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Always good to remind people overpopulation is not a problem when I see news like this.
Our consumption habits are much more detrimental to earth than how many of us there are (most of us live in poverty). As countries develop, the UN estimates the 12th billion human will never be born.
Poor 12th billion mother-to-be. She'll push and push but the baby just won't come out 😔
Our consumption habits are much more detrimental to earth than how many of us there are (most of us live in poverty).
The best way to reduce consumption is to not exist.
The rules and ethics around who gets to exist or not exist are more complex than fucking not being aggressively destructive with the plentiful resource we have.
If you put it on a graph of how many people it takes to sustain the society you want versus the impact it has on consumption, you'd see you can't draw a line that makes sense with our current way of life. Cut too low and you don't have enough people. Cut too high and you end up with the same problems you think are due to overpopulation. Run the numbers, find your ideal spot and tell us how much of all this is actually number of people.
Consumption doesn't scale exponentially or even linearly with population, it does for the most egregious industries that run the world today. The math doesn't check out, dude. The only variable left is to change the way we consume. We have the economic and technological means to do it, with nothing but greed and cheating keeping us from it, to serve the few.
This isn't even about communism or socialism either, we are far far beyond what is necessary in terms of capitalistic gains, like very very far beyond. You're afraid your way of life would change but it wouldn't really, as the video you didn't watch clearly states.
And if that doesn't make sense to you, then by all means "be the change you want to see in the world".
All your essay is unraveled by just taking a plane and looking down. In many biomes, humans have left no room for anything else besides ourselves.
And if that doesn't make sense to you, then by all means "be the change you want to see in the world".
Yeah, I'm doing just that, by not reproducing.
I mean, most of the earth's real estate is taken up by industries for the purpose of consumption, not for housing.
I still think that less humans is better. Restrictive birth should be more common.
The problem with this approach is evident in China right now, where they will experience a pure demographic catastrophe where the share of people in working age will go down significantly, meaning their economy will start contracting and people won't be happy because this will directly affect their lifestyle.
where the share of people in working age will go down significantly
That's happening in most developed nations, btw.
What if you think humans are the problem?
Then you didn't watch the video, and you'd be hard pressed to suggest a "human" oriented solution that would improve things permanently.
That's fair, but my objection to having kids is more due to the current capitalist structure than carrying capacity of the planet.
I don't want to spend my own resources rearing another slave for billionaires.
Nuts take, planet is absolutely overpopulated with human beings, 100% undeniably. It isn't just some abstract number, it's the farms, fuel, logging, goods, the absolute everything a single human being partakes in or experiences. Human beings aren't even managing to properly care, feed, and clothe the humans that are already here, and more igual systems won't address the continuing need to scale into the environment and destroy even more land that nature needs to maintain the biosphere. I super promise we do not have enough even now, and even when the population was 3 billion we were overconsuming irreplaceable natural resources that other creatures were using.
There are more than enough resources to go around, and we aren't going to start killing off new people to sustain greedy and wasteful old people. There's no solution you could suggest regarding population count that wouldn't be extremely short sighted and temporary.
Population is growth is not a unstoppable phenomenon and will soon stagnate. The problem is how much we've allowed single human beings to take. We could all live like we made 100k a year even at 12 billion people, if only it meant a handful of people weren't allowed to hoard and cheat society out of enormous amounts of wealth.
I think you simply underestimate how much a billion is. You underestimate how much water 12 billion people need compared to how much nestle shoves in bottles for free to ship off to another part of the world. You also clearly didn't watch the video.
Some fun links from the World Economic Forum and United Nations for you:
Global freshwater demand will exceed supply 40% by 2030 and 90% of global top soil and arable land is at risk of depletion by 2050.
Good luck sustaining 8+ billion people in your fantasy land utopia when there's no fresh water or top soil.
That water ain't being taken by my fucking shower and dishwasher, and not by yours either. A handful of corporations heavily exploit these resources while giving nothing back. They ain't doing it for you and me. We could have 1b people and that would just allow the remaining to consume and waste more, and die of climate disasters anyway.
This is the only reasonable argument for overpopulation I've seen. We have all the resources we need for everyone to have a great life, but that'll change as arable and livable land becomes more and more scarce. The solution to this is halting and reversing climate change, or making things a lot more sustainable if the damage we (mainly corporations) have done can't be reversed. Or just kill/sterilize people en masse if you ask your average overpopulation believer
Technically yes, with perfect or near-perfect management, we could double our population and minimize the damage. But realistically, our resource usage will certainly continue at a rate similar to or more than it is now.
The good thing is, birth rates are proportional to available resources, quality of life, and education; and birthrates globally are already on a decline in non-developing countries. Low birthrates have negative implications on society, but for the planet as a whole, less humans are a good thing
There are more than enough resources to go around, and we aren't going to start killing off new people to sustain greedy and wasteful old people.
