We are overloading the planet: Now What?

[Loren Pechtel]

Death by Overshoot. That doesn't strike terror in your heart?

The problem is that you come along preaching the gospel of population reduction with about as much evidence of it's effectiveness as any other preacher.

It's obviously a matter of sustainability. A finite space, the planet in this instance, and its ecosystems can only support a certain number of people. What the tipping point happens to be is determined by both the number of people and their rate of consumption. Physics, pure and simple.

The point is sustainable requires some sort of renewal. And most resources don't renew.

Yes, that is the point. Ecosystems can be maintained if they are not pushed beyond their ability to renew. One billion people are obviously going have far less impact on ecosystems and resources, extending the ready availability of non renewables for far longer, especially if we had not cultivated a throwaway consumer society.

But how much of what we are throwing away was renewable in the first place?

(And there's the issue that for most plastic and the like materials that recycling is actually more polluting than discarding.)

 

[bilby]

Every tonne of plastic that ends up buried in a landfill is a tonne of fossil fuel that didn't end up as atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Throwing away plastic is good for the environment.

 

[Elixir]

But how much of what we are throwing away was renewable in the first place?

well... with sufficient additional energy input, there's virtually no limit!

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Every tonne of plastic that ends up buried in a landfill is a tonne of fossil fuel that didn't end up as atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Throwing away plastic is good for the environment.

As long as it gets to the landfill.

 

[DBT]

Responsible recycling? The Human Race? Oxymoron.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Every tonne of plastic that ends up buried in a landfill is a tonne of fossil fuel that didn't end up as atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Throwing away plastic is good for the environment.

As long as it gets to the landfill.

Yeah. Just yesterday I found a cluster of 4 mylar balloons out in the desert. As they age they turn into a gazillion shiny bits. They are ugly!! I got these before they had degraded and they were simple to gather up.

 

[Swammerdami]

Crime peaked in 1993. A popular hypothesis -- touted by Freakonomics -- is that there were fewer young criminals after 1993 BECAUSE it was 20 years after the birth-control pill became available. (But note that the shape of the crime-rate curve doesn't match that hypothesis.) Was it really the rise of birth-control that reduced crime a generation later?

I just watched an interesting YouTube from Veritasium. It discusses LEAD, a horrid poison, especially for infants, which among other bad aspects correlates strongly with eventual criminality. The crime decline may have been PARTLY due to birth control, but a big part of it seems to be the removal of tetraethyl-lead from gasoline.


The YouTube has other interesting details:

• a quote from Benjamin Franklin about lead poisoning: "You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it is generally received and practiced on."
• details of octane ratings.
• A young PhD student was tasked with determining the age of the earth by measuring uranium/lead ratios in certain crystals, but found lead concentrations much higher than expected.
• Lead hardens arteries and caused 250,000 heart-attack deaths annually in the U.S.
• Lead is still a HUGE problem, killing 700,000 annually worldwide.
• Thomas Midgley Jr. is the villain in the YouTube's title. Midgeley invented tetraethyl-lead as a way to prevent engine "knocking" even though he KNEW it was a poison. He also invented CFCs (Freon, etc.) for refrigerators, winning a villain's Daily Double!
• Leaded fuel is STILL used for small airplanes, and this is a major source of the lead in infants' blood today. The video closes with a repetition of Franklin's quote from the 18th century.

I think Infidels will be interested in this, but wasn't sure where to post it. This seemed to be the appropriate thread. The problem of poisonous lead in the atmosphere was about ten times worse than it would have been with only one-tenth the population. The same thing is true of other long-term poisons, and even problems we now know nothing about. Overpopulation is bad, especially with the huge "footprint" technological man insists on.

 

[Elixir]

Overpopulation is bad

As bilby is quick to point out, the inherent bad has to do with impact, which correlates loosely with population. In my estimation (<$.02) there is grave risk associated with high population numbers. Leaded gas is an example, but other things introduced to or depleted from or contaminating our environment are increasingly likely as populations increase. They can insidiously become intractable problems before they are noticed.
Maybe it’s self correcting though.
Doesn’t ingesting lead impair the development of intelligence? If intelligence itself is the lethal mutation that imperils us, perhaps more lead is in order!

 

[Swammerdami]

Doesn’t ingesting lead impair the development of intelligence? If intelligence itself is the lethal mutation that imperils us, perhaps more lead is in order!

where's my emoticon?

 

[bilby]

Crime peaked in 1993. A popular hypothesis -- touted by Freakonomics -- is that there were fewer young criminals after 1993 BECAUSE it was 20 years after the birth-control pill became available. (But note that the shape of the crime-rate curve doesn't match that hypothesis.) Was it really the rise of birth-control that reduced crime a generation later?

I just watched an interesting YouTube from Veritasium. It discusses LEAD, a horrid poison, especially for infants, which among other bad aspects correlates strongly with eventual criminality. The crime decline may have been PARTLY due to birth control, but a big part of it seems to be the removal of tetraethyl-lead from gasoline.


