway as most of it is in cities. If we want to keep the cities then the population needs to be lower to not use more than the earth can handle. Even if people in cities lived super eco lives with what is achievable currently I doubt we could have over a billion. Keep in mind that even if we use less than the earth can renew in a year there are a variety of things we use that don’t renew and that gets even more complicated.
You can’t have this discussion when just talking about population alone. You must understand the situation in terms of population x consumption. I.e How many people at what living standard. If we had fewer people, they could lead richer lives. Conversely, having more people means fewer available resources per capita. Don’t go too far down this rabbithole until you get the bigger picture.
Then frame this discussion against a planetary boundaries framework. We live on a finite planet that has limits. Breech those limits and suffer terrible consequences.
8 billion ridiculously unequal humans such as we are have grossly exceeded several planetary boundaries. Any combination of population reduction and consumption reduction that gets you back under the planetary boundaries is the key to avoiding human extinction.
A billionaire looks at this math and says I can have more if I push more middle class into poverty.
An ethno-fascist says my people can have more if we kill those people over there.
The communist says if we eliminated billionaires we could raise the consumption of the lowest of us to escape poverty and bring overall consumption down.
My preferred option is degrowth. Fewer people by lower birthrates and lower overall consumption by focusing on the wealthy who have room to spare. It doesn’t have to be crazy radical. Outlaw private jets. Eat less meat and return some land to it’s most ecological sound production. Return some to wilderness. Make passive house and electric heat pumps part of the building code and end fossil fuels. Build urban, regional and national electric train transit and let EVs be for last low density last leg rural. Encourage telecommuting and work from home. Outlaw planned obsolescence and mandate repairability. End casual overproduction of pollutants like PFAS and ensure its use is limited to high value use only until substitutes can be implemented.
Eventually, hopefully earth can stabilize around 1 billion, healthy, happy people around the world who have their material and energy needs met, while earths planetary boundaries are respected. We could double the population to 2B. But we would have to halve our consumption. Few people want to live like monks, so I personally lean towards fewer people and higher resources per capita. A comfortable, modest lifestyle without extremes of rich and poor.
The good news is the worlds falling birthrates are a naturally occuring phenomena. We’ve outgrown our planet, and the scarcity of energy and wealth is causing people to rethink having children. Let’s accelerate this process and we have a chance to dodge some of the worst outcomes of our profligacy.
I’ll be honest, there is a reckoning coming because we’ve so badly overshot earths planetary boundaries already. Climate change is just one facet of the predicament. The consequences already baked in are severe. Like our friends over in /r/collapse are aware, a collapse is coming. How well we respond to this collapse will determine what the future of humanity is. Degrowth is a painful, managed descent back to sustainable levels. Collapse is the unmanaged, chaotic descent back to sustainable levels. The only real choice left to us is this dichotomy. Chosing any flavour of techno-optimism “green growth” b.s. is really just choosing collapse with extra steps. For degrowth’s benefits to really shine, it has to be intense enough to get ahead of the collapse curve.
Here is a thought experiment. If you were the benevolent supreme dictator of Earth, (impossible, I know), and you wanted to optimize for a return to sustainability how would you go about it?
For me, I would command that we plan for a rapid reduction of population. Radical degrowth in one generation aiming for a stable 1 billion diverse human beings. The current generations would be tasked with building the resilient sustainable world of the smaller future. It’s a lot easier now, because you don’t need to convert all legacy infrastructure and future growth to a sustainable one. You only need to build a resilient core that accomodates 1/8th of your former population. Take a city of your choice, build a resilient, efficient, futureproof passivehouse, electric, heatpump enabled downtown core. As the population declines, and suburban legacy homes and infrastructure become abandoned, instead of mining for new resources to feed the core, you can strip your suburban periphery for the copper, aluminum, brick and wood. Suburbs, in time will be stripped back to farmers fields and wilderness. A major occupation of the smaller 1/8th will be a permaculture farmer living in a passivehouse. Urban cores will contain the remaining scientific, technological and industrial capacity of humanity. It will be focused on maximizing the circular economy where waste streams are incorporated into product development.
