While the author is correct about population growth and sustainability, the Earth isn't overpopulated at the moment, not by a long shot. However, we do over consume and our lifestyles are not...
While the author is correct about population growth and sustainability, the Earth isn't overpopulated at the moment, not by a long shot. However, we do over consume and our lifestyles are not sustainable, even if the population were halved tomorrow. Heck, half the USA is still more carbon output than a lot of other countries.
Food availability is one of the only natural ways to limit a population. For humanity, birth control is likely a far more humane option.
Personally, I'm starting to get really irritated at how many neomalthusian arguements I've seen as of late. I swear at least 80% of the time it's being used as an excuse justify taking away...
Personally, I'm starting to get really irritated at how many neomalthusian arguements I've seen as of late. I swear at least 80% of the time it's being used as an excuse justify taking away people's rights and treating them like cattle.
In case I wasn't clear, I don't think mandatory birth control is a good option either. But if we were genuinely on the brink of overpopulation and it came down to starvation or limiting births, I...
In case I wasn't clear, I don't think mandatory birth control is a good option either. But if we were genuinely on the brink of overpopulation and it came down to starvation or limiting births, I feel limiting births is far more humane. That said, I think it's a reasonable position to say 'birth control should be readily accessible and free to all who want it'.
The correct answer (IMO) is to reduce consumption of non-essentials (IE: electronics are not sustainable en-mass, especially not 'all you can buy'), whether gently encouraged or hard rationed.
What rights do you believe are being taken away by beginning a discussion about overpopulation? Would that reflect similarly on a discussion about overconsumption?
What rights do you believe are being taken away by beginning a discussion about overpopulation? Would that reflect similarly on a discussion about overconsumption?
When discussing overpopulation, someone inevitably brings up some form of control on who gets to have children. There is no good answer here because there is no way to control birth on a societal...
When discussing overpopulation, someone inevitably brings up some form of control on who gets to have children. There is no good answer here because there is no way to control birth on a societal scale without being biased towards certain people or just straight up authoritarian.
Besides, birth rates go down on their own once society industrializes. A strange problem, because industry is the one creating the problem, and not the amount of people. Africa is the second most populous continent after Asia, but it produces a fraction of greenhouse emissions, being responsible for just 5% of the total emissions. So clearly the amount of people isn't the problem, the way they live is. A woman's right to give birth (or not) should be absolute, because it's her body. And if you start punishing people for having too many children, you'll end up like China now, suffering from the consequences of it's one-child policy, where they have too many men in a generation because the girls all got aborted or killed as infants.
Yeah, those arguments are not just unfortunate, but also wrong—advocating for population management isn't necessarily an indicator for tacit support for genocide or racism, although some awful...
There is no good answer here because there is no way to control birth on a societal scale without being biased towards certain people or just straight up authoritarian.
Yeah, those arguments are not just unfortunate, but also wrong—advocating for population management isn't necessarily an indicator for tacit support for genocide or racism, although some awful people do use it as such. That being said, there are compatible ways of managing population without resorting to authoritarian measures:
Incentivising higher education and making it as accessible to as many people as possible.
Providing free access to birth control to anyone who wants it.
Removing tax breaks that are provided to families that have children.
Even monetarily incentivising families to not have children, in the form of providing personal carbon credits that could be on-sold.
None of these would prevent or otherwise limit families from having three, four, or five kids if they want to. But it sends the message that managing population is an important societal policy in terms of ensuring we don't completely destroy the planet's biosphere, because it's very obvious that would pragmatically remove far more freedoms and rights than accepting some level of responsibility around consumption and birth rates now.
Africa is the second most populous continent after Asia, but it produces a fraction of greenhouse emissions, being responsible for just 5% of the total emissions. So clearly the amount of people isn't the problem, the way they live is.
Unfortunately, this is because one third of Africans live below the poverty line, and represent the poorest 70% of the planet—22 of the 24 countries that are classified as having low human development on the HDI are in Africa, and as these countries transition into developed nations—which they should be allowed to do—they'll consume more resources and continue to asymptotically approach current westernised society which already massively over-consumes.
This returns to my argument I've made here, which states that many who believe "overpopulation" to be the problem and not just "overconsumption" stems from the fact that even with a significant and sizeable reduction in resource consumption, the planet cannot support 8 billion humans in a sustainable fashion.
Isn't this effectively a situation of two sides of the same coin? If you step back and consider humanity's impact on the planet is not sustainable, as you agree, and if you were to define...
the Earth isn't overpopulated at the moment, not by a long shot. However, we do over consume and our lifestyles are not sustainable, even if the population were halved tomorrow.
Isn't this effectively a situation of two sides of the same coin? If you step back and consider humanity's impact on the planet is not sustainable, as you agree, and if you were to define "overpopulation" as the state of our species when we're consuming resources at an unsustainable rate—which is not an unreasonable goalpost—then aren't we effectively overpopulated?
