Population

[bilby]

Environmental impact increases as the lifestyle and consumption rate of this 1% grows into 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 10 - 20 - 30 - 50% of the world's population and upward.

Sure.

And that consumption growth would happen regardless of whether the population stays the same, or divides by two, or four, or eight.

It's a problem that cannot be solved by population reduction.

The only solutions are to prevent people from climbing out of poverty; Push the already wealthy into poverty; Or find a way to be wealthy in a sustainable way.

The first two options are immoral and inhumane; And attempts to reduce population don't even address the issue, so we needn't worry that they would also likely need to be immoral and inhumane.

We need to stop fart-arseing around, wringing our hands over the irrelevance of absolute population, and start making wealthy people behave in a sustainable fashion - for example, by replacing fossil fuels with ultra low carbon dioxide emissions energy sources, and by using low impact energy to enable the widespread recycling of materials.

Then we can have wealth without fucking shit up.

 

[Swammerdami]

IIRC, I was complaining about the old software not properly supporting multi-quote. May I retract that complaint?

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No shit. But the evidence says that those who think it's relevant are wrong.

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The correct answer was divulged weeks ago. What's left? Sado-masochism and gratuitous insults?

 

[Jokodo]

Only when fossilized stuff is dug out from under layers of sand does the balance shift.

So you are saying that human population is not a factor with regards to environmental health?

Human consumption is a factor with regards to environmental health. Population is only insofar as it can be used as a proxy for consumption - and it is known to be a piss-poor proxy for consumption.

 

[Jokodo]

DBT,
You are making entirely too much sense. Our primitive limbic systems want thoughtless, emotional, unintegrated, dopamine-laced solutions. Get with the program already.

Quoting a three-paragraph-block of a paper that is, at best, tangentially related to the topic under discussion without indicating the relevant couple of sentences one thinks help clarify the issue at hand isn't "making entirely too much sense".

Not by a long shot.

It's not complicated....two people consume more than one, four people consume more than two, eight more than four......

Population is a major factor. As is lifestyle, the issue being a combination of numbers and consumption rate.

Yes, and zero people and 10,000,000 baboons consume more than one, two, four, or eight people.

As a general rule of thumb, most of what plants produce will be eaten by animals, homo sapiens or not, except for the fraction that's fossilised.

Only when fossilised stuff is dug out from under layers of sand does the balance shift.

Doesn't relate, sorry. The issue is consumption rate in relation to environmental impact. 10 billion baboons are certain to impact their environment to a far greater extent than a fraction of that number. Even with minimal consumption per head, numbers count.

I *am* sorry to repeat myself.

As a general rule of thumb, most of what plants produce will be eaten by animals [eta: and funghi], homo sapiens or not, except for the fraction that's fossilised.

Repeating something doesn't make it relevent.

The irony being that you still haven't indicated which bit of the three-paragraph blob you pasted without comment you think relevant.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

Only when fossilized stuff is dug out from under layers of sand does the balance shift.

So you are saying that human population is not a factor with regards to environmental health?

Human consumption is a factor with regards to environmental health. Population is only insofar as it can be used as a proxy for consumption - and it is known to be a piss-poor proxy for consumption.

Are you sure about that? Can you give an example? It seems that a segment of the population enjoying high consumption is enabled by another segment of the population experiencing low consumption. The growing population enables high consumption within certain sub-populations but that higher consumption cannot occur unless there are sub-populations at low consumption. Doesn't that make sense?

 

[Politesse]

Only when fossilized stuff is dug out from under layers of sand does the balance shift.

So you are saying that human population is not a factor with regards to environmental health?

Human consumption is a factor with regards to environmental health. Population is only insofar as it can be used as a proxy for consumption - and it is known to be a piss-poor proxy for consumption.

Are you sure about that? Can you give an example? It seems that a segment of the population enjoying high consumption is enabled by another segment of the population experiencing low consumption. The growing population enables high consumption within certain sub-populations but that higher consumption cannot occur unless there are sub-populations at low consumption. Doesn't that make sense?

So your solution to over-consumption of the wealthy is to very slowly decrease the population of the poor people the wealthy exploit, until there are too few workers to produce the goods they're overconsuming, and/or the wealth they use to acquire them??

 

[steve_bank]

An example? American farm workers have a high percentage of illegal immigrants with no rights. It has always served to keep our food prices low.

I watched a 40s movie Border Incident about human trafficking on the southern birder to supply American business with cheap labor. Illegals are not a new problem. People looked the ohter way.

Our gluttonous grocery stores are kept supplied by cheap labor.

