Yes, that's the trend; but the problem is we're already overpopulated. I've spoken about this a few times now on Tildes, and it seems there's some understanding that the problem can not be...
Yes, that's the trend; but the problem is we're already overpopulated. I've spoken about this a few times now on Tildes, and it seems there's some understanding that the problem can not be resolved by merely accepting a limit of 7 billion people, or embracing a techno-futuristic perspective where through the magic lens of idealism, suddenly no one pollutes—which will frankly never happen.
Then take a look at this graph courtesy NOAA. The global temperature trend started creeping up in the 1920's, for christ's sake. Back then, the world population was only 1.8 billion.
The only solution is for us to become massively less resource-intensive as a species, and massively depopulate. Probably down to a billion people or less, if we're after true sustainability: phosphorous sustainability, erosional sustainability, native fauna & flora sustainability. You may gasp and think "gosh, what a small number". My reply to you would to be count to a billion. Go on, I'll wait. Assuming you can enunciate four numbers a second, you'll be done sometime later next decade.
I'd point out here that @lukeify wrote "The only solution is for us to become massively less resource-intensive as a species, and massively depopulate." They're not mutually exclusive options. One...
I'd point out here that @lukeify wrote "The only solution is for us to become massively less resource-intensive as a species, andmassively depopulate." They're not mutually exclusive options. One helps the other.
Simplistically: Total Resource Use = Resource Use per Person x Number of People. To reduce our total resource use, we can reduce either our resource use per person or the number of people using those resources. However, if we reduce both those numbers, we can achieve a bigger reduction faster, and maintain it for longer.
It's my estimate, based on what I've read in scientific papers, generally concerning the sensitivity of the Earth's climate and biosphere to human interruption. It's not just about CO2. It's about...
It's my estimate, based on what I've read in scientific papers, generally concerning the sensitivity of the Earth's climate and biosphere to human interruption. It's not just about CO2. It's about the fact humans litter. We take up land and chop down forests (which are contributing to what is commonly called the anthropocene). We accidentally cause forest fires. Global agricultural production is leading to a phosphorus shortage, desertification. Our ownership of dogs and cats has lead to the extinctions, and continuing endangerment of many endemic species. These are things which are tied directly to population, and not just our resource use.
Don't confuse alarmisms with things which are actually alarming. It's a weak argument.
Population-wise? There's not much we can do. We should be donating foreign aid to encourage education which is directly correlated with a lower birth rate. We should be providing free contraception. We should be removing any tax-breaks which make having children more cost effective. Ultimately, we need to lower the birth rate down to what is maximally sustainable economically. Which is probably somewhere around 1-1.5 children per couple.
Again, 1 billion is not a small number. It's actually a very large number, that looks small because we've invented a lovely OOM name for it. It's 1,000,000,000 humans. It's more than you could ever meet in 1000 lifetimes.
Do you remember which scientific papers those were? I'm genuinely interested in learning more about this.
It's my estimate, based on what I've read in scientific papers, generally concerning the sensitivity of the Earth's climate and biosphere to human interruption.
Do you remember which scientific papers those were? I'm genuinely interested in learning more about this.
Well, let's observe for starters that the birth rate in some industrialised countries is already below the natural replacement rate. Look at the fertility rates shown in this Wikipedia article....
Well, let's observe for starters that the birth rate in some industrialised countries is already below the natural replacement rate. Look at the fertility rates shown in this Wikipedia article. For example, my own country of Australia has a fertility rate of about 1.8 births per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. If it wasn't for a combination of good medicine increasing people's life spans, and immigration, our population would be falling. And, last time I checked, there was no deliberate genocide happening here (let's leave the Aboriginal people aside for the purpose of this discussion - they're only about 2.8% of the population anyway, so a genocide on them wouldn't have much impact on our total population).