A bit, but the problem is that, even if we hard cutoff the population at an arbitrary number, it doesn't matter if our consumption continues to skyrocket. 1 person could destroy the world given...
A bit, but the problem is that, even if we hard cutoff the population at an arbitrary number, it doesn't matter if our consumption continues to skyrocket.
1 person could destroy the world given enough machines.
And it's a hell of a lot more humane to restrict consumption of non-essentials than anything else.
I don't disagree. But it's a sliding scale. If we both agree there's a maximum amount of impact we can have on the planet in a sustainable way, and that impact is defined as the multiplication of...
I don't disagree. But it's a sliding scale. If we both agree there's a maximum amount of impact we can have on the planet in a sustainable way, and that impact is defined as the multiplication of consumption per person and total population, then you have two sliders to adjust: consumption, and population.
Most arguments around "overpopulation" stem from a belief that—even if we were able to "reduce our consumption", which no society on Earth has managed, since it is the human condition to always want more, it's highly unlikely that "reducing our consumption" is a feasible mechanism for reducing our planetary impact below the limit of what is sustainable, because Jevon's paradox states that as you make a process more efficient—the very thing people talk about when "reducing our consumption", that process is usually scaled up in response, resulting in an even greater consumption of resources. Efficiency actually ends up consuming more resources, not less.
Furthermore, people arguing from a stance of overpopulation usually believe that, given our planet's demonstrated fragility to our actions—climate change, oceanic biomass loss, insect biomass loss, loss of crop land to failed soil quality and desertification, sea level rise, ice sheet collapse, the anthropocene extinction event, habitat and forestry loss—at 8 billion people, the amount we would have to reduce our consumption by to reach a sustainable impact would amount to us effectively being completely constrained to human-based means of transportation (bikes and walking), and probably subsisting off of insects only.
Our planet is clearly telling us we're not just slightly un-sustainable, but massively so.
Therefore we enter a tragedy of the commons scenario. No one reasonably wants to give up their possessions or accept a "reduced" state of living, so it never happens, and we simply "aspire" towards it instead—basically a mass societal delusion of "all words, no action", while the population keeps growing, and no action is taken to promote smaller families or no families.
I think applying Jevon's paradox to adopting a less less impactful, and therefore more resource efficient, lifestyle, is dubious. If it becomes more efficient to have a high standard of living,...
I think applying Jevon's paradox to adopting a less less impactful, and therefore more resource efficient, lifestyle, is dubious. If it becomes more efficient to have a high standard of living, there aren't suddenly going to be a lot more humans around because they're cheaper from a resource perspective to maintain. In rich and poor countries alike, reduction in birthrate tracks with the education of women and access to contraception, not with heightened resource consumption, though those two often correlate. The only way I could see it applying is in making it easier in the short term for developing countries to, well, develop, and that's something that's eventually going to happen anyway, regardless of environmental impact, so better to have it done early and efficiently.
And anyway, the problem isn't with humanity, which is perfectly capable of common pool resource management, or even with industrial civilization. The problem is with capitalism (and perhaps market economies in general), and its perverse incentive structure with regard to externalities that gets in the way of this capability. The tragedy of the commons is a largely discredited capitalist fairy tale justifying the land closures, colonialism, and other theft required for the disposession of the masses and creation of a landless proletariat condemned to wage slavery. Historically, common lands were well and thoughtfully managed by the precapitalist communities they supported. It's possible to do this writ large with the entire planet, we just need to do away with this economic system that causes rational humans capable of planning, forethought, and coordinated action, to act as mindless bacteria poisoned by their own waste products.
I agree, but the sliders are weighted exponentially differently, because of that number difference. If we use carbon footprint as that consumption impact metric, reducing America's carbon/capita...
that impact is defined as the multiplication of consumption per person and total population, then you have two sliders to adjust: consumption, and population.
I agree, but the sliders are weighted exponentially differently, because of that number difference.
If we use carbon footprint as that consumption impact metric, reducing America's carbon/capita to China's levels, carbon output is reduced by ~2,602 Mt CO2. To EU levels: 2,829 Mt. Reducing all three of those areas by 2,000,000 population instead: 14 Mt.
So when people talk about industrialized nations producing less people, it's kind of disingenuous. That population slowdown is coming at the cost of much more consumption and environmental cost.
I do like using carbon footprints as the consumption impact heuristic because it's the most measurable quantity we have in terms of planetary impact—but as a brief aside, let's also consider that...
I do like using carbon footprints as the consumption impact heuristic because it's the most measurable quantity we have in terms of planetary impact—but as a brief aside, let's also consider that there are wider stochastic effects that are less quantifiable in terms of planetary impact. Some examples might be land use for agriculture, human-caused wildfires, amount of plastics littered, causing species population decline, and over-tourism, causing environmental decay.