What is happening now is those at the bottom are gaining some political power.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

An example? American farm workers have a high percentage of illegal immigrants with no rights. It has always served to keep our food prices low.

I watched a 40s movie Border Incident about human trafficking on the southern birder to supply American business with cheap labor. Illegals are not a new problem. People looked the ohter way.

Our gluttonous grocery stores are kept supplied by cheap labor.

What is happening now is those at the bottom are gaining some political power.

I was actually looking for an example of how total consumption can rise without an increase in the overall population, as per Jokodo's post. Wealth is relative and therefore so is consumption. If everyone today, all eight billion or so of us were all living in caves or as nomadic hunter gatherers what kind of planetary environment would we have out there? Is that sustainable? Would there be any trees left on the planet?

 

[steve_bank]

An example? American farm workers have a high percentage of illegal immigrants with no rights. It has always served to keep our food prices low.

I watched a 40s movie Border Incident about human trafficking on the southern birder to supply American business with cheap labor. Illegals are not a new problem. People looked the ohter way.

Our gluttonous grocery stores are kept supplied by cheap labor.

What is happening now is those at the bottom are gaining some political power.

I was actually looking for an example of how total consumption can rise without an increase in the overall population, as per Jokodo's post. Wealth is relative and therefore so is consumption. If everyone today, all eight billion or so of us were all living in caves or as nomadic hunter gatherers what kind of planetary environment would we have out there? Is that sustainable? Would there be any trees left on the planet?

My mistake.

 

[DBT]

An example? American farm workers have a high percentage of illegal immigrants with no rights. It has always served to keep our food prices low.

I watched a 40s movie Border Incident about human trafficking on the southern birder to supply American business with cheap labor. Illegals are not a new problem. People looked the ohter way.

Our gluttonous grocery stores are kept supplied by cheap labor.

What is happening now is those at the bottom are gaining some political power.

I was actually looking for an example of how total consumption can rise without an increase in the overall population, as per Jokodo's post. Wealth is relative and therefore so is consumption. If everyone today, all eight billion or so of us were all living in caves or as nomadic hunter gatherers what kind of planetary environment would we have out there? Is that sustainable? Would there be any trees left on the planet?

My mistake.

As living standards in developing nations are raised - as the should - people are able to afford to buy more things, cars, boats, appliances, clothes, travel, etc, which inevitably increases consumption.

Eight to ten billion people living lavish developed nation lifestyle must necessarily put more pressure on ecosystems than two billion.....which is not intended to mean that we should "get rid of all the poor," just that we have a looming problem in the years ahead.

 

[DBT]

DBT,
You are making entirely too much sense. Our primitive limbic systems want thoughtless, emotional, unintegrated, dopamine-laced solutions. Get with the program already.

Quoting a three-paragraph-block of a paper that is, at best, tangentially related to the topic under discussion without indicating the relevant couple of sentences one thinks help clarify the issue at hand isn't "making entirely too much sense".

Not by a long shot.

It's not complicated....two people consume more than one, four people consume more than two, eight more than four......

Population is a major factor. As is lifestyle, the issue being a combination of numbers and consumption rate.

Yes, and zero people and 10,000,000 baboons consume more than one, two, four, or eight people.

As a general rule of thumb, most of what plants produce will be eaten by animals, homo sapiens or not, except for the fraction that's fossilised.

Only when fossilised stuff is dug out from under layers of sand does the balance shift.

Doesn't relate, sorry. The issue is consumption rate in relation to environmental impact. 10 billion baboons are certain to impact their environment to a far greater extent than a fraction of that number. Even with minimal consumption per head, numbers count.

I *am* sorry to repeat myself.

As a general rule of thumb, most of what plants produce will be eaten by animals [eta: and funghi], homo sapiens or not, except for the fraction that's fossilised.

Repeating something doesn't make it relevent.

The irony being that you still haven't indicated which bit of the three-paragraph blob you pasted without comment you think relevant.

The article speaks for itself, it describes the issue of ecosystem degradation in terms of population growth and economic activity....which is the impact of population numbers and consumption rate has on ecosystems and environment. Ten million obviously not having the impact of one billion if both are engaged in the same practices.

 

[Swammerdami]

... Eight Tanzanian farm labourers consume several orders of magnitude less than one Jeff Bezos.

Cite? Or are you using an irrelevant definition of "consumption"? ("Billionaire bought a million-dollar painting, an OIL painting: think of the CO2 emissions! And how do you think they make burnt umber paint?")

Private jets account for about 0.1% of total CO2 emissions: a big number we might want to reduce. But it doesn't change the fact that U.S.A. emits more than three times the CO2 of prosperous France per capita, nor that France has less than twice the per capita emissions of poorer countries like Egypt or Vietnam.