No progroms, death camps or race wars required. Managed degrowth back to something that can last. The big hurdle of this is letting go of the old and infirm as a rapidly aging civilization can’t be burdened with taking care of so many elderly with so few youth. Legalize compasionate medically assisted end of life. Promote graceful exits and end the suffering of vegetative old who would already be dead if not for enourmous intervention to keep the meat going long past the mind’s expiry date.
This concludes my TedX talk. Thanks for listening.
Efficiency of living is not static, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were possible to sustainably support 10B people with a relatively high standard of living.
I heard the following metric recently:
But in China, in 2013, China had terrible particulate air pollution. It was known around the world as the airpocalypse (ph) on a - a 700 on a scale of air pollution from zero to 500, the U.S. embassy reported. And, you know, over the decade after 2013, the size of the Chinese population grew by 50 million people. And so if more people were always worse for the environment, you might think that particle air pollution in China would have gotten worse. But, in fact, particle air pollution in China fell by half, even while the population grew.
Efficiency of living is only starting to come into the public consciousness, and we’re barely rewarding the exploration of that space. I think we’ll find there are a ton of improvements to be had.
That said, it’s a “after we survive the crisis” outlook. It seems hardship from climate change is already inevitable, especially in this upcoming century.
Efficiency of living is indeed critical to a solution, but I think you are operating under some misunderstandings if you want 10B at a high average standard of living.
We’re at 8B and have already grossly exceeded our planetary boundaries. Non-ecologists don’t tend to understand what this means; we’ve already overshot earth’s carrying capacity and we’re degrading it rapidly so each year the total levels that could be considered sustainable are shrinking. To illustrate, the equivalent of sustainable is having a pile of money and being able to live off the interest forever. Overshooting your carrying capacity is the ecological equivalent of withdrawing all the interest and some of the principle to live large. The pool of interest you have to live on is shrinking and you not only have to curtail your spending to live on interest only, it’s a smaller interest than what used to be possible. As you ramp down your life style gradually, you are spending less principle each period of time, but your pool of interest is also shrinking. The solution is to rapidly reduce spending to below your income, use the saving to build back your principle, then decide how big a family you can support on that income.
If you’ll pardon the mixed metaphore, You are saying that that we can bridge the gap in overspending by adding 2 billion people and giving everyone a high living standard by switching insurance providers on your Maserati.
You must be an economist. ;) It’s pure madness and folly.
Climate change alone is already at 1.5°C and we are on a pathway to 4-8°C. All our renewables are nice, but we only added it to the energy mix, we didn’t displace fossil fuels. 2C is baked in already as there is a 20 year lag time between leveling of global average temperatures and CO2 concentrations.
It’s essential to understand what 2°C does to agricultural output and biodiversity. Fish stocks are collapsing as are the food chains they depend on. Agriculture has to suffer more frequent and more intense droughts and floods. Productivity will suffer immensely.
It gets worse. The reason for the Paris accord at 1.5°C was because the scientists models said at 2°C the risks of tipping points that can dwarf human emissions push the earths climate into a positive feedback loop. Stopping fossil fuels at 2C doesn’t help because melting permafrost, sub-oceanic clathrates and changes in albedo from reduced snow cover and melting ice caps. Before 1.5, if we turned off emissions, there was a reasonable chance of suffering some warming, but it would stop and stabilize at a new level. Its too late for that now.
We’re blowing past 2C no matter what now. Oceans and agriculture are going to be devastated. 8°C is not off the table. What do you propose feeding 10B high consumption people? If the answer isn’t eachother you do not understand the scale of the problem.
The problem is population x living standard. The median standard of living for Americans would break the planet if applied to the world. China’s current standard may have issues with longevity.
You’re already running into problems with nations choosing fascism over reduced family size and standard of living.
Families are choosing lower birthrates the world over. It’s dropping fast, just not fast enough for my taste.
You make a great point about convincing people to accept a lower standard of living. A benevolent government would ask for this the same way as a billionaire would squeeze out the middle class so they didn’t have to change their lifestyle. One would have basic security built in, the other would maximize precarity to extort more work out of their disposable slaves. Our hoarding tendencies are ingrained because we KNOW how precarity is abused.
It’s a real problem. I’m not convinced humanity has it in them to survive.
Very nicely put.
This person over here casually gonna wipe 7 billion people of the planet in one generation. K.