These are very important human-society externalities that do seriously degrade and damage the environment, but are harder to measure. These are trends that also scale linearly with population and usually cannot as directly be addressed through resource consumption reductions, although that scaling factor does change over time as societal expectations and trends change (for example, less people smoke in western society now, so you could argue stochastically, the scaling factor of wildfires caused by non-extinguished cigarette butts is now less extreme).
But back to your example:
If we use carbon footprint as that consumption impact metric, reducing America's carbon/capita to China's levels, carbon output is reduced by ~2,602 Mt CO2. To EU levels: 2,829 Mt. Reducing all three of those areas by 2,000,000 population instead: 14 Mt.
As a brief preface, I usually advocate for a reduction in both population and consumption, so I'm all for reducing per capita carbon emissions, but I don't believe this alone will be enough to make a difference. Why? Follow on for some very back of the envelope math:
There is meaningful evidence that the global temperature anomaly started trending upwards as early as 1920-1930. One estimate placed the lag time for CO2-induced temperature changes in the climate as approximately a decade, so as an example: the effects caused by humanity in 2020 won't be fully reflected on the temperature record until 2030.
What this means is that potentially as early as 1910 or 1920, we were rapidly[1] influencing the climate temperature record. As of 1920, the world's population was 1.87-1.96 billion people, and our global CO2 emissions were 3.49 billion tonnes (averaged per capita emissions of 1.78-1.86 tonnes). As of today, the world population is nearing 8 billion people, and our global CO2 emissions as of 2018 was 36.58 billion tonnes. Our population has grown four times over since 1920, and our emissions have grown nearly 11 times.[2]
Working backwards, if in 1920, we were already past the limit in terms of sustainable emissions of CO2, causing rapid atmospheric temperature rise, this means today, we need all 8 billion people to be emitting less than 3.5b tonnes of CO2, or 436kg/per person/yr. Currently:
The United States has per capita emissions of 16.1 tonnes/yr.
United Kingdom has per capita emissions of 5.4tonnes/yr.
Sweden has per capita emissions of 4.5 tonnes/yr.
Countries that do have per capita emissions in the 400-450kg/yr range include: Togo, Sudan, & Kenya. 47% of Sudan live below the poverty line. Kenya has a motorisation rate of 30 vehicles per 1000 inhabitants.
Unless citizens in practically all "developed" countries are planning to significantly reduce their resource consumption by very large factors, I don't see how it's possible for a "more efficient use" of resources to solve our planetary sustainability problems—biking to work isn't going to solve anything. Western societies need to embrace massive population reduction programs through some of the incentives I mentioned in another comment, and also drastically take steps to reduce consumption by orders of magnitude. A reduction in population by 2 million people is honestly peanuts. The population likely needs to halve, or more, before we have any shot of making resource efficiency improvements to drop underneath our maximum sustainable planetary impact emission rate.
[1]: Sure, humanity has been influencing the climate for thousands of years, but rapid changes only began around the onset of the industrial revolution.
I think that's what i was trying to show with my post (although I might have borked the math, I'm second guessing myself now). There's basically only two options to get things done semi-quickly:...
Unless citizens in practically all "developed" countries are planning to significantly reduce their resource consumption by very large factors, I don't see how it's possible for a "more efficient use" of resources to solve our planetary sustainability problems
I think that's what i was trying to show with my post (although I might have borked the math, I'm second guessing myself now). There's basically only two options to get things done semi-quickly: reduce consumption or nuclear war. Leveling off current population isn't gonna do it.
I'll take switching to EU consumption levels any day.
What's the difference? If everyone became vegetarian and quit driving, there might be room for more of us, but as a species, it is our natural rate of resource consumption that defines our...
the Earth isn't overpopulated at the moment, not by a long shot. However, we do over consume and our lifestyles are not sustainable
What's the difference? If everyone became vegetarian and quit driving, there might be room for more of us, but as a species, it is our natural rate of resource consumption that defines our sustainable carrying capacity.
ETA: It seems if I'd kept reading, I'd have seen at least 2 other people advancing the same counter ... so feel free to skip over this reiteration.
Here's the thing about birth prevention (and, for that matter, abortion). Decisions would have to be made about which groups get their birth rate reduced, whether voluntarily or not. And the...
Here's the thing about birth prevention (and, for that matter, abortion). Decisions would have to be made about which groups get their birth rate reduced, whether voluntarily or not. And the groups could be delineated by whatever lines the human imagination can conceive: political, geographical, economic/financial, racial, ethnic, religious, ideological -- whatever.
I don't find this article particularly illuminating. Of course the Earth has some limit on population (at the most extreme, at some point there will be too many people to fit on Earth). The...
I don't find this article particularly illuminating.
Of course the Earth has some limit on population (at the most extreme, at some point there will be too many people to fit on Earth). The question is when the limit will hit, and the author has no better idea than anyone else.