Pretending that each person consumes roughly the same amount is a great way to reach a very badly mistaken conclusion, because the amount consumed by one person depends on which person we are considering

Population is a major factor.

It really isn't.

As is lifestyle, the issue being a combination of numbers and consumption rate.

Consumption rate is almost entirely unrelated to population numbers. The consumption rate of the 1% dwarfs that of the bottom 50%.

I don't know where you get your numbers. India emits more CO2 than EU and UK combined. Just so we're on the same page, am I correct that your "consumption" includes the million dollars that billionaire spent on a painting?

And anyway, I thought you were in the "Ten billion people? Twenty billion? Who cares! Dilithium crystals will save us!" camp. Aren't you rooting for poor Africans to fly on jets and eat more beef?

 

[bilby]

... Eight Tanzanian farm labourers consume several orders of magnitude less than one Jeff Bezos.

Cite? Or are you using an irrelevant definition of "consumption"? ("Billionaire bought a million-dollar painting, an OIL painting: think of the CO2 emissions! And how do you think they make burnt umber paint?")

Private jets account for about 0.1% of total CO2 emissions: a big number we might want to reduce. But it doesn't change the fact that U.S.A. emits more than three times the CO2 of prosperous France per capita, nor that France has less than twice the per capita emissions of poorer countries like Egypt or Vietnam.

Pretending that each person consumes roughly the same amount is a great way to reach a very badly mistaken conclusion, because the amount consumed by one person depends on which person we are considering

Population is a major factor.

It really isn't.

As is lifestyle, the issue being a combination of numbers and consumption rate.

Consumption rate is almost entirely unrelated to population numbers. The consumption rate of the 1% dwarfs that of the bottom 50%.

I don't know where you get your numbers. India emits more CO2 than EU and UK combined. Just so we're on the same page, am I correct that your "consumption" includes the million dollars that billionaire spent on a painting?

And anyway, I thought you were in the "Ten billion people? Twenty billion? Who cares! Dilithium crystals will save us!" camp. Aren't you rooting for poor Africans to fly on jets and eat more beef?

I wonder why you haven't bothered to attempt to understand my actual position, rather than attacking that strawman.

I also wonder why you chose France as your exemplar of a developed nation with low environmental impact per capita. What could possibly be the reason for France to be so much ahead of the pack?

 

[Elixir]

Too many for what?

Too many to eat.
When a volcanic eruption or asteroid strike causes global crop and livestock failures, there will be more dead bodies than the survivors can eat.
At a more optimal "sustainable" population level, the survivors of such an event would be able to consume all the dead, but just barely.

 

[Swammerdami]

I wonder why you haven't bothered to attempt to understand my actual position, rather than attacking that strawman.

Your position — that humans' effect on the planet is the same whether their population is 1 billion or 10 billion — is wrong, totally wrong. I addressed some of your blundering in the post you just quoted but didn't answer. My question about how you derived your claim was sincere. (I guess I must assume going forward that the money billionaires spend on paintings IS included in "consumption" when you make your extravagant claims.)

I've tried to address your fallacy from several directions but you remain adamant. To me, your position is so wrong that I'm befuddled by it. Two sides seem to be talking past each other in this thread, refusing to accept simple truths.

Part of the problem, I think, is that reducing human population to, say, 1 billion, and then keeping it there might be very difficult for several reasons. I have repeated over and over and over that I offer no solution. It just seems silly to me and anti-intellectual to mis-diagnose a problem out of some "political correctness."

In this thread, whenever I mention that high human population increases environmental damage, I am accused of planning genocide! If someone in a Covid thread mentions that overweight is a risk factor, would he be accused of wanting to send the obese to the death camps? If we mention the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition, would we be branded sympathizers to Islamic terrorism?

I think not. This peculiar Pavlovian reflex seems most visible just here in the Population thread.

 

[bilby]

I wonder why you haven't bothered to attempt to understand my actual position, rather than attacking that strawman.

Your position — that humans' effect on the planet is the same whether their population is 1 billion or 10 billion — is wrong, totally wrong.

That's not my position.

I remain mystified by your apparent inability to read the posts I have made in this thread, which set out my position very clearly.

You don't strike me as stupid, and I am certain that I have never written "Humans' effect on the planet is the same whether their population is 1 billion or 10 billion", so why you imagine I think that is beyond me.

I addressed some of your blundering in the post you just quoted but didn't answer.

What you addressed has fuck-all to do with me; If you want answers, you'll need to ask the person who came up with the points you addressed - which as far as I can tell, was you, imagining what I might have said had I been a total moron.