Not doing this is just trading not-being-borns for deaths of poverty, despair and conflict as we fight over remaining resources.
Bad take. Overpopulation will never not be an issue.
No, this is objectively wrong.
First of all, our current level of population is already overpopulated. We would do immense damage to the earth at our numbers regardless of how our society functioned. 7 billion indigenous people would also be making an enormous impact on the planet.
Second of all, we could never support 7 billion indigenous people. The literal only reason we can support our current population levels is because of industrial farming and our ability to make nitrogen enriched fertilizer.
Thirdly, there is nothing about capitalism that necessitates those thing, and nothing about communism or dictatorship or any other form of resource distribution that inherently avoids them.
Rule 3
I could be mistaken but based on recent demographic trends I don’t think people are talking about overpopulation much these days. Seems to be a trend that industrialized countries population goes down. China is looking at falling below replacement rate. Of course there’s the argument that we already have too many people, but if everyone starts going down then hey problem solved
In ecology, animal populations grow in a distinct S-shaped pattern up to the environment’s carrying capacity. Globally, the human population has been following a similar curve, and we’re already past the inflection point, where population growth rates have begun to fall over time. The global population of humans is projected to reach steady state sometimes between 2060-2100. This could change though, what with humaty’s proclivity for making things awful
It’s already progressed beyond that, global birth rates are already hitting and falling below replacement rate
There aren’t much countries where the population is actually growing, and where there is still growth, it won’t be for much longer. Governments are increasingly panicking over depopulation. Babies are future workers and customers after all. They tried immigration, but that runs into popular backlash.
That doesn’t mean we’re not overpopulated though.
It does not. I don’t have a genuine opinion on whether or not we are overpopulated. It doesn’t seem to matter since the trend is already very much in the opposite direction and there’s nothing we can do even if we decide we are.
We are though, by any objective measure of our planet’s health and sustainability.
The only measure that you could look at that would suggest we weren’t overpopulated is the billionaire musk view of ‘but more indentured servants mean that I get richer’. But theres literal no way to look at our planet’s health or systems and our impact on them that wouldn’t lead you to think that 7B is sustainable.
The negative impacts of our systems of consumption and exploitation are different the number of humans that are on the earth, though. We could easily sustain everyone on earth with much less of an environmental impact with current technology and a more just economic system
Do you have a source for that?
Literally just the amount of fertilizer that we need to produce to grow crops at our scale causes downstream environmental harms. I fail to see how you could sustain 7B people at anywhere close to a comfortable modern lifestyle with current technology.
Hell we’re projected to run out of copper before we can hit Net Zero. And more people means that we need more resources which means that we need more of everything.
A more just economic system doesn’t even necessarily reduce emissions. Yeah it’s wasteful when a billionaire takes a private jet, but it’s also incredibly wasteful when a million people install air conditioning. All else being equal, the latter is still a better use of money, but from the planet’s perspective it’s the same.
any objective measure of our planet’s health and sustainability.
How much of that is due to capitalism being an inefficient economic distribution system, though? (I’m not saying it isn’t, I just haven’t done enough research on that to have an opinion)
We’re already over populated. We’re no longer about to drive off a cliff due to over population but we’re still continuously damaging the planet with the number of humans we have.
Right, but we could have the same number of people while being ecologically sustainable. The problem seems like more one of distribution and technology, not total number of people. And besides, what’s the alternative? So I think it’s ok to say it’s a good thing the population outlook is downward while recognizing we’ve still got problems
Right, but we could have the same number of people while being ecologically sustainable.
What are you basing that on?
We can live more sustainably than we do, but that doesn’t mean we can support this level of population sustainably on the earth’s systems.
And besides, what’s the alternative? So I think it’s ok to say it’s a good thing the population outlook is downward while recognizing we’ve still got problems
The alternative is to frankly acknowledge that the earth can’t sustain our current population levels, so policymakers and voters should be focused on increasing economic output with fewer people, and couples / families should try to not be maximalist when it comes to number of children.
Right now, most governments and billionaires don’t care and are encouraging population growth because more people means more workers to exploit which means they get richer before they die.