The YouTube has other interesting details:

• a quote from Benjamin Franklin about lead poisoning: "You will observe with concern how long a useful truth may be known and exist before it is generally received and practiced on."
• details of octane ratings.
• A young PhD student was tasked with determining the age of the earth by measuring uranium/lead ratios in certain crystals, but found lead concentrations much higher than expected.
• Lead hardens arteries and caused 250,000 heart-attack deaths annually in the U.S.
• Lead is still a HUGE problem, killing 700,000 annually worldwide.
• Thomas Midgley Jr. is the villain in the YouTube's title. Midgeley invented tetraethyl-lead as a way to prevent engine "knocking" even though he KNEW it was a poison. He also invented CFCs (Freon, etc.) for refrigerators, winning a villain's Daily Double!
• Leaded fuel is STILL used for small airplanes, and this is a major source of the lead in infants' blood today. The video closes with a repetition of Franklin's quote from the 18th century.

I think Infidels will be interested in this, but wasn't sure where to post it.

It is interesting, and I agree, environmental lead is a major issue, with severe consequences.

This seemed to be the appropriate thread. The problem of poisonous lead in the atmosphere was about ten times worse than it would have been with only one-tenth the population. The same thing is true of other long-term poisons, and even problems we now know nothing about. Overpopulation is bad, especially with the huge "footprint" technological man insists on.

This is a massive and IMO unsupportable stretch.

With 1/10 of the population, why would you expect 1/10 of the tetraethyl lead to have been burned?

Is there a 1:1 link between world population and total motor vehicle mileage?

It seems extremely unlikely; The majority of people never owned a car during the time that automotive fuel routinely contained lead.

Worse still for your assumption, the rate of population growth during that time was FAR greater amongst the world's non-car owners than it was amongst drivers.

The rate at which lead was added to the environment correlates very poorly to population; How does your conclusion here connect up to your premises?

Lead poisoning is bad. Environmental lead is therefore bad, and adding lead to gasoline is therefore also bad.

But there's a huge gulf between these things and the claim "overpopulation is bad".

 

[bilby]

This beautifully illustrates the pointlessness of "overpopulation" as a concept.

Having identified leaded gasoline as a problem, we can come up with lots of practical and achievable solutions: Use something else as an anti-knock agent (this was actually the solution we adopted); Discourage private car use in favour of public transportation options; Switch to electric vehicles; Place a punitive tax on leaded fuels; etc.; etc.

Now, imagine you are in a meeting with the President of the World, with all these options on the table; And you pipe up with "The best way to reduce environmental lead pollution would be to persuade Ethiopians to have smaller families!".

Do you honestly see that as a useful (or even sane) contribution?

It's beyond absurd.

 

[Swammerdami]

The problem of poisonous lead in the atmosphere was about ten times worse than it would have been with only one-tenth the population. The same thing is true of other long-term poisons, and even problems we now know nothing about. Overpopulation is bad, especially with the huge "footprint" technological man insists on.

This is a massive and IMO unsupportable stretch.

With 1/10 of the population, why would you expect 1/10 of the tetraethyl lead to have been burned?

Is there a 1:1 link between world population and total motor vehicle mileage?

I wrote "ABOUT ten times worse." In fact it might be MORE than ten times worse in many cases. Working in Silicon Valley, I knew people who made 2-hour one-way commutes! With lower populations they could have lived closer to thir work, while still enjoying the rural home environment for which they paid so dearly in commute time.

Now, imagine you are in a meeting with the President of the World, with all these options on the table; And you pipe up with "The best way to reduce environmental lead pollution would be to persuade Ethiopians to have smaller families!".

Do you honestly see that as a useful (or even sane) contribution?

It's beyond absurd.

There you go again, ignoring what I have repeated ad nauseum. I am NOT testifying before policy-makers. I am discussing FACTS with intellectuals.

I seek to DEscribe, not to PREscribe.

 

[DBT]

Every tonne of plastic that ends up buried in a landfill is a tonne of fossil fuel that didn't end up as atmospheric carbon dioxide.

Throwing away plastic is good for the environment.

As long as it gets to the landfill.

Yeah. Just yesterday I found a cluster of 4 mylar balloons out in the desert. As they age they turn into a gazillion shiny bits. They are ugly!! I got these before they had degraded and they were simple to gather up.

What about the islands of plastic garbage floating in our oceans?

 

[bilby]

The problem of poisonous lead in the atmosphere was about ten times worse than it would have been with only one-tenth the population. The same thing is true of other long-term poisons, and even problems we now know nothing about. Overpopulation is bad, especially with the huge "footprint" technological man insists on.

This is a massive and IMO unsupportable stretch.

With 1/10 of the population, why would you expect 1/10 of the tetraethyl lead to have been burned?