The best way to reduce birth rates is to increase women's education, and to decrease poverty. Educated women have more control over their own fertility: they're informed about birth control methods, and how to use them. Women living in wealthy countries have less incentive to have large numbers of children: more of their children will survive through infancy, they themselves can choose to work (reducing their desire to have children), and each child is seen as a larger investment so that more children is actually worse than less.
No genocide required - just educate more girls and improve the conditions they live in, and the birth rate will fall quite naturally.
Then there's the more authoritarian method of China's now-defunct One Child Policy. This had the unfortunate side effect of people killing girl babies, but that might not happen in cultures where women and men are seen as having equal value.
China's "One Child Policy" didn't reduce the population merely slowed it's growth. Japan is the news poster child for low birth rates and had achieved an annual population change of -0.2% in 2012....
Japan is the news poster child for low birth rates and had achieved an annual population change of -0.2% in 2012. (World Bank)
The current world population is 7.442 Billion, our target is 1 Billion this is in the context of climate change and resource depletion. So if you could wave a magic wand and tomorrow everyone is japan 2012 it will take very roughly ~800 years. Now this is a hugely incompetent calculation since immigration is keeping japans numbers up and bla bla bla.
But that's irrelevant since you don't have a magic wand. We're not going to reduce population to anywhere near 1Billion in a timeframe relevant for global warming & resource depletion without some kind of horrific die off.
edit> I think given our political and economic trajectory a horrific die off is pretty inevitable at this point btw. All the western civil services pushing surveillance & Chinese resource geopolitics does not bode well.
Demography is also a very real concern. How will we take care of a large amount of older people with few younger people? Society has to function and be a good place for everyone. It's not like we...
Demography is also a very real concern.
How will we take care of a large amount of older people with few younger people? Society has to function and be a good place for everyone.
It's not like we can just control the amount of people without serious changes to society to make it work.
And for society to function, we also need a healthy planet, and we need to accept we need to be fully sustainable as a species. We're not going to get that happening without direct devotion...
Society has to function and be a good place for everyone.
And for society to function, we also need a healthy planet, and we need to accept we need to be fully sustainable as a species. We're not going to get that happening without direct devotion towards reducing the population to a number that's a fraction of what we have today.
Yes, we could. Rather than people in the developing world raising their standard of living to that found in the developed world, we in the developed world could lower our standard of living. Less...
Or, imagine this, we could use less shit and less energy
Yes, we could. Rather than people in the developing world raising their standard of living to that found in the developed world, we in the developed world could lower our standard of living. Less cars, less processed/packaged foods, less electronic devices, less plastics, and so on. Are you willing to go first, to lead by example?
live in places where AC is not required.
So, you're going to transplant billions of people... to where?
Again, it's not feasible to frame this as a resource-use problem, when it's an overpopulation problem. You can reduce our electricity consumption to nil, and our impact on our planet would still...
Again, it's not feasible to frame this as a resource-use problem, when it's an overpopulation problem. You can reduce our electricity consumption to nil, and our impact on our planet would still be directly correlated to our population in a vast quantity of ways from land use, to erosion, to species extinction.
Solving climate change doesn't solve sustainability. It's a far broader topic. To be sustainable means we can continue to exist in a steady state with an environment and biosphere that also remains in a steady state. That is absolutely not possible with 7,000,000,000 people.
Sustainability is not only about energy. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels is not the only problem. Even if we all switched to renewable energy tomorrow, we still use a lot of other resources,...
Sustainability is not only about energy. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels is not the only problem. Even if we all switched to renewable energy tomorrow, we still use a lot of other resources, and create a lot of pollution.
For one thing, we use land. Animals are being driven extinct because we're building and/or farming on their habitats.
We're creating plastic pollution everywhere. It's getting into waterways, oceans, and even the food chain. We ourselves are now ingesting particles of our own plastic waste in the fish we eat.
We use water. There's a major river system here in Australia which doesn't have enough water to sustain some of the native wildlife because too much water is being siphoned off to irrigate farms.
