We are overloading the planet: Now What?

[Merle]

In no sense would #9 make school optional.

So you’re setting a floor on taxes that parents have to pay if they have kids, regardless of their income? What if the real cost of education is greater than their income? Do they they pay all their income to the government, then starve to death so their kids can go to mandatory school?

School is already already available for “free”, and kids are dumb as fuck because so many of them are homeskoold or in religious schools.

I did say that money that was used for school taxes could be given to the poor. Or, if you like, 70% of your child's education through grade 12 are paid by the government, and parents need to cough up the rest. If you choose not to have any children and are poor, you may be given money for not having children.

Hey, its an idea. I realize it is not attractive, but if we are in a dire situation, it can be better than the alternative.

I do see that my list missed one that I have mentioned before: 12: Empower and educate women.

Do you have any ideas we could add to the list?

 

[Merle]

Except the pre-industrial farming system was not remotely sustainable. Wood was not being harvested at a renewable rate.

I agree.

What do you think of this person's view of the future:

Once large scale coal and oil extraction will be gone though, our descendants will be increasingly forced to return to burning charcoal to process the scrap metals left behind by us. This would not only mean rapid deforestation but also a drastic drop in metal production and recycling. I wager that more than 90% of the materials in circulation today will be lost during the long descent of modernity, as we will have no capacity to process them. Most of our metals will simply be left to rot and rust where they are. And as we have already depleted all easy to access high grade ores (amenable to artisan mining and smelting techniques) our descendants far into the future will eventually have nothing to extract from the Earth. Surely not with a pickax and ox-drawn carts. We will thus first see the emergence of a vibrant scavenger economy, salvaging and repurposing whatever they can as modernity starts to break down, then as we lose metallurgy due to the lack of energy to power it, our children and grandchildren will witness the complete loss of all our modern technologies. Sure, they will have an odd blacksmith here and there, but that’s about it. -- https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/we-are-not-mining-with-renewable?

 

[DBT]

Given that we are in overshoot now

THAT IS NOT A GIVEN, it is the point in dispute.

Numerous studies suggest otherwise, that we are using resources faster than they can be replenished.


''If Earth’s resources were a bank account, today would mark the date we’d officially be in the red.

As of July 29, humanity has officially used up more ecological resources this year than the Earth can regenerate by the end of the year. The occasion even has a name: Earth Overshoot Day.

The Global Footprint Network, a sustainability organization which calculates the day, says humanity is currently consuming nature 1.75 times faster than the planet can regenerate.

That means we’re overspending our natural capital, compromising resources in the future as a result and leading to things like deforestation and carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere.

And more carbon dioxide brings ever increasing climate change, the network says.''

 

[DBT]

Plant and animal species that go extinct aren't coming back. Ecosystems being taken over by monoculture and suburbia with a McDonald's on every block are gone and won't come back.

Yes, and that's not a good thing. But it's not going to take us out.

I didn't say it will. I think that there is a major correction on our horizon and we are going to have to adapt to the new reality.

 

[Elixir]

In no sense would #9 make school optional.

So you’re setting a floor on taxes that parents have to pay if they have kids, regardless of their income? What if the real cost of education is greater than their income? Do they they pay all their income to the government, then starve to death so their kids can go to mandatory school?

School is already already available for “free”, and kids are dumb as fuck because so many of them are homeskoold or in religious schools.

I did say that money that was used for school taxes could be given to the poor.

Why bother? Just make education free and mandatory.

I do see that my list missed one that I have mentioned before: 12: Empower and educate women.

Do you have any ideas we could add to the list?

I already added a pony. WTF do you want?

* pay teachers and cops a lot

 

[Merle]

I already added a pony. WTF do you want?

A free pony. Where do I get mine?

 

[DBT]

Did someone mention a free pony?

 

[Elixir]

Did someone mention a free pony?

Yes, my plan provides everyone a pony.

 

[pood]

I think Bilby means that population increase BY ITSELF is not a problem, since our best current projections predict population growth is scheduled to level off later this century and then decline (and decline has its own problems, as Japan is finding out). The problems lie elsewhere.

 

[Elixir]

The problems lie elsewhere.

“The” is extraneous IMHO. Problems are ubiquitous. Most can be traced to aspects of human behavior rather than just human numbers.

 

[bilby]

I think Bilby means that population increase BY ITSELF is not a problem, since our best current projections predict population growth is scheduled to level off later this century and then decline (and decline has its own problems, as Japan is finding out). The problems lie elsewhere.

Indeed.

There are a huge number of environmental problems; Each has its own solution(s), and we should tackle them one at a time, starting with the most urgent.

Lumping them all together into one massive intractable lump isn't helpful.