I don't see how defining overpopulation as "whether you can physically fit people into a particular space" as a very useful metric, perhaps you're looking for the term "overcrowding"? Because if...
I don't see how defining overpopulation as "whether you can physically fit people into a particular space" as a very useful metric, perhaps you're looking for the term "overcrowding"? Because if you're just going to ignore the land needed to manufacture goods and services that we consume, the land needed to produce the raw materials for those goods and services, and ignore the entire argument around sustainability, then yes, I guess there's no point even considering whether humanity is "overpopulated' because according to that definition, the answer is certainly not.
But that's not usually the expressed understanding most people use when they talk about overpopulation.
I don't think they're trying to provide an answer, but rather to try raise further questions to bring the topic into view so it can be discussed. Many writers just want to start conversations, not...
I don't think they're trying to provide an answer, but rather to try raise further questions to bring the topic into view so it can be discussed. Many writers just want to start conversations, not necessarily answer questions.
I really would like to see a source for this claim. It is central to the essay's entire argument and it's plucked out thin air. What if we could do something about it? What would need to change...
Once a simple tweak of the plough transformed agriculture. Today, such innovation wouldn’t make a dent.
I really would like to see a source for this claim. It is central to the essay's entire argument and it's plucked out thin air. What if we could do something about it? What would need to change for that to happen?
Thus, as our consumption goes up, our resource footprint does too. One person does not equal another. An America is equivalent to four Chinese, 20 Indians or 250 Ethiopians. By increasing consumption globally, we could shrink our population in numbers and still become more overpopulated.
The author brings up consumption a lot as a point to why we'll run out of resources, but again, they don't bother asking if there's anything we could possibly do about it. Yes, if every person on Earth lived like your average American, we'd quickly run out of resources. That's because the resource consumption and organization of Americans (and most industrialized nations) is outrageously high and horribly misallocated! (Also, that section about one person not equaling another is worryingly dehumanizing. I don't think the author mean it like that but it's not a good way to phrase comparisons of people.) There's no reason our current way of life has to last forever until we die.
As he bluntly concluded: ‘Zero population growth is going to happen… we can choose from the [second] list, or nature will do so for us.’ Like the deer in the field, we have a choice between equilibrium and bottleneck: the plateau or the falling cliff. The question will be answered in your lifetime. But as we make our decision, the ghost of Malthus is never far behind.
I wish this essay would make a conclusion rather than vaguely steal someone else's without any modification. If your title asks a question your essay should try to answer yes, no, or a confident "I don't know" and have a suggestion or two.
You can actually break it down mathematically. When only humans can till soil, the available growing area is limited to: If that number goes negative, people start starving. So the number of...
I really would like to see a source for this claim.
You can actually break it down mathematically.
When only humans can till soil, the available growing area is limited to:
(calories consumed - calories expended) * number people
If that number goes negative, people start starving. So the number of people is limited by the calories you can grow, to keep that number positive. So when you introduce technology, added efficiency gives the ability to grow more calories. Excess calories allow to support more people.
When we hit the animal-driven plows, it was a huge expansion in calories able to be grown, because oxen + plow were able to cover a lot more area/calorie (esp since oxen can consume calories outside of crops).
The part of that claim I want to see a source for is "innovation wouldn't make a dent". How does the author know this? What innovations have they considered, and why wouldn't they work?
The part of that claim I want to see a source for is "innovation wouldn't make a dent". How does the author know this? What innovations have they considered, and why wouldn't they work?
I think they were getting that there's a point of diminishing returns. The development of the plow was huge. Each extra bit of yield we get out of a given plot of land is going to have diminishing...
I think they were getting that there's a point of diminishing returns. The development of the plow was huge. Each extra bit of yield we get out of a given plot of land is going to have diminishing returns at some point. Eventually, it will be impossible to grow food with any nutritional value, because the plant will extract nutrients out of the ground faster than they can be replenished, or failing that just hitting a physical density problem.
That's true, but it's not at all clear that we're near the point of having perfected agriculture. The usual figure I've heard is that just greenhouses can offer an order of magnitude improvement...
That's true, but it's not at all clear that we're near the point of having perfected agriculture. The usual figure I've heard is that just greenhouses can offer an order of magnitude improvement on crop yields per acre; it's not done to a massive extent today only because farmland is very cheap compared to greenhouses, as are the vehicles needed to traverse and maintain the vast tracts of this comparatively unproductive land.
I'd like to add that there are actually a ton of agricultural innovations that are not being used right now simply because they aren't as cheap as our current methods. There are even real-world...
I'd like to add that there are actually a ton of agricultural innovations that are not being used right now simply because they aren't as cheap as our current methods. There are even real-world existing examples of them being run right now, profitably. We have a lot of "weapons" to be used against a lack of resources that are basically just waiting for their chance to shine; vertical farming, hydroponics, environmental control techniques (greenhouses, artifical lighting, etc.), and those are just the obvious ones I know the names of.
