Significantly reducing population (to, say, 3 billion or less) is probably our best bet against climate change. However, to do so in any remotely ethical way takes a lot of time.
The next step is energy use: both reduction of consumption and reduction of wasted energy, ie. less energy, more effectively used. Things like insulation fall under this category.
Because we're simply using too many resources for the world to remain unchanged in the medium term. We need to change.
Changing the energy mix without addressing this just postpones the consequences of our actions - and not even that much.
Basically: massive, world-wide societal changes are our best bet against climate change. Nuclear energy is our best bet to push the hot potato to (at best) the next generation.
People who claim the world is overpopulated probably live in a big city and never really travelled the world. Because there are vast remote places thousands of miles across without anyone living. I believe the world can easily hold 100 billion people without issues.
And besides, downscaling the world is not an option. Every organic structure needs to expand indefinitely. The only reason you would have decrease in population is world scale war. Sure we don't need that.
Not really, not all land can be used to host people. We need space to grow food, produce energy, have factories and offices, infrastructures...
We're already using more than what the entire emerged land can provide us each year (with the help of massive supplies of fossil fuel and derived products, which will eventually run out).
If we want to offer everyone a western lifestyle while being sustainable on the long run, the optimal world population is indeed estimated at around 1.5-2 billions (world population of 1950), and definitely under 3 billions.
Currently 60% of landmass is being used by humans directly (human habitat, pastures, crops). Of remaining 40% about a half is still being continuously influenced by humans (residential forests, patches of land between roads, etc.). And the land is being used unsustainably and almost all unused land is beyond the polar circle. So no, the Earth can not hold 100B people with current level of consumption.
And generally you don't want current consumption level, you want much higher standards, because majority of world's population is living in poverty. Which means that Earth can't hold 8B people either unless humans improve their land use efficiency significantly, which is unlikely.
You know, it's possible to convert ground dedicated to cattle or agriculture and develop that into cities. That's historically how we always do it. It's not like housing developments can only happen on land that no one owns and that isn't being used for anything at all.
What we do is change what the land is used for. So I don't think this argument holds any water, TBH.
By the time the frontier was closed -- say late 1800s, pretty much all US land was owned by someone and ostensibly dedicated to some use. Yet we managed to increase our population quite a bit since then.
All European land was spoken for by the early middle ages. Yet they managed to grow their population too.
For most of the Western United States --- points west of the 100th latitude --- the limiting factor is not land but water.
The city of Los Angeles has a watershed which extends 1,500 miles eastward, to the western extent of the Rocky Mountains. The reason much of the Western US appears more as an island archipellago than a continuously inhabited terrain is because there simply isn't enough water to fill taps, flush toilets, and run showers, let alone grow food or provide range for livestock on an unirrigated "dry-land" basis. Even attempting that proved a major environmenal disaster, the Dust Bowl of the 1920s and 1930s.
Sorry if it wasn't clear, but the problem of land use is not legal. Indeed you can build your city whenever you have enough will to and it has never been a problem. The problem is that humans destroy the ecosystem of the place they live in. And if humans use 100% of landmass then 100% of planet ecosystems are destroyed.
> it's possible to convert ground dedicated to cattle or agriculture and develop that into cities
Unless you find a way to generate food out of thin air, it's not possible. People living in the cities need to eat something.
In many cases the very reason why some places aren't populated is that living there is difficult (lack of water/arable land, weather conditions...), and in many cases they are useful (as forests, grasslands...) for living beings thriving elsewhere.
Joel E. Cohen is the Earth's leading authority on the question, and lives and works in New York City, which I strongly hope is not too rural for your taste. He's the first to say that the question and answer are complicated, but that does not mean that there are no limits.
He makes a much more complete exploration in his 1995 book, How many people can the earth support?, Cohen visits many estimates and/or claims regarding carrying capacity and explores the assumptions or logic behind many of these, which range from a low of about 100 million to highs over 12 trillion. Most such estimates cluster around 1--10 billion, and seem more credible than outliers, especially of the high-end group.
There are also a few articles discussing the question, though not with the detail of the book. Most are either paywalled or in PDF formats (which seems to strongly discourage online readers). Their quality and expertise strongly reward expended effort, do please read these if you're genuinely interested in the question.
Nobody asked to delete population. The challenge is to allow people to access familial planning, make contraception and abortions more widespread in developing countries, and stop or at least reduce pro-natal fiscal policies in the West.
> Wealth can be created. There's no limit to how much wealth can be created.
Traditionally wealth means stuff or ability to acquire stuff, which inherently consumes resources. I'm assuming you are referring to a reinterpretation of the term "wealth" to mean "a number in a computer system"?
Wealth is things that people value. Wealth creation is finished when individuals freely, and willingly exchange what they currently have (money) for valuables and continue to do that happily.
That can be software so yes, given that software can be created without limits and that software wealth creation is a subset of total wealth creation that alone is proof that wealth creation is unlimited.
However if you think material resources is the limiting factor then you're going to have to explain exactly what is going to stop scientists from developing new materials that can be used in new products or in existing products.
Why is inmoral? It's just population orderly control, and it will at some point just get constant so wealth will be limited to that constant and it will not grow anymore, economy doesn't need to grow to improve human welfare.
It's completely sane to think and discuss how we can in someway "delete" population.
It is immoral to think the world would be better with fewer people because what you're really saying is, 3 Billion people or whatever number shouldn't exist. If you think not existing is a good thing then we wouldn't be having this conversation would we?
I don't think anyone is saying those 3 billion people doesn't need to exists, no one. It's just give education teach people to have healthy families, the constant is a balance of population given by health, nature and economics.
