A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
total emissions = emissions per capita * capita
Unless we figure out carbon neutrality without cratering HDI in the next year or two maybe lets work on reducing birth rates. 'we could have 20 billion people if we all live like subsistence farmers' is fucking stupid.
We are producing enough food (and clothes, and appliances, etc., etc.) for 10 billion people, and the planet is burning. It is not sustainable long term. And, by "long term", I don't mean "the next 20 years", I mean "the next 100-200 years".
And the "manufactured crisis" of population decline hits really hard if you're 12 and have no clue how the retirement system works.
They arrive at the right conclusion (capitalism is currently the cause of all suffering), but through completely stupid reasoning.
We are producing enough food (and clothes, and appliances, etc., etc.) for 10 billion people, and the planet is burning. It is not sustainable long term.
That's not necessarily true. How much of our overall greenhouse emissions come from which sector?
From this chart, decarbonizing electricity and transport will go a long, long way, and decarbonizing manufacturing and construction could also give some room to reduce overall emissions by more than the entire agricultural sector produces.
And it's not just some kind of pipe dream. We're doing real work at decarbonizing electricity, heat, transport, shipping, construction, etc., as the prices of low or zero emissions options start to outcompete the higher emission options for many applications.
Plus if the data center boom crashes as a bubble, a lot of the infrastructure investment into increasing energy production and distribution with both high carbon and low carbon sources will at least have financed a lot of low carbon energy and the potential for curtailing the least carbon efficient generation methods.
Even if it is feasible, I still encounter twice as many people as I want to on a daily basis. I want to live on Solaria, from Isaac Asimov's The Naked Sun.
fuck these climate change deniers
Our rapidly depleting aquifers being used to produce those resources would suggest there are too many people.
World population in 2024 was 8.1 billion.
Doesn't really matter but people please make sure your numbers are right before you use them. easily avoidable way to lose your credibility.
Edit: Oh wait it's a double quote without date attribution. Assuming that original source did some basic numbers checking, that puts it at around 2018.
This post is an embarrassment to critical thinking.
yikes dude, your critical thinking skills seems to be lacking more...
either that or you somehow took the entirety of packing ppl on 5% of the globe as a centralized single point lol.
right? i sounds great until you realize oh shit… logistics exist… all those perishable goods don’t just magically appear on people’s plates… 2.3billion people’s worth of food waste for 7.7bn people is honestly bloody miraculous tbh… can we do more to reduce food waste in our rich nations? sure… would that help feed people in areas of famine? unlikely
did you know that when there’s an overproduction of food, rather than selling it, it just gets thrown away?
for example, if dairy farmers make more than their quotas allow, they are expected to simply throw their milk down the drain. thousands of liters of perfectly fine milk, completely wasted. and this sort of waste is not exclusive to dairy farms either
under capitalism, so much of food waste is entirely preventable, if not deliberately caused! just by ending this practice, ending the intercontinental shipping of perishable food (which means that, yes, you in europe, north america or australia would have to give up bananas, so sad) and turning supermarkets into food banks rather than stores (so no pretty displays of food outside fridges), i bet that we could save tons of food from getting wasted
But think of the prices! Imagine if supply weren't artificially detached from demand, thus driving down commodities prices and CRASHING THE ECONOMY!?!?! And by economy I obviously mean my own profit margin.
I agree, it's really hard to remember how to use things like cans and preservatives when it comes to shipping food to areas of famine.
Hard /s
A clear example was shown when USAID goods to help starving kids in the Middle East were burn. Or the supermarkets destroying food that is "not marketable".
Haven't you read the top comments on this thread? It's impossible to feed people our excess and continue paying for things like USAID because of overpopulation.... Apparently.
The "let them starve" eugenics propaganda is strong in the pseudo-science community.
Okay but what if and hear me out on this we change nothing and just use this as justification to keep doing that and victimizing the most vulnerable
Yeah, the world doesn't run on "if everybody just did x" as much as we'd like it to. People don't do what they need to do in order for resources to be fairly distributed, and people don't do what they need to do to change that. What we can do only matters when we're already organized enough to do it. For now it's just a reminder that all isn't quite lost, but people seem to use it as an indicator that all is well instead.
This is a much less cool post when you realize that the Earth can only sustainably support 10 billion people if we never fly, give up a lot of our modern tech, and have rice make up 50% of our diet. Basically any meat is completely off the table, as with personal cars, and probably standalone houses. If I'm given the choice between not having kids and not flying to see my family for holidays, I'll take the no-kids option.