This kind of reinforces what I'm trying to point out in my other comments across this thread though: even though this improves the efficiency of crop growth, it directly results in more resource...
The usual figure I've heard is that just greenhouses can offer an order of magnitude improvement on crop yields per acre
This kind of reinforces what I'm trying to point out in my other comments across this thread though: even though this improves the efficiency of crop growth, it directly results in more resource consumption than just growing food traditionally—glasshouses aren't free, either from a cost or materials standpoint.
As soon as we start requiring glasshouses to meet food requirements for our current population—you're adding an entirely new supply chain to the agricultural process: metal bending, glass creation, additional resource mining, which will likely lead to down-chain consequences too: more greenhouse gas emissions, less habitat for other species from the sheer land use alone, etc.
The wide-scale consequences of "scaling up" invariably end up using more resources, not less.
I don't think it's at all evident that greenhouse agriculture is necessarily going to be worse for the planet than traditional mechanized agriculture, just because it involves more industrial...
I don't think it's at all evident that greenhouse agriculture is necessarily going to be worse for the planet than traditional mechanized agriculture, just because it involves more industrial production. I mean, yeah it lengthens the supply chain somewhat, but it's not a universal truth that complicated high tech and industrial techniques are intrinsically more environmentally impactful than more simple ones, the case is often the opposite (just look at biomass cooking and heating versus electric), and we're talking in this case about a factor of ten reduction in the amount of land usage of an endeavor that occupies something like a third of the planet's land area, while simultaneously reducing water usage, eliminating massively polluting ICE farm equipment, shortening food shipping distances, slashing the use of pesticides, the list goes on.
Considering that the world's population is already topping out, i.e. Jevon's paradox does not apply, as the demand for food is basically fixed, more efficient agricultural techniques like greenhousing allow us to give over billions of hectares of some of the most productive land on Earth to rewilding efforts. Sure, there's likely to be negative environmental impact in production of materials for these greenhouses, but that's going to be way, way offset by the unprecedented scale of habitat creation and carbon sequestration it would enable.
I don't think so either, but it explains the author's thought process a bit. That said...have you ever had 'less efficient' food? Einkorn is delicious compared to modern wheat, but it has far less...
it's not at all clear that we're near the point of having perfected agriculture
I don't think so either, but it explains the author's thought process a bit.
That said...have you ever had 'less efficient' food? Einkorn is delicious compared to modern wheat, but it has far less yield. I'm worried that our desire to hyper-optimize yields will result in very bleh food over time.
I haven't ever had einkorn, but I do love beefsteak tomatoes, which are sidelined for reasons of mechanization. That's actually one of the reasons I'm a fan of unconventional agricultural...
I haven't ever had einkorn, but I do love beefsteak tomatoes, which are sidelined for reasons of mechanization. That's actually one of the reasons I'm a fan of unconventional agricultural techniques like greenhouses and indoor farming, aside from the efficiency benefits: they open up the possibilities for cultivation of more finnicky food crops that were abandoned under our current agricultural regime.
While the author is correct about population growth and sustainability, the Earth isn't overpopulated at the moment, not by a long shot. However, we do over consume and our lifestyles are not sustainable, even if the population were halved tomorrow. Heck, half the USA is still more carbon output than a lot of other countries.
Food availability is one of the only natural ways to limit a population. For humanity, birth control is likely a far more humane option.
Personally, I'm starting to get really irritated at how many neomalthusian arguements I've seen as of late. I swear at least 80% of the time it's being used as an excuse justify taking away people's rights and treating them like cattle.
In case I wasn't clear, I don't think mandatory birth control is a good option either. But if we were genuinely on the brink of overpopulation and it came down to starvation or limiting births, I feel limiting births is far more humane. That said, I think it's a reasonable position to say 'birth control should be readily accessible and free to all who want it'.
The correct answer (IMO) is to reduce consumption of non-essentials (IE: electronics are not sustainable en-mass, especially not 'all you can buy'), whether gently encouraged or hard rationed.
What rights do you believe are being taken away by beginning a discussion about overpopulation? Would that reflect similarly on a discussion about overconsumption?
When discussing overpopulation, someone inevitably brings up some form of control on who gets to have children. There is no good answer here because there is no way to control birth on a societal scale without being biased towards certain people or just straight up authoritarian.
Besides, birth rates go down on their own once society industrializes. A strange problem, because industry is the one creating the problem, and not the amount of people. Africa is the second most populous continent after Asia, but it produces a fraction of greenhouse emissions, being responsible for just 5% of the total emissions. So clearly the amount of people isn't the problem, the way they live is. A woman's right to give birth (or not) should be absolute, because it's her body. And if you start punishing people for having too many children, you'll end up like China now, suffering from the consequences of it's one-child policy, where they have too many men in a generation because the girls all got aborted or killed as infants.