I have no proof and no source whatsoever BUT! Nature surely has a way to combat overpopulation. Animals stop reproducing when their environment stops supporting life properly. Humans aren’t much different. Too much stress, either from being sourrounded by too many people, or from our environment not meeting our demands, make us not want to have children. We also don’t NEED children anymore, since society will take care of us in place of children. With a constant pressure from society to always work more, harder and better, it’s no wonder we don’t want children. Our environment doesn’t support us anymore, we lost reason to procreate, and so nature corrects by not making us do so.
Having an anti-intellectualism toddler dictator also tends to affect population on a country level
It’s not just the US. It’s pretty much every country with a high standard of living.
I truly believe that in the not too distant future we’re going to be “discussing” (the MSM telling us) how there are “too many people” because there isn’t enough work for them so they can feed themselves.
I’m very pessimistic generally, but I do not see the ownership class simply letting people “take” any of the profit they make from owning AI systems, and in the future advanced robotics utilizing the AI systems. Most of the work will be done by robots, but that doesn’t in any way mean “we” will have better lives because of it.
I already came to the conclusion, long ago, that once enough workers are replaced with automation, and the unemployment rate starts to reach the point where the engine fuelling capitalism — workers earning money to pay for goods and services — shuts down, fascism would take root in most countries and large swathes of humanity would be mass murdered to cull the population down to a more sustainable level.
There are not enough resources, at our current or foreseeable level of technology, to support even 3 billion people living a developed world lifestyle and rate of consumption. People are too greedy, selfish, and ignorant to accept they must consume less, or that capitalism is incompatible with sustainability, so they’ll just blame “others” for their problems, the same way they complain about traffic when THEY ARE traffic. Also, climate change and imminent ecological collapse may mean that far less than a billion people can be supported by the end of the century anyway.
I’m real fun at parties.
I mean, youre wrong about us not having enough resources to go around. But, otherwise, the cynic in me says youre spot on with the fascism…I think you’re also wrong on why fascism is taking hold around the world. But, doesn’t matter. The result is the same.
youre wrong about us not having enough resources to go around
Elaborate without suggesting everyone goes vegan or other dramatic societal changes that voters continually reject…
I don’t think automation is the reason for the current fascist expansion; that’s just from capitalism and their political class puppets destroying financial and housing security across the west… Though, I do suspect western oligarchs are promoting fascism because they know climate change and resource wars are going to cause major economic upheaval within the next couple of decades, regardless of automation.
I’m real fun at parties.
A party attended by some Fediverse-literate doomers / realists? Sign me up!
Alternatively, there will be a socialist revolution and the people will take the AIs from the ownership class to work for all of us, so we have to work less.
It does not seem like the most likely of possibilities at the moment though, I must admit.
Historical precedent has shown that people generally revolt once they don’t have access to basic necessities, such as food. If you can only get necessities through work, in capitalism, and the majority of people don’t have work, so they don’t have food, so they revolt and take the food for all of us.
We are in a mass extinction event right now. As a result of overpopulation. If we can not do things sustainably right now; we are overpopulating. Yes, we can extract more resources. But we don’t know how to do it sustainably. We are on borrowed time.
Not really though. Birth rates decline in many countries, and will compound over generations. Look into South Korea right now.
But it all depends on living standard and working hours basically. If these parameters change, so will birth rate.
Sorry to be harsh, but do people seriously think the carrying capacity of the earth is infinite? Overpopulation is a real issue.
If you can totally remake the world’s economic systems as desired, then yeah, you can solve a lot of problems that way.
But be sure to build in some limit on population growth, or it will eventually become a problem again no matter how effective your new world order is at relieving the short-term pressure.
News flash: Global birthrates are dropping below replacement rate already
Follow the lead of the movie “the beautiful green”. Embrace hippie.
<Snickers in North Korean.>
Earth can feed over 10 billion people easily with a ton extra left. We just overproduce and waste too much for profit. And if you’re speaking of land, we have plenty of that, too.
Having billions of thinking minds is only ever going to be an asset. If we solve the zero point energy problem; then infinite population will be viable but the greed of the billionaires never will be.
Infinite population is not possible with finite resources. Unless you are talking about spreading out into the stars, in which case, I think you have way too much optimize for humans. We have shown repeatedly that all we want to do is destroy stuff.