And so on, and so on.
Yes, climate change is a big problem. Yes, we could decrease our energy use and/or convert to renewable energy to reduce our carbon emissions. However, climate change is not the only problem and decreasing our energy use is not the only solution.
As an American, I wonder if this is such a win/win if you're adopting someone from another country. People from other countries have much lower carbon footprints than Americans, so moving one of...
As an American, I wonder if this is such a win/win if you're adopting someone from another country. People from other countries have much lower carbon footprints than Americans, so moving one of them here increases their carbon footprint. I suppose this would be alright if you adopted only someone from your own country.
Yes, that's the trend; but the problem is we're already overpopulated. I've spoken about this a few times now on Tildes, and it seems there's some understanding that the problem can not be resolved by merely accepting a limit of 7 billion people, or embracing a techno-futuristic perspective where through the magic lens of idealism, suddenly no one pollutes—which will frankly never happen.
Seriously. Take a good hard look at this image courtesy climate.nasa.gov. Search for more. Glaciers are one of the best bell-weathers we have for anthropogenic climate change, because they hit home the hardest I find.
Then take a look at this graph courtesy NOAA. The global temperature trend started creeping up in the 1920's, for christ's sake. Back then, the world population was only 1.8 billion.
The only solution is for us to become massively less resource-intensive as a species, and massively depopulate. Probably down to a billion people or less, if we're after true sustainability: phosphorous sustainability, erosional sustainability, native fauna & flora sustainability. You may gasp and think "gosh, what a small number". My reply to you would to be count to a billion. Go on, I'll wait. Assuming you can enunciate four numbers a second, you'll be done sometime later next decade.
I'd point out here that @lukeify wrote "The only solution is for us to become massively less resource-intensive as a species, and massively depopulate." They're not mutually exclusive options. One helps the other.
Simplistically: Total Resource Use = Resource Use per Person x Number of People. To reduce our total resource use, we can reduce either our resource use per person or the number of people using those resources. However, if we reduce both those numbers, we can achieve a bigger reduction faster, and maintain it for longer.
It's not an either/or situation.
It's my estimate, based on what I've read in scientific papers, generally concerning the sensitivity of the Earth's climate and biosphere to human interruption. It's not just about CO2. It's about the fact humans litter. We take up land and chop down forests (which are contributing to what is commonly called the anthropocene). We accidentally cause forest fires. Global agricultural production is leading to a phosphorus shortage, desertification. Our ownership of dogs and cats has lead to the extinctions, and continuing endangerment of many endemic species. These are things which are tied directly to population, and not just our resource use.
Don't confuse alarmisms with things which are actually alarming. It's a weak argument.
Population-wise? There's not much we can do. We should be donating foreign aid to encourage education which is directly correlated with a lower birth rate. We should be providing free contraception. We should be removing any tax-breaks which make having children more cost effective. Ultimately, we need to lower the birth rate down to what is maximally sustainable economically. Which is probably somewhere around 1-1.5 children per couple.
Again, 1 billion is not a small number. It's actually a very large number, that looks small because we've invented a lovely OOM name for it. It's 1,000,000,000 humans. It's more than you could ever meet in 1000 lifetimes.
Do you remember which scientific papers those were? I'm genuinely interested in learning more about this.
1 Billion is a lot of people, but how do you propose stopping 6 Billion people from reproducing without a genocide?
Well, let's observe for starters that the birth rate in some industrialised countries is already below the natural replacement rate. Look at the fertility rates shown in this Wikipedia article. For example, my own country of Australia has a fertility rate of about 1.8 births per woman, far below the replacement rate of 2.1 births per woman. If it wasn't for a combination of good medicine increasing people's life spans, and immigration, our population would be falling. And, last time I checked, there was no deliberate genocide happening here (let's leave the Aboriginal people aside for the purpose of this discussion - they're only about 2.8% of the population anyway, so a genocide on them wouldn't have much impact on our total population).