Yeah, those arguments are not just unfortunate, but also wrong—advocating for population management isn't necessarily an indicator for tacit support for genocide or racism, although some awful people do use it as such. That being said, there are compatible ways of managing population without resorting to authoritarian measures:
None of these would prevent or otherwise limit families from having three, four, or five kids if they want to. But it sends the message that managing population is an important societal policy in terms of ensuring we don't completely destroy the planet's biosphere, because it's very obvious that would pragmatically remove far more freedoms and rights than accepting some level of responsibility around consumption and birth rates now.
Unfortunately, this is because one third of Africans live below the poverty line, and represent the poorest 70% of the planet—22 of the 24 countries that are classified as having low human development on the HDI are in Africa, and as these countries transition into developed nations—which they should be allowed to do—they'll consume more resources and continue to asymptotically approach current westernised society which already massively over-consumes.
This returns to my argument I've made here, which states that many who believe "overpopulation" to be the problem and not just "overconsumption" stems from the fact that even with a significant and sizeable reduction in resource consumption, the planet cannot support 8 billion humans in a sustainable fashion.
Isn't this effectively a situation of two sides of the same coin? If you step back and consider humanity's impact on the planet is not sustainable, as you agree, and if you were to define "overpopulation" as the state of our species when we're consuming resources at an unsustainable rate—which is not an unreasonable goalpost—then aren't we effectively overpopulated?
A bit, but the problem is that, even if we hard cutoff the population at an arbitrary number, it doesn't matter if our consumption continues to skyrocket.
1 person could destroy the world given enough machines.
And it's a hell of a lot more humane to restrict consumption of non-essentials than anything else.
I don't disagree. But it's a sliding scale. If we both agree there's a maximum amount of impact we can have on the planet in a sustainable way, and that impact is defined as the multiplication of consumption per person and total population, then you have two sliders to adjust: consumption, and population.
Most arguments around "overpopulation" stem from a belief that—even if we were able to "reduce our consumption", which no society on Earth has managed, since it is the human condition to always want more, it's highly unlikely that "reducing our consumption" is a feasible mechanism for reducing our planetary impact below the limit of what is sustainable, because Jevon's paradox states that as you make a process more efficient—the very thing people talk about when "reducing our consumption", that process is usually scaled up in response, resulting in an even greater consumption of resources. Efficiency actually ends up consuming more resources, not less.
Furthermore, people arguing from a stance of overpopulation usually believe that, given our planet's demonstrated fragility to our actions—climate change, oceanic biomass loss, insect biomass loss, loss of crop land to failed soil quality and desertification, sea level rise, ice sheet collapse, the anthropocene extinction event, habitat and forestry loss—at 8 billion people, the amount we would have to reduce our consumption by to reach a sustainable impact would amount to us effectively being completely constrained to human-based means of transportation (bikes and walking), and probably subsisting off of insects only.
Our planet is clearly telling us we're not just slightly un-sustainable, but massively so.
Therefore we enter a tragedy of the commons scenario. No one reasonably wants to give up their possessions or accept a "reduced" state of living, so it never happens, and we simply "aspire" towards it instead—basically a mass societal delusion of "all words, no action", while the population keeps growing, and no action is taken to promote smaller families or no families.
I think applying Jevon's paradox to adopting a less less impactful, and therefore more resource efficient, lifestyle, is dubious. If it becomes more efficient to have a high standard of living, there aren't suddenly going to be a lot more humans around because they're cheaper from a resource perspective to maintain. In rich and poor countries alike, reduction in birthrate tracks with the education of women and access to contraception, not with heightened resource consumption, though those two often correlate. The only way I could see it applying is in making it easier in the short term for developing countries to, well, develop, and that's something that's eventually going to happen anyway, regardless of environmental impact, so better to have it done early and efficiently.
And anyway, the problem isn't with humanity, which is perfectly capable of common pool resource management, or even with industrial civilization. The problem is with capitalism (and perhaps market economies in general), and its perverse incentive structure with regard to externalities that gets in the way of this capability. The tragedy of the commons is a largely discredited capitalist fairy tale justifying the land closures, colonialism, and other theft required for the disposession of the masses and creation of a landless proletariat condemned to wage slavery. Historically, common lands were well and thoughtfully managed by the precapitalist communities they supported. It's possible to do this writ large with the entire planet, we just need to do away with this economic system that causes rational humans capable of planning, forethought, and coordinated action, to act as mindless bacteria poisoned by their own waste products.
I agree, but the sliders are weighted exponentially differently, because of that number difference.
If we use carbon footprint as that consumption impact metric, reducing America's carbon/capita to China's levels, carbon output is reduced by ~2,602 Mt CO2. To EU levels: 2,829 Mt. Reducing all three of those areas by 2,000,000 population instead: 14 Mt.