Population isn't a problem (exponential population growth was, but we have solved it, and are just waiting for the solution to filter through the demographic lag); Population is the objective - ie, we need to find solutions that don't entail genocide, or the creation of a highly intrusive police state that forces reproductive choices on people against their will.

There are many approaches we can take to a looking shortage of oil, or to climate change, or to a shortage of helium, or copper, or iron, or phosphate, or to health issues caused by the dumping of toxic wastes. None require action with regards to population levels, and the vociferous lobby for population to be prioritised above actual solutions to these separate and individual problems is highly counterproductive.

Sorry, simpletons, but there isn't a single cause of, or solution to, our problems.

Now, can we please shut up about the problem that was top of the list in our youth (before it became clear that exponential population growth had been solved), and start working on the problems that are currently at the top of the list of threats?

 

[Swammerdami]

Except the pre-industrial farming system was not remotely sustainable. Wood was not being harvested at a renewable rate.

I agree.

What do you think of this person's view of the future:

Once large scale coal and oil extraction will be gone though, our descendants will be increasingly forced to return to burning charcoal to process the scrap metals left behind by us. This would not only mean rapid deforestation but also a drastic drop in metal production and recycling. I wager that more than 90% of the materials in circulation today will be lost during the long descent of modernity, as we will have no capacity to process them. Most of our metals will simply be left to rot and rust where they are. And as we have already depleted all easy to access high grade ores (amenable to artisan mining and smelting techniques) our descendants far into the future will eventually have nothing to extract from the Earth. Surely not with a pickax and ox-drawn carts. We will thus first see the emergence of a vibrant scavenger economy, salvaging and repurposing whatever they can as modernity starts to break down, then as we lose metallurgy due to the lack of energy to power it, our children and grandchildren will witness the complete loss of all our modern technologies. Sure, they will have an odd blacksmith here and there, but that’s about it. -- https://thehonestsorcerer.substack.com/p/we-are-not-mining-with-renewable?

I won't try to predict the future, but that article does remind us of the huge habitat destructions and pollutions still on-going as mankind seeks out harder and harder-to-get materials.

Yet some consider such mining to be "sustainable"? A non-problem like the shortage of wealth which bankers solve by just "adding more zeroes"?

 

[DBT]

Optimism aside, each and every individual is a consumer, some more than others, rich nations, poorer nations, yet as each and every individual is by necessary and want a consumer, the more people we have on the planet, the greater the rate of consumption we get.

Our world should now be called Planet Ponzi.

 

[steve_bank]

The old Pogo cartoon, 'We have met the enemy and he is us'.

 

[Bomb#20]

If you choose option c, can you explain how your plan would eliminate those who may be reading this that are in the top 20%? Some of us don't want to be "eliminated".

If you don't want to be eliminated then you'll need to reduce your environmental impact.

You're a far bigger problem than the average African, but somehow it's their existence that's the problem, not yours.

You can't possibly have a good reason to believe that unless you're in possession of private personal information about how many children Merle has and will have. A person's environmental impact includes the environmental impact of his children, and of their children, and on unto the last syllable of recorded time.

I wrote a carbon footprint simulator that adds up how big a problem a person is over time and included the long-term effects of his procreation decisions. Assuming Merle has an average American's lifestyle, his carbon footprint is about the same as the average African's, if Merle has two children. If he has three or more children then he is as you say a far bigger problem than the average African. If he has one or no children then he is a far smaller problem than the average African.

"Those who refuse to do arithmetic are doomed to talk nonsense." - John McCarthy

 

[steve_bank]

Mer;e thinks we can make rational choices on having kids on a lathe scale. Christians call it teaching abstinence.

We are genetically programmed to procreate. Hard to overcome that. It is not juatt about hat sex feels good, it is a powerful drive to have kids.

 

[Merle]

I think Bilby means that population increase BY ITSELF is not a problem, since our best current projections predict population growth is scheduled to level off later this century and then decline (and decline has its own problems, as Japan is finding out). The problems lie elsewhere.

We have been over this many times in this thread. Yes, the UN says population will level off at about 130% of the current population, and perhaps even start to decline.

The problem is that we are already in overshoot. The Global Footprint Network calculates that it would take 1.75 planets to sustainably support us. We continue on, but the overshoot is rapidly deteriorating our planet.

If future population rises 30%, and our average footprint per person remains the same, we end up needing 2.25 planets to support us all. If affluence also increases in that timeframe we could easily get to the point of needing 3 planets.

That is going the wrong way. As I suggest in my paper, we should instead be reducing our impact in half.

Some people here say that it is OK that we will have 30% more people at increasing levels of affluence. Science will save us. We will use all kinds of existing and new technologies to reduce our negative impact per unit of consumption. Thus, even with 30% more people at higher consumption per person, we will reduce the negative impact per unit of consumption such that one planet is sufficient.

