Population

[DBT]

Scale is the issue. With a stable population of one or two billion, we would most likely not be having this discussion.

 

[Politesse]

Scale is the issue. With a stable population of one or two billion, we would most likely not be having this discussion.

What happens to the other 7 billion?

 

[bigfield]

I don't know where you get your numbers. India emits more CO2 than EU and UK combined.

India's emissions are high because it manufactures cheap, environmentally damaging goods that are consumed by Western countries.

The solution has to be to reduce the demand for those goods. There's no point in India reducing supply, because other poor countries will just take up the job of supplying the West's huge demand for goods. What are you going to do, wipe out the population of the entire Global South until no-one can make cheap shit anymore?

The only practical solution here is to change what we consume and how we make it in the first place. We need clean energy and sustainable materials, just for starters. And in future, when they US shoots its billionaires into space, fucking leave them up there.

 

[DBT]

Scale is the issue. With a stable population of one or two billion, we would most likely not be having this discussion.

What happens to the other 7 billion?

Voluntary birth control, good standard of living and education for all, the other seven billion would not have been born.

 

[Swammerdami]

...
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.

What about China's One-Child One-Generation program? Or isn't that time frame short enough for you?

What I have said repeatedly is that there is no burden on me to propose a good population reduction method.
I am a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist.

Mathematicians frequently use the Riemann Hypothesis in published "proofs." (Of course they state clearly that their proof depends on RH.) In your view is this improper of them? No? Why then am I not allowed to point out that high population is a problem, if I lack a solution?

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.

Yes or No: Have aquifers been depleted by the high human population? I am NOT asking what MIGHT be accomplished in future if sufficiently creative individuals invent dilithium crystals; I'm asking about the real world in the year 2021.

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....

I think it's in the nature of many or most species to expand until curbed. Typically they expand to fill a niche, or fill it as well as they can in the presence of competitors and predators. But does Homo technologia have any competitors or predators (other than coronavirus!)?

A huge percentage of the Earth is now devoted to feeding mankind. Habitat destruction is severe; species are going extinct. Does this bother you? Or do you fall for the Christian meme that Earth was created to serve Man?

Insects are an important Class of animals; scientists now estimate that terrestrial insects' populations are decreasing by an AVERAGE of 10% per decade. (It is much higher for some species and in some locales.)
A. Should this concern us?
B. Would it have happened if the human population were 1 billion instead of 8 billion?

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

That we face severe ecological calamity is not in dispute.

And of course we can do nothing about it.

 

[bigfield]

Scale is the issue. With a stable population of one or two billion, we would most likely not be having this discussion.

What happens to the other 7 billion?

Voluntary birth control, good standard of living and education for all, the other seven billion would not have been born.

That was never going to happen. That would have required 20th and 21st century medical, technological, economic and social advances, including some that still haven't happened yet, to arrive in the 19th century.

 

[bigfield]

What about China's One-Child One-Generation program?

How could anyone consider that program ethical?

 

[Politesse]

That we face severe ecological calamity is not in dispute.

And of course we can do nothing about it.

There are a lot of things we can do about the many-varied threats we face. That's why it upsets me when people focus their attention on misanthropic red herrings instead of advocating for meaningful reform of ecologically relevant practices.

 

[Politesse]

Scale is the issue. With a stable population of one or two billion, we would most likely not be having this discussion.

What happens to the other 7 billion?

Voluntary birth control, good standard of living and education for all, the other seven billion would not have been born.

I agree this is a possibility, but that's now irrelevant. The people alive now, are alive now, and most do not have a good standard of living or access to critical resources.

 

[Politesse]

...
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.

What about China's One-Child One-Generation program? Or isn't that time frame short enough for you?

What I have said repeatedly is that there is no burden on me to propose a good population reduction method.
I am a descriptivist, not a prescriptivist.

Mathematicians frequently use the Riemann Hypothesis in published "proofs." (Of course they state clearly that their proof depends on RH.) In your view is this improper of them? No? Why then am I not allowed to point out that high population is a problem, if I lack a solution?