Your thesis doesn't match up with this chart:
https://ourworldindata.org/emissions-by-sector
We're working to decarbonize the highest categories on that list, with rapid adoption of solar/wind, some potential for more nuclear and geothermal in the medium term, and maybe even fusion in the long term.
Then, while decarbonizing electricity, we're electrifying heating for homes, water, cooking, and we're electrifying transportation.
US carbon emissions per capita peaked in the 70's, and peaked as a whole in the 2000's. US carbon emissions per capita still greatly exceed those of other rich nations.
It's very much possible to have modern first world living standards, even with significant reductions in our resource use and net emissions. We just need to line up the incentives (aka pricing) with what is good for the Earth. And we're already doing that in many of the heaviest polluting sectors.
So let's build lots of highspeed rail? We went to the moon on less compute than your cell phone and modern tech could be way more sustainable if we properly optimized. Rice is fantastic and works for a significant chunk of the current population just fine. Meat? Just gotta grow that protein in other more sustainable/efficient ways. Cars are useless in a dense urban environments and make everything worse. Fuck cars. Standalone houses are a giant waste of space and when you design your neighborhoods around this idea, everything is too spread out to actually have proper density and utility.
This is a very cool post that does point out that all of these things are in such excess. You should give StrongTowns and NotJustBikes a watch on youtube for much more on the topic of urban design.
Aviation is about 2.5% of global emissions.
In the long run then yes, we need carbon neutral fuels, but it should be possible for people to fly a little and not destroy the planet.
Or you could just take a train
So basically it's perfectly fine? But for some reason you made it sound horrible?
Overpopulation is not a myth. 36% of the earth's mammalian biomass is Humans, only 5% is wild mammals. 71% of avian life is livestock. https://ourworldindata.org/wild-mammals-birds-biomass
Half of all "habitable land" (which includes everything except deserts, tundra, salt flats, beaches, or exposed rock) is used for agriculture. Half of all land, for agriculture. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2019/12/agriculture-habitable-land/
Industrial farming is not sustainable at the current rate and relies on either mined or petrochemical derived ammonia which supplies the nitrogen necessary for protein. Synthetic Ammonia alone feeds half the world population and requires an additional 2% of the world's power to produce.
The global ecoystem is in rapid decline.
I gave up finding appropriate sources halfway when I realized this post will just get removed eventually.
The reason for the decline in birth rates amongst the "developed" nations is because there is no more growth potential for profits for the wealthy past a certain point. So they have to turn inward and eat away at the other classes to get that unsustainable growth they demand. Opportunities have dried up for becoming even just well off so when situations are insecure like that you see a sudden drop in birth rates. They can't afford children.
I don't know about your country, but here in Poland (and well, whole Europe), most historical statisticians point to two facts, that remained unchanged at least since medieval times and were proven times and times again:
So yeah, everything you wrote is true, up to and including "people can't afford children because of the new vampires", but it's not THE reason why they don't have children.
(IIRC its best explained here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition)
Live in the USA, it's not the only reason, but it's something to consider as well. Thank you for the additional info.
Replace "sustainable," and the bit about profit and capitalism, with "efficient" and "corruption and un-free markets," then this is a common right-wing talking point (back when the right wing tried to engage intellectually, at least).
In my unscientific opinion, the current population is unsustainable, and there's no known ways to make it sustainable enough to support the population in the long term (I hope there will be, of course). The most sustainable framing practices are less intensive and result in less output per acre. That's just about survival, ignoring quality of life. I've heard it claimed we'd need 5 Earths for everyone on Earth to live a first-world-like lifestyle. Granted, we should drastically change our lifestyles.
Climate change will also likely lower the human population the Earth can support, and I think we will likely adopt even less sustainable practices to make up for the loss, accelerating our own demise; kicking and scratching and bringing all the ecosystems of the Earth down with us.
First world lifestyles are indeed unsustainable, but not due to food scarcity. We have a global overproduction of food, due in part to logistical inefficiencies but in a larger part due to free market economics with artificial scarcity to drive up prices.
Organic farm practices currently yield about 20-30% less than less sustainable ones. Current US food wastage is 40 % of produced goods. So at least the US could switch over it's food supply to organic farming and still feed everyone on the same acreage.
There's plenty other resource usage that first-worlders need to cut back on, mostly petrochemicals and plastics in everything from travel (make walkable cities) to novelty consumption (buy it for life).