I mean, resource depletion is a thing..... I'm not sure anyone can academically honestly claim that there is enough fresh water dispersed around the globe to where it would prevent mass migration.
Population is growth is not a unstoppable phenomenon and will soon stagnate.
Right, but that's not what people are claiming. Our ability to sustain this level of population is completely dependent on complex logistics systems, built around an economical model based on exponential growth.
We could probably sustain a population of 12 billion people with the complicated system of trade and shipping we have now, but that's assuming the trade and logistical system will remain feasible in the future.
In reality the current global population is higher than what the globe could support without the use of nitrogen and phosphate fertilizer derived from fossil fuels. If we ran out of fossils fuels, or if the trade of these fertilizers goes up in price due to our departure of utilizing fossil fuels..... We're likely to see famines on a scale not seen in hundreds of years.
overpopulation is not about minimum requirements to sustain life in individuals to me. Its about what population the planet can sustain while renewing the resources used each year for each individual in the population to enjoy a modern, educated, fullfilling life. I agree there are little to no solutions for it. I swear though that population peak has been predicted for awhile as just a bit off but we seem to keep on growing. I think we will grow till we crash more than likely.
What have you studied to conclude it will continue to grow? Just your intuition?
The professionals in the video (with sources in the comments) have studied the growth and we're right on track.
There are more than enough riches on earth for every single on of those 12b people to live a modern life. Which is more than can be said about people living that life in 2023. It's not more people that made the wage gap.
Source: Trust me
I find the idea that people actually think overpopulation is a non issue actually a threat to the survival of the human race, the overall biosphere, and the planet.
I'm not sure why this understanding changed, but it's a Western cultural perspective with the younger generation from what I can tell, it does not reflect reality.
Climate science, and history are a huge passion of mine, I'm beyond certain about this, and it seems impossible that so many people would be willfully ignorant to the point of denial about things so obvious and self evident.
I think overpopulation is a non-issue because I prefer to follow the data over my own intuition. And the data shows that population is already slowing and will peak without intervention.
And I think it's extraordinarily important to reiterate that point because of the extreme dangers of any attempt at population control to devolve into outright eugenics and genocide.
https://www.pop.org/overpopulation-myth/
The most effective and the only ethical means of population control is a combination of increasing the availability of birth control, providing family planning education, and reducing child mortality. Yes this needs to be part of our climate change solutions, we're doing this, and it's already working.
Tell me you want an excuse to commit genocide without telling me you want an excuse to commit genocide
For Jesus sake, I'm talking about the long term survival of the human race and all species on the planet and you are trying to reduce this to some kind of political talking point.
How do we reduce the population then? Do you have an answer other than genocide?
Of course there are solutions other than genocide, it all just comes down to the timescale available. I do unfortunately think that the situation is urgent now, but on a longer timescale it could look like China's one child policy, or programs with incentives for voluntary birth control access, maybe even sterilization.
There are lots of ways to solve this that range from completely or questionably moral, to socially responsible and planned. I care about the long term survival of the human race, and the rest of the planet, I could absolutely be talked into putting that far ahead of my own well-being depending on the circumstances.
Where in this video does it state that overpopulation is not a problem? The message the video is conveying, as I've interpreted it, is that the bleak, distopian vision of an overpopulated planet is not likely based on historical trends: as we develop as a society, the overall standard of living has improved, fertility rates reduce to a stable or even shrinking population, etc., etc.
The video does not address the current state of our overpopulated planet, and the impact humans continue to have on animal populations, biomes or climate change. None of these things are likely to be easily reversed within even a few generations, and with the current trend, will likely only continue to get worse in our lifetimes.
In my opinion, overpopulation is a problem today, and while it may reduce social inequalities for humans, reproductive rates cannot drop quickly enough to make a dent in the lasting impact our species is having on issues affecting the planet as a whole.
Nice! We did it, Reddit! Okay maybe not much contribution from Redditors but still!
I remember when it was six billion. Whole lotta fuckin going on. I did my part to slow down the train; I'm childless. Elon thinks I shouldn't get to vote.
I didn't know that about Elon but it doesn't surprise me. That man sure has some silly notions.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The human species has topped 8 billion, with longer lifespans offsetting fewer births, but world population growth continues a long-term trend of slowing down, the US Census Bureau said Thursday.
The bureau estimates that the global population exceeded the threshold on 26 September, though the agency said to take this precise date with a grain of salt.
The United Nations estimated the number was passed 10 months earlier, having declared 22 November 2022, the “Day of 8 Billion”, the Census Bureau pointed out in a statement.
Some of the most populous countries, such as India and Nigeria, haven’t conducted censuses in over a decade, according to the bureau.
The minimum number of such births necessary to replace both the father and mother for a neutral world population is 2.1, demographers say.
Israel, Ethiopia and Papua New Guinea rank among countries with higher-than-replacement fertility rates of up to 5.
The original article contains 422 words, the summary contains 148 words. Saved 65%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
That's a lot of hairless apes running around