But science is rapidly falling behind. So how are these people so certain that science will stop falling behind, that some day we will actually use science to reduce our impact enough that our increasing consumption does not matter? They don't know this. As far as I can tell, they just take it by faith that science will do this.

Like I said many times, this reminds me of the prophet Habakuk.The Old Testament prophets promised over and over that obeying Yahweh would lead to a prosperous kingdom of Israel on Earth. One would think that the repeated failures of this religion would have caused people to reject it. But the religion hung on. Many followed the advice of Habukkuk 3:17-19. That passage says that, in spite of the promises that Yahweh will cause them to have olives, fruit and meat in abundance, and even if it doesn't happen, they will still believe that it will happen. They will simply have blind faith that their God will pull through, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

I see that some people here have the same blind faith to nuclear power, carbon capture, and other technologies. Although they have not fulfilled their promise, yet we will have faith that they will do so in the future.

And what if technology doesn't pull through to the extent we need? Well, technology is their Plan A. If Plan A fails? Then plan B is to try plan A again. If Plan A fails again? Once again Plan B is to go back to Plan A. Ad infinitum. That is blind faith. That is religion.

I have asked people that appear to me to have this undying faith in technology what they would do if technology failed to save the day. If it became obvious that the only way to prevent completely trashing the planet was to either take steps to reduce the number of future people making footprints, or limit the size of the footprint per person, which would they think is better? They refuse to answer. I have asked the question several ways. They refuse to answer. They have Plan A. They keep telling me it makes no sense to ask what they would do if Plan A fails. Plan A will not fail. They want Plan A to work. They need Plan A to work. They have blind faith that Plan A will work. So don't ask them what they will do if Plan A does not work. They equate that to the nonsense of asking somebody if he stopped beating his wife yet.

I might expect the same answer if I asked true believers what they would do if I showed that Jesus did not rise from the dead. What? They have faith that Jesus rose from the dead. There is no need to ask them what they would do if he did not rise from the dead. That is like asking them if they have stopped beating their wife yet. The question makes no sense.

But the question of what you would do if I could show Jesus did not rise from the dead, or what you would do if we needed to cut consumption to save the planet, are real questions. Those who do not have undying faith that they cannot possibly be wrong would be willing to answer what they would do if they were shown to be wrong. But true believers in the resurrection or Nuclear Power don't want to answer the question of what they would do if their faith is wrong.

In my paper -- https://mindsetfree.blog/we-are-overloading-the-planet-now-what/ -- I try to present not only my view, but answer the objections of those who disagree. And I am here to discuss the objections I might find here.

Does that answer your post?

 

[bilby]

The problem is that we are already in overshoot. The Global Footprint Network calculates that it would take 1.75 planets to sustainably support us.

But this is at best hyperbole, and it's useful for alarming people, but bloody useless for figuring out what to do about it - unless you are fixated on the daft concept that "population" is the only important cause of, or solution to, bloody everything.

We don't need 1.75 or 2.25 or 10 or 15 planets.

We may need 1.75 times the currently available rate of turnover in some specific resource; If so, we can approach the problem by finding substitute resources.

But by framing the problem in terms of "planets", and applying it to every environmental problem simultaneously, they render it unable to be solved other than by means we have all agreed are unacceptable. Which is daft, because none of the individual problems are actually intractable.

Taking a real world example, in the 1890s, we were using whale products at an unsustainable rate. But we didn't suddenly have no lighting, no lubricants, no corsetry, and no soap as a consequence of hunting whales to near extinction. We just changed our systems. We switched to Gas and Electricity for lighting; to Mineral oil for lubricants; to Plastics for corsetry; and to Plant oils for soap.

We could, and probably should, have made those substitutions sooner, and been less mean to the poor whales in the process.

But we certainly wouldn't have found those solutions had we instead just declared that we were using ten planets worth of resources, and that this was an overpopulation problem.

We probably were using ten planets (or more) worth of whales; But by not talking about whales at all when stating the problem, we could have effectively obscured the problem, and incorrectly concluded that the only option was to slash the human population.

The entire approach of aggregating disparate problems into a great big intractible lump is incredibly dumb.

How can we even try to tackle the "problem" of using "1.75 planets"? It's too big, and too vague.

But the answer is to tackle the problem the same way you would eat an elephant - one bite at a time.

 

[steve_bank]

I think Bilby means that population increase BY ITSELF is not a problem, since our best current projections predict population growth is scheduled to level off later this century and then decline (and decline has its own problems, as Japan is finding out). The problems lie elsewhere.

We have been over this many times in this thread. Yes, the UN says population will level off at about 130% of the current population, and perhaps even start to decline.