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.

Yes or No: Have aquifers been depleted by the high human population? I am NOT asking what MIGHT be accomplished in future if sufficiently creative individuals invent dilithium crystals; I'm asking about the real world in the year 2021.

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....

I think it's in the nature of many or most species to expand until curbed. Typically they expand to fill a niche, or fill it as well as they can in the presence of competitors and predators. But does Homo technologia have any competitors or predators (other than coronavirus!)?

A huge percentage of the Earth is now devoted to feeding mankind. Habitat destruction is severe; species are going extinct. Does this bother you? Or do you fall for the Christian meme that Earth was created to serve Man?

Insects are an important Class of animals; scientists now estimate that terrestrial insects' populations are decreasing by an AVERAGE of 10% per decade. (It is much higher for some species and in some locales.)
A. Should this concern us?
B. Would it have happened if the human population were 1 billion instead of 8 billion?

If you were a descriptivist, you'd be able to show your work. Critically, your data. Instead of asking me about pure hypotheticals with no relevance to current world events. Data on China's population over time is easily available, you should know that the program did not, in fact, measurably reduce the overall population.

 

[T.G.G. Moogly]

That we face severe ecological calamity is not in dispute.

And of course we can do nothing about it.

There are a lot of things we can do about the many-varied threats we face. That's why it upsets me when people focus their attention on misanthropic red herrings instead of advocating for meaningful reform of ecologically relevant practices.

Give me an example.

 

[Politesse]

That we face severe ecological calamity is not in dispute.

And of course we can do nothing about it.

There are a lot of things we can do about the many-varied threats we face. That's why it upsets me when people focus their attention on misanthropic red herrings instead of advocating for meaningful reform of ecologically relevant practices.

Give me an example.

There's a nice diagram of the serious threats we're facing back in post #279; I think if we were making serious progress on all nine of those boundaries, our collective situation would feel significantly less like a crisis. I would recommend taking urgent action on those concrete problems, rather than vaguely hoping that population reduction will somehow, eventually, automatically produce results on any of those fronts.



This other diagram, from the same website DBT linked the first from, shows scale of crisis concentrating in the categories of biosphere integrity and biogeochemical flows, making these logical starting points. Slowly killing off humanity and hoping for the best is unlikely to help in either case; what we need to do is actively manage mineral extraction and curtail damaging landscape usage, while enacting very strict controls on waste disposal especially into maritime environments. Even if population reduction would somehow help with all of the above, it wouldn't be fast enough to deal with the present crises in progress. There's no point in slowly killing off seven billion people in a grinding, century-long process if by the time they're all gone, the oceans have acidifed past the point of habitability anyway. Who are we "saving the planet" for, if we let the biosphere die while waiting for Malthus to rise from the grave and save us the lazy way?

 

[bilby]

Scale is the issue. With a stable population of one or two billion, we would most likely not be having this discussion.

Sure we would.

We would just be having it a few decades later.

If humans burn all the accessible coal oil and gas (and so far, they do), then the resulting carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere will be calamitous.

Two billion people behaving the way our actual population behaved since the Industrial revolution would take a little longer to do this, but they would still do it. Unless, like us, they decided to try not to, and unlike us, they acted on that decision.

 

[bilby]

I don't know where you get your numbers. India emits more CO2 than EU and UK combined.

India's emissions are high because it manufactures cheap, environmentally damaging goods that are consumed by Western countries.

The solution has to be to reduce the demand for those goods.

I am sure it doesn't have to be, though that's certainly one possibility.

Another would be to slash India's emissions by switching from fossil fuels to other energy sources.

India is investing heavily in Thorium reactor technology at the moment, for example.

I suspect that moving energy production from fossil fuels to Thorium and Uranium will be a LOT easier than reducing demand for cheap tat.

There's no point in India reducing supply, because other poor countries will just take up the job of supplying the West's huge demand for goods. What are you going to do, wipe out the population of the entire Global South until no-one can make cheap shit anymore?