I am not responsible for claims made by your imagination, even when you attribute them to me.

 

[Swammerdami]

I remain mystified by your apparent inability to read the posts I have made in this thread, which set out my position very clearly.

I'm not going to hunt through the thread, but ...

I mentioned that hydro-electric power alone could provide electricity to a smaller human population without the need for fossil fuels. Didn't you claim that humans would have used just as much fossil fuels anyway?

I mentioned that aquifers are being depleted throughout the world. Many predict that future wars will be fought over water. It was someone else IIRC who dismissed this worry by proposing to pipeline water, e.g. from the Great Lakes to the California desert. (If such projects are viable why are they not done already? And do such projects have their own environmental costs? Look what happened when the Soviets diverted water from the Aral Sea.) I forget: What's YOUR stand on aquifer depletion?

 

[Politesse]

I wonder why you haven't bothered to attempt to understand my actual position, rather than attacking that strawman.

Your position — that humans' effect on the planet is the same whether their population is 1 billion or 10 billion — is wrong, totally wrong. I addressed some of your blundering in the post you just quoted but didn't answer. My question about how you derived your claim was sincere. (I guess I must assume going forward that the money billionaires spend on paintings IS included in "consumption" when you make your extravagant claims.)

I've tried to address your fallacy from several directions but you remain adamant. To me, your position is so wrong that I'm befuddled by it. Two sides seem to be talking past each other in this thread, refusing to accept simple truths.

Part of the problem, I think, is that reducing human population to, say, 1 billion, and then keeping it there might be very difficult for several reasons. I have repeated over and over and over that I offer no solution. It just seems silly to me and anti-intellectual to mis-diagnose a problem out of some "political correctness."

In this thread, whenever I mention that high human population increases environmental damage, I am accused of planning genocide! If someone in a Covid thread mentions that overweight is a risk factor, would he be accused of wanting to send the obese to the death camps? If we mention the excesses of the Spanish Inquisition, would we be branded sympathizers to Islamic terrorism?

I think not. This peculiar Pavlovian reflex seems most visible just here in the Population thread.

We have the option, in the case of obesity, of trying therapeutic means to reduce the weight of the afflicted. The only way to "reduce population" quickly is to kill people en masse. You admit yourself that you can think of no ethically palatable solution to overpopulation.

And what has been said, will be said, and is still true is not that the ecological footprint of 10 billion people is identical to that of 1 billion.

What I have said, repeatedly, is two-fold:

1. The population of the planet cannot be meaningfully reduced by ethically sound means, at least not within a short time frame.

2. Doing so would not end any of our significant ecological crises, whose origin for the most part is the over-exploitation of wild resources and abuse of the lower classes, not legitimate needs of the majority of human beings given sufficient creativity.

I could see your point about not denying scientific truths simply for political reasons, but I have two objections to your application of this principle to the situation at hand:

1. Malthusianism is pseudo-science, not actual science. If there were tangible, concrete evidence that we were above the "carrying capacity" of the planet, or that it is "in the nature" of the human population to expand exponentially until violently curbed, I myself might consider switching sides. But so far no one has been able to offer such evidence, and I am not just referring to those participating in this thread. I've been studying issues relating to cultural ecology since I began my training in the social sciences more than twenty years ago, and I watch the literature on this topic with interest. I have yet to see the case convincingly made that curbing population should or even could be our priority in reducing ecological threats.

2. Given the above, speculation can be dangerous, and if the potential consequences of a certain line of speculation are known to be extremely severe, I think morality dictates subtlety, at the very least, in pursuing it. "Political correctness", whatever the hell that means, has nothing to do with it. I don't want you to run for political office, just to stop spreading misinformation.

 

[DBT]

Quote:
''How can we judge whether cornucopians, or so-called Malthusians, will be right in the long run? One way would be to keep a running account of key biophysical factors on which the prospering of our species depends. If an alarm bell sounds for any of those key factors, we should sit up and pay attention. After all, Liebig’s Law (another foundation of ecology) tells us that growth limits are set not by total resources available, but by the single scarcest necessary resource.

Fortunately, somebody is keeping those accounts. Indeed, a cottage industry of environmental scientists, led by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Center and Will Steffen of the Australian National University, has identified nine planetary boundaries that we transgress at our peril: climate change, ocean acidification, biosphere integrity, biochemical flows, land-system change, freshwater use, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, and the introduction of novel entities into environments.

We are currently exceeding the “safe” marks for four of these boundaries:

 

[Politesse]

That we face severe ecological calamity is not in dispute.