So when people talk about industrialized nations producing less people, it's kind of disingenuous. That population slowdown is coming at the cost of much more consumption and environmental cost.
I do like using carbon footprints as the consumption impact heuristic because it's the most measurable quantity we have in terms of planetary impact—but as a brief aside, let's also consider that there are wider stochastic effects that are less quantifiable in terms of planetary impact. Some examples might be land use for agriculture, human-caused wildfires, amount of plastics littered, causing species population decline, and over-tourism, causing environmental decay.
These are very important human-society externalities that do seriously degrade and damage the environment, but are harder to measure. These are trends that also scale linearly with population and usually cannot as directly be addressed through resource consumption reductions, although that scaling factor does change over time as societal expectations and trends change (for example, less people smoke in western society now, so you could argue stochastically, the scaling factor of wildfires caused by non-extinguished cigarette butts is now less extreme).
But back to your example:
As a brief preface, I usually advocate for a reduction in both population and consumption, so I'm all for reducing per capita carbon emissions, but I don't believe this alone will be enough to make a difference. Why? Follow on for some very back of the envelope math:
There is meaningful evidence that the global temperature anomaly started trending upwards as early as 1920-1930. One estimate placed the lag time for CO2-induced temperature changes in the climate as approximately a decade, so as an example: the effects caused by humanity in 2020 won't be fully reflected on the temperature record until 2030.
What this means is that potentially as early as 1910 or 1920, we were rapidly[1] influencing the climate temperature record. As of 1920, the world's population was 1.87-1.96 billion people, and our global CO2 emissions were 3.49 billion tonnes (averaged per capita emissions of 1.78-1.86 tonnes). As of today, the world population is nearing 8 billion people, and our global CO2 emissions as of 2018 was 36.58 billion tonnes. Our population has grown four times over since 1920, and our emissions have grown nearly 11 times.[2]
Working backwards, if in 1920, we were already past the limit in terms of sustainable emissions of CO2, causing rapid atmospheric temperature rise, this means today, we need all 8 billion people to be emitting less than 3.5b tonnes of CO2, or 436kg/per person/yr. Currently:
Countries that do have per capita emissions in the 400-450kg/yr range include: Togo, Sudan, & Kenya. 47% of Sudan live below the poverty line. Kenya has a motorisation rate of 30 vehicles per 1000 inhabitants.
Unless citizens in practically all "developed" countries are planning to significantly reduce their resource consumption by very large factors, I don't see how it's possible for a "more efficient use" of resources to solve our planetary sustainability problems—biking to work isn't going to solve anything. Western societies need to embrace massive population reduction programs through some of the incentives I mentioned in another comment, and also drastically take steps to reduce consumption by orders of magnitude. A reduction in population by 2 million people is honestly peanuts. The population likely needs to halve, or more, before we have any shot of making resource efficiency improvements to drop underneath our maximum sustainable planetary impact emission rate.
[1]: Sure, humanity has been influencing the climate for thousands of years, but rapid changes only began around the onset of the industrial revolution.
[2]: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emissions#global-emissions-have-not-yet-peaked
I think that's what i was trying to show with my post (although I might have borked the math, I'm second guessing myself now). There's basically only two options to get things done semi-quickly: reduce consumption or nuclear war. Leveling off current population isn't gonna do it.
I'll take switching to EU consumption levels any day.
What's the difference? If everyone became vegetarian and quit driving, there might be room for more of us, but as a species, it is our natural rate of resource consumption that defines our sustainable carrying capacity.
ETA: It seems if I'd kept reading, I'd have seen at least 2 other people advancing the same counter ... so feel free to skip over this reiteration.
Here's the thing about birth prevention (and, for that matter, abortion). Decisions would have to be made about which groups get their birth rate reduced, whether voluntarily or not. And the groups could be delineated by whatever lines the human imagination can conceive: political, geographical, economic/financial, racial, ethnic, religious, ideological -- whatever.
It's sobering to consider.
I don't find this article particularly illuminating.
Of course the Earth has some limit on population (at the most extreme, at some point there will be too many people to fit on Earth). The question is when the limit will hit, and the author has no better idea than anyone else.
I don't see how defining overpopulation as "whether you can physically fit people into a particular space" as a very useful metric, perhaps you're looking for the term "overcrowding"? Because if you're just going to ignore the land needed to manufacture goods and services that we consume, the land needed to produce the raw materials for those goods and services, and ignore the entire argument around sustainability, then yes, I guess there's no point even considering whether humanity is "overpopulated' because according to that definition, the answer is certainly not.
But that's not usually the expressed understanding most people use when they talk about overpopulation.
My point is that the article asks a question in the title and but doesn't come closer to answering it, thus I don't find it useful.