The best way to reduce birth rates is to increase women's education, and to decrease poverty. Educated women have more control over their own fertility: they're informed about birth control methods, and how to use them. Women living in wealthy countries have less incentive to have large numbers of children: more of their children will survive through infancy, they themselves can choose to work (reducing their desire to have children), and each child is seen as a larger investment so that more children is actually worse than less.
No genocide required - just educate more girls and improve the conditions they live in, and the birth rate will fall quite naturally.
Then there's the more authoritarian method of China's now-defunct One Child Policy. This had the unfortunate side effect of people killing girl babies, but that might not happen in cultures where women and men are seen as having equal value.
China's "One Child Policy" didn't reduce the population merely slowed it's growth.
Japan is the news poster child for low birth rates and had achieved an annual population change of -0.2% in 2012. (World Bank)
The current world population is 7.442 Billion, our target is 1 Billion this is in the context of climate change and resource depletion. So if you could wave a magic wand and tomorrow everyone is japan 2012 it will take very roughly ~800 years. Now this is a hugely incompetent calculation since immigration is keeping japans numbers up and bla bla bla.
But that's irrelevant since you don't have a magic wand. We're not going to reduce population to anywhere near 1Billion in a timeframe relevant for global warming & resource depletion without some kind of horrific die off.
edit> I think given our political and economic trajectory a horrific die off is pretty inevitable at this point btw. All the western civil services pushing surveillance & Chinese resource geopolitics does not bode well.
Demography is also a very real concern.
How will we take care of a large amount of older people with few younger people? Society has to function and be a good place for everyone.
It's not like we can just control the amount of people without serious changes to society to make it work.
And for society to function, we also need a healthy planet, and we need to accept we need to be fully sustainable as a species. We're not going to get that happening without direct devotion towards reducing the population to a number that's a fraction of what we have today.
Yes, we could. Rather than people in the developing world raising their standard of living to that found in the developed world, we in the developed world could lower our standard of living. Less cars, less processed/packaged foods, less electronic devices, less plastics, and so on. Are you willing to go first, to lead by example?
So, you're going to transplant billions of people... to where?
This will absolutely never happen. Why is the answer that more of us should live like peasants, rather than less of us should live like kings?
Again, it's not feasible to frame this as a resource-use problem, when it's an overpopulation problem. You can reduce our electricity consumption to nil, and our impact on our planet would still be directly correlated to our population in a vast quantity of ways from land use, to erosion, to species extinction.
Solving climate change doesn't solve sustainability. It's a far broader topic. To be sustainable means we can continue to exist in a steady state with an environment and biosphere that also remains in a steady state. That is absolutely not possible with 7,000,000,000 people.
Sustainability is not only about energy. Carbon emissions from fossil fuels is not the only problem. Even if we all switched to renewable energy tomorrow, we still use a lot of other resources, and create a lot of pollution.
For one thing, we use land. Animals are being driven extinct because we're building and/or farming on their habitats.
We're creating plastic pollution everywhere. It's getting into waterways, oceans, and even the food chain. We ourselves are now ingesting particles of our own plastic waste in the fish we eat.
We use water. There's a major river system here in Australia which doesn't have enough water to sustain some of the native wildlife because too much water is being siphoned off to irrigate farms.
And so on, and so on.
Yes, climate change is a big problem. Yes, we could decrease our energy use and/or convert to renewable energy to reduce our carbon emissions. However, climate change is not the only problem and decreasing our energy use is not the only solution.
EDIT: Typos, omitted words, and formatting.
I have one child now and one of my serious considerations against having another one is environmental impact.
As an American, I wonder if this is such a win/win if you're adopting someone from another country. People from other countries have much lower carbon footprints than Americans, so moving one of them here increases their carbon footprint. I suppose this would be alright if you adopted only someone from your own country.
My wife and I don't have children. We did our part for population reduction.