The problem is that we are already in overshoot. The Global Footprint Network calculates that it would take 1.75 planets to sustainably support us. We continue on, but the overshoot is rapidly deteriorating our planet.

If future population rises 30%, and our average footprint per person remains the same, we end up needing 2.25 planets to support us all. If affluence also increases in that timeframe we could easily get to the point of needing 3 planets.

That is going the wrong way. As I suggest in my paper, we should instead be reducing our impact in half.

Some people here say that it is OK that we will have 30% more people at increasing levels of affluence. Science will save us. We will use all kinds of existing and new technologies to reduce our negative impact per unit of consumption. Thus, even with 30% more people at higher consumption per person, we will reduce the negative impact per unit of consumption such that one planet is sufficient.

But science is rapidly falling behind. So how are these people so certain that science will stop falling behind, that some day we will actually use science to reduce our impact enough that our increasing consumption does not matter? They don't know this. As far as I can tell, they just take it by faith that science will do this.

Like I said many times, this reminds me of the prophet Habakuk.The Old Testament prophets promised over and over that obeying Yahweh would lead to a prosperous kingdom of Israel on Earth. One would think that the repeated failures of this religion would have caused people to reject it. But the religion hung on. Many followed the advice of Habukkuk 3:17-19. That passage says that, in spite of the promises that Yahweh will cause them to have olives, fruit and meat in abundance, and even if it doesn't happen, they will still believe that it will happen. They will simply have blind faith that their God will pull through, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

I see that some people here have the same blind faith to nuclear power, carbon capture, and other technologies. Although they have not fulfilled their promise, yet we will have faith that they will do so in the future.

And what if technology doesn't pull through to the extent we need? Well, technology is their Plan A. If Plan A fails? Then plan B is to try plan A again. If Plan A fails again? Once again Plan B is to go back to Plan A. Ad infinitum. That is blind faith. That is religion.

I have asked people that appear to me to have this undying faith in technology what they would do if technology failed to save the day. If it became obvious that the only way to prevent completely trashing the planet was to either take steps to reduce the number of future people making footprints, or limit the size of the footprint per person, which would they think is better? They refuse to answer. I have asked the question several ways. They refuse to answer. They have Plan A. They keep telling me it makes no sense to ask what they would do if Plan A fails. Plan A will not fail. They want Plan A to work. They need Plan A to work. They have blind faith that Plan A will work. So don't ask them what they will do if Plan A does not work. They equate that to the nonsense of asking somebody if he stopped beating his wife yet.

I might expect the same answer if I asked true believers what they would do if I showed that Jesus did not rise from the dead. What? They have faith that Jesus rose from the dead. There is no need to ask them what they would do if he did not rise from the dead. That is like asking them if they have stopped beating their wife yet. The question makes no sense.

But the question of what you would do if I could show Jesus did not rise from the dead, or what you would do if we needed to cut consumption to save the planet, are real questions. Those who do not have undying faith that they cannot possibly be wrong would be willing to answer what they would do if they were shown to be wrong. But true believers in the resurrection or Nuclear Power don't want to answer the question of what they would do if their faith is wrong.

In my paper -- https://mindsetfree.blog/we-are-overloading-the-planet-now-what/ -- I try to present not only my view, but answer the objections of those who disagree. And I am here to discuss the objections I might find here.

Does that answer your post?

Is that wallpaper?

 

[pood]

I think Bilby means that population increase BY ITSELF is not a problem, since our best current projections predict population growth is scheduled to level off later this century and then decline (and decline has its own problems, as Japan is finding out). The problems lie elsewhere.

We have been over this many times in this thread. Yes, the UN says population will level off at about 130% of the current population, and perhaps even start to decline.

The problem is that we are already in overshoot. The Global Footprint Network calculates that it would take 1.75 planets to sustainably support us. We continue on, but the overshoot is rapidly deteriorating our planet.

I got curious about this and looked it up. There are several different formulations. One is that today we are using resources AS IF we have 1.75 earths. Another is that to sustain our CURRENT world population, we WOULD NEED 1.75 earths. And so on.

It’s rather odd. What does it really mean? Nothing, so far as I can tell. It’s vacuous. Clearly, we ARE sustaining (albeit badly in many cases) our CURRENT world population, with ONE earth — the other .75 of an earth is nowhere to be found, which strongly suggests it is not actually needed. What is needed for the many real problems we face is climate mitigation, phase-out of fossil fuels to the existent that is possible, a return to nuclear power, education and family planning which reduce birth rates (which we know works because it is already happening in Western industrialized nations), better allocation of resources and food, better land management and on and on. Technology will play a big role in this. To compare the promise of technological advances to the empty promises of religion is obviously empirically unwarranted. Technology produces results (often, granted, with unforeseen and unintended negative side effects), while religion produces zilch except intolerance and ignorance.