If you're saying the world is overpopulated by X then you're saying X amount of people who exist shouldn't exist.
No matter how you paint it, you think it is a good thing for you to exist but not others.
"Balance of health, nature and economics" nice words for basically "I want fewer poor people in the world so let's help them sterilize themselves" instead of creating wealth which isn't inherently immoral and would actually have a positive impact if done rightly
There are too many people on the planet as it is. Earth Overshoot Day, the day by which we've collectively used up whatever the Earth can generate in a year, is moving earlier in the year. In 2021, it was July 29th.
From there on out, we're depleting the Earth's reserves - some of which can never come back.
This is, in my view, immoral. That's how I view things without giving back.
Your comments seem to try to twist the arguments into some sort of Thanos-snap, as if certain currently living people do not have a right to live. That is a strawman, no one is arguing that.
If you think X amount of poor people should not exist in the future then you must also think X amount of poor people should not exist in any other time period. Or do you think somehow it was a good thing to be poor in the past but now is bad?
The reality is that if you go back far enough your ancestors were poor by modern standards, and if someone have done what you want to do to the poor today you wouldn't exist.
It is immoral to want for others what you don't want for yourself
If you're saying the world is overpopulated by X then you're saying X amount of people who exist shouldn't exist.
The observation is that a given population and affluence level cannot sustainably exist. Not as a matter of morality or prescription, but as a simple matter of fact. The concept of overshoot, well established in ecology, is one that specifically notes that populations can for a finite period of time, exceed long-term carrying capacity, but will in time collapse. Overshoot itself --- population in excess of sustainable capacity --- occurs because of lag effects. Consequences of actions follow those actions, but not necessarily immediately.
Population dynamics, like diseases, don't distinguish on ethnicity, religioun, ancestry, or ideology. It is true that the poor tend to bear the brunt more heavily. I ascribe no moral justification to this, though theological and ideological doctrines of the past and present very frequently do, to their discredit.
Respondind that a fact may be legitimately rejected simply because its implications are too painful to consider is wishful thinking, the informal fallacy of argumentum ad consequentiam appeal to consequences.
Adding to that error, you then invent the utterly unsupported claim that those making the case for overpopulation mean for any reduction measures to only apply to others. This is in fact entirely a fiction of your own creation in this discussion. It does of course make answering the claim all the more difficult. I point out that as a fabulous claim there is no need to do so.
As I've noted before in this thread, you seem bent on repeatedly dragging this discussion into moral territory, in a manner which makes substantial and productive discussion difficult. It would benefit the discussion, and you might learn something, were you to not do so.
I have asked repeatedly for what exactly are the limiting factors that will make population unsustainable and there hasn't been satisfactory answers that could defend your position or make me rethink.
You should be able to defend a position that other people think is immoral specially if you think is morally good.
The Wikipedia link and theory is based on a computer model. No model can predict future innovation because part of future innovation is non linear and hence unpredictable utilizing current trends.
So you have something you can't predict (future innovation and how that will affect energy and new materials).
The burden of proof is on you given that you want to do something unnatural and immoral: make sterile millions of people.
If you want to sterilize yourself I don't agree with it but I cant stop you but that's not enough for you folks, you presume you have the right to promote mass sterilization so yes I'm going to say it for what it is: immoral.
You're also showing a pattern of deflecting and projecting rather than addressing the specific issues addressed by others.
On Wikipedia: I link to it as a general reference. Again, there is a long and large literature, the article is just one of numerous jumping-off points. There are others, such as Google Scholar:
Arguing based on unknowables ("future innovation is non linear and hence unpredictable utilizing current trends") is literally an appeal to ignorance. Arguing from the point that a premise is unknown and unknowable does not prove conclusions premised on that premise being true:
You are putting words in my mouth regarding what you're again fabricating as another's argument. I said no such thing, that is again your fiction. I'll merely respond that in advocating unsustainable population overshoot that you are committing many billions to lives of poverty and misery. And committing the fallacy of composition to boot.
Burden of proof relates to factual claims, not moral ones. Those are ultimately goverened by the is-ought relation.
And if you'll read elsewhere in this thread, I've actually already addressed your specious and repeated question:
Again, I await your answer to my first question, though with low expectations.
Serious question: Are you commenting to try to better understand a question and viewpoints about it, or only to promote your own views and cast aspersions? Because your comments strongly suggest the latter.
There's no limit to how much wealth can be created.
Citation requested.
That, and other statements of your comment, are articles of ideology and belief, not scientific statements. You're attempting to moralise what is a factual matter. That is as effective as a moral theory of disease, which is to say, not at all.
Ask the pro-depopulation who should not be allowed to have X+ children. I not those people, how many they maybe, pollute less all together than those blaming population growth.
The issue is not with the population but the few who ruin everything for everyone.
I agree we should help curb down our fertility rate worldwide. However this would take at least 50 years before it starts showing effect. It's too long a time when facing an environmental emergency.
That is obviously the only answer (unless cold fusion comes out soon) but it's also the only answer that can't make anyone money. (Except maybe Pfizer, if the tinhat crowd is right.)
The next step is energy use: both reduction of consumption and reduction of wasted energy, ie. less energy, more effectively used. Things like insulation fall under this category.
Because we're simply using too many resources for the world to remain unchanged in the medium term. We need to change.
Changing the energy mix without addressing this just postpones the consequences of our actions - and not even that much.
Basically: massive, world-wide societal changes are our best bet against climate change. Nuclear energy is our best bet to push the hot potato to (at best) the next generation.