I don't think they're trying to provide an answer, but rather to try raise further questions to bring the topic into view so it can be discussed. Many writers just want to start conversations, not necessarily answer questions.
I really would like to see a source for this claim. It is central to the essay's entire argument and it's plucked out thin air. What if we could do something about it? What would need to change for that to happen?
The author brings up consumption a lot as a point to why we'll run out of resources, but again, they don't bother asking if there's anything we could possibly do about it. Yes, if every person on Earth lived like your average American, we'd quickly run out of resources. That's because the resource consumption and organization of Americans (and most industrialized nations) is outrageously high and horribly misallocated! (Also, that section about one person not equaling another is worryingly dehumanizing. I don't think the author mean it like that but it's not a good way to phrase comparisons of people.) There's no reason our current way of life has to last forever until we die.
I wish this essay would make a conclusion rather than vaguely steal someone else's without any modification. If your title asks a question your essay should try to answer yes, no, or a confident "I don't know" and have a suggestion or two.
You can actually break it down mathematically.
When only humans can till soil, the available growing area is limited to:
If that number goes negative, people start starving. So the number of people is limited by the calories you can grow, to keep that number positive. So when you introduce technology, added efficiency gives the ability to grow more calories. Excess calories allow to support more people.
When we hit the animal-driven plows, it was a huge expansion in calories able to be grown, because oxen + plow were able to cover a lot more area/calorie (esp since oxen can consume calories outside of crops).
The part of that claim I want to see a source for is "innovation wouldn't make a dent". How does the author know this? What innovations have they considered, and why wouldn't they work?
I think they were getting that there's a point of diminishing returns. The development of the plow was huge. Each extra bit of yield we get out of a given plot of land is going to have diminishing returns at some point. Eventually, it will be impossible to grow food with any nutritional value, because the plant will extract nutrients out of the ground faster than they can be replenished, or failing that just hitting a physical density problem.
That's true, but it's not at all clear that we're near the point of having perfected agriculture. The usual figure I've heard is that just greenhouses can offer an order of magnitude improvement on crop yields per acre; it's not done to a massive extent today only because farmland is very cheap compared to greenhouses, as are the vehicles needed to traverse and maintain the vast tracts of this comparatively unproductive land.
I'd like to add that there are actually a ton of agricultural innovations that are not being used right now simply because they aren't as cheap as our current methods. There are even real-world existing examples of them being run right now, profitably. We have a lot of "weapons" to be used against a lack of resources that are basically just waiting for their chance to shine; vertical farming, hydroponics, environmental control techniques (greenhouses, artifical lighting, etc.), and those are just the obvious ones I know the names of.
This kind of reinforces what I'm trying to point out in my other comments across this thread though: even though this improves the efficiency of crop growth, it directly results in more resource consumption than just growing food traditionally—glasshouses aren't free, either from a cost or materials standpoint.
As soon as we start requiring glasshouses to meet food requirements for our current population—you're adding an entirely new supply chain to the agricultural process: metal bending, glass creation, additional resource mining, which will likely lead to down-chain consequences too: more greenhouse gas emissions, less habitat for other species from the sheer land use alone, etc.
The wide-scale consequences of "scaling up" invariably end up using more resources, not less.
I don't think it's at all evident that greenhouse agriculture is necessarily going to be worse for the planet than traditional mechanized agriculture, just because it involves more industrial production. I mean, yeah it lengthens the supply chain somewhat, but it's not a universal truth that complicated high tech and industrial techniques are intrinsically more environmentally impactful than more simple ones, the case is often the opposite (just look at biomass cooking and heating versus electric), and we're talking in this case about a factor of ten reduction in the amount of land usage of an endeavor that occupies something like a third of the planet's land area, while simultaneously reducing water usage, eliminating massively polluting ICE farm equipment, shortening food shipping distances, slashing the use of pesticides, the list goes on.
Considering that the world's population is already topping out, i.e. Jevon's paradox does not apply, as the demand for food is basically fixed, more efficient agricultural techniques like greenhousing allow us to give over billions of hectares of some of the most productive land on Earth to rewilding efforts. Sure, there's likely to be negative environmental impact in production of materials for these greenhouses, but that's going to be way, way offset by the unprecedented scale of habitat creation and carbon sequestration it would enable.
I don't think so either, but it explains the author's thought process a bit.
That said...have you ever had 'less efficient' food? Einkorn is delicious compared to modern wheat, but it has far less yield. I'm worried that our desire to hyper-optimize yields will result in very bleh food over time.
I haven't ever had einkorn, but I do love beefsteak tomatoes, which are sidelined for reasons of mechanization. That's actually one of the reasons I'm a fan of unconventional agricultural techniques like greenhouses and indoor farming, aside from the efficiency benefits: they open up the possibilities for cultivation of more finnicky food crops that were abandoned under our current agricultural regime.