The only practical solution here is to change what we consume and how we make it in the first place. We need clean energy and sustainable materials, just for starters. And in future, when they US shoots its billionaires into space, fucking leave them up there.

With clean energy and sustainable materials, cheap tat demand isn't a problem.

 

[bilby]

Scale is the issue. With a stable population of one or two billion, we would most likely not be having this discussion.

What happens to the other 7 billion?

Voluntary birth control, good standard of living and education for all, the other seven billion would not have been born.

Then all you need is a time machine.

You could go back to the C19th and invent the oral contraceptive pill a century before its actual invention.

Or forward to an alternative C22nd where it was never invented, and gloat about how we stabilised our population below ten billion, and thereby preveted disaster.

 

[steve_bank]

The China one child program failed.

Parents killed female babies so they cold try to have a boy.

Overall the program ended up with a serious imbalance between males and females.

Like Japan Chima became faced with a growing older population an not enough young people to support them.

The capitalist system is a vicious circle that demands growth in population.

 

[bilby]

Describing population as a problem is a category error.

Population isn't a problem; though it factors in to several genuine problems, and population reduction can therefore be treated as a potential solution for a swathe of actual probles. Sadly, it's a shithouse solution due to its inherent horrific nature, involving either genocide, coercion of reproductive choices, or both.

By describing this abhorrent solution as 'a problem', or worse, 'the problem', the neo-malthusian paints himself into a corner, whereby only draconian and frankly evil options remain.

But if we step back and look at actual problems, we find that each has an alternative solution or solutions that do not involve extermination camps or forced sterilisations.

Carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are too high? Stop burning coal, and use nuclear power instead (France did this one in the 1970s and '80s)

Too little food being produced? Find better ways to produce food (the world did this one in the 1970s and '80s).

Aquifer depletion? Get water elsewhere (pipelines, desalination plants, etc); or Move water intensive activities to locations with more rainfall.

Shortages of specific chemical compounds or elements? Recycle, re-concentrate and/or synthesise them.

There's no problem that can ONLY be solved by reducing population.

The derivative (population growth) could have been a problem, if it were indefinitely prolonged. But we solved that problem in the 1960s by making contraception safe, effective, and under the conrol of women.

Population isn't a problem. Not as in "I don't care about the population problem", but as in "The word 'problem' has a definition that excludes 'population' from being an instance of that category of things".

For any resource or sink Y, that has a maximum sustainable population that can exploit it, X, there exists a solution that involves changing our use of the resource or sink such that X becomes irrelevant.

There is, for every specific problem attributed to 'population', a solution or solutions that do not require population to be taken into account.

 

[DBT]

Scale is the issue. With a stable population of one or two billion, we would most likely not be having this discussion.

Sure we would.

We would just be having it a few decades later.

If humans burn all the accessible coal oil and gas (and so far, they do), then the resulting carbon dioxide concentration in our atmosphere will be calamitous.

Two billion people behaving the way our actual population behaved since the Industrial revolution would take a little longer to do this, but they would still do it. Unless, like us, they decided to try not to, and unlike us, they acted on that decision.

The activity/consumption rate of two billion per head doesn't compare to the same level of consumption per head of a population of eight billion.

As standard of living rises for those living in developing nations, consumption must steadily increase over the rest of the century and beyond.

The question is, will climate and environmental change allow a population of eight to ten billion people to live western lifestyles.....

 

[DBT]

Scale is the issue. With a stable population of one or two billion, we would most likely not be having this discussion.

What happens to the other 7 billion?

Voluntary birth control, good standard of living and education for all, the other seven billion would not have been born.

Then all you need is a time machine.

You could go back to the C19th and invent the oral contraceptive pill a century before its actual invention.

Or forward to an alternative C22nd where it was never invented, and gloat about how we stabilised our population below ten billion, and thereby preveted disaster.

I was talking about education, management of resources and good government. We of course don't have, and never had, we live in a divided, fractured world where governments act largely in their own interests, big corporations and the super-rich. The results of which may bite us hard in the decades to come.