Is there a 1:1 link between world population and total motor vehicle mileage?

I wrote "ABOUT ten times worse." In fact it might be MORE than ten times worse in many cases. Working in Silicon Valley, I knew people who made 2-hour one-way commutes! With lower populations they could have lived closer to thir work, while still enjoying the rural home environment for which they paid so dearly in commute time.

Now, imagine you are in a meeting with the President of the World, with all these options on the table; And you pipe up with "The best way to reduce environmental lead pollution would be to persuade Ethiopians to have smaller families!".

Do you honestly see that as a useful (or even sane) contribution?

It's beyond absurd.

There you go again, ignoring what I have repeated ad nauseum. I am NOT testifying before policy-makers. I am discussing FACTS with intellectuals.

I seek to DEscribe, not to PREscribe.

Then think about what I DEscribe:

A world with fewer people need not have fewer cars.

As MOST people DO NOT have cars, it would be EASY to imagine a world with far fewer people but with not much less lead pollution.

Well, it would be easy if you weren't so invested in the nonsensical insistence that the number of cars is "about" proportional to the number of humans.

You are not discussing FACTS, you are making absurd assumptions. And doubling down on them:

In fact it might be MORE than ten times worse in many cases. Working in Silicon Valley, I knew people who made 2-hour one-way commutes! With lower populations they could have lived closer to thir work, while still enjoying the rural home environment for which they paid so dearly in commute time.

Do you genuinely think that Silicon Valley is representative of the entirety of humanity??

If not, why bother mentioning this obvious outlier?

I note that you snipped my explanation of why your assumption is absurd:

It seems extremely unlikely; The majority of people never owned a car during the time that automotive fuel routinely contained lead.

Worse still for your assumption, the rate of population growth during that time was FAR greater amongst the world's non-car owners than it was amongst drivers.

Ignoring the points you can't address without dissonance. How very intellectual of you.

 

[Swammerdami]

[Blah Blah Blah.]

Ignoring the points you can't address without dissonance. How very intellectual of you.

Overpopulation leads to a wide variety of problems.

For some problems multiplying the population by TEN, magnifies the problem by only NINE or less. For other problems, the magnification will be by ELEVEN or more.

Your laughable strawmen -- problems are ignored unless that multiplication factor is exactly 10.0 -- is "unbecoming" !

 

[bilby]

[Blah Blah Blah.]

Ignoring the points you can't address without dissonance. How very intellectual of you.

Overpopulation leads to a wide variety of problems.

For some problems multiplying the population by TEN, magnifies the problem by only NINE or less. For other problems, the magnification will be by ELEVEN or more.

Your laughable strawmen -- problems are ignored unless that multiplication factor is exactly 10.0 -- is "unbecoming" !

I made no such argument; Your accusation that I did is, ironically, itself a strawman argument.

I pointed out that the population of the world is a number that is probably almost completely de-coupled from the amount of leaded fuel burned, and asked you to support your implied assumption that the two are closely linked.

You respond by declaring (incorrectly) that I insist that there's no coupling unless it is a perfect 1:1 coupling - but I did no such thing.

You DO NOT respond by providing a shred of evidence that a close coupling of these two figures exists.

A quick Google suggests that there were about 100 million cars in the world in 1960; and by 1980 that this had risen to 300 million.

World population in 1960 is estimated at 3 billion; So there was about one car for every 30 humans.

If the world population in 1960 had been only 300 million, the number of people per car could have been 1:30, implying 1/10 as many cars; But it equally well could have been 1:3, implying a much wealther world (due perhaps to the supposed boon of low population?).

It all comes down to the question of whether, and how much, low population improves the lives of the people.

Essentially, if the people who didn't exist in our hypothetical population of 300 million 1960ites were the poorest 90%, then the impact on lead pollution of that change in population size would, by simple arithmetic, be zero.

Equally, if the people who didn't exist were the wealthiest 90%, no leaded fuel would be burned at all.

Note that I seek to DEscribe, not to PREscribe. There is a range of hypotheticals here; From one where population has no beneficial impact on lead pollution, to one in which it has a massive impact.

But note further that there is a clearly proportional relationship between wealth (as proxied by car ownership) and lead pollution.

So we can see that IF low population leads to poverty, then a lower population would have lower lead pollution; and IF low population leads to prosperity, then a lower population would have higher lead pollution.

So, are you going to argue that, if we had fewer people, we would all be so much less affluent; Or do you agree that if we had fewer people, we could still manage to fuck up our environment? Because from where I am sitting, you can't have both affluence and low environmental lead levels, whether with a population size of 3 billion, or of 300 million.

By 1980 there were 300 million cars for a world population of about 4.5 billion, or one car for every 15 people. In just twenty years of increasing global affluence, the lead pollution per capita approximately doubled.

Given the observed massive variability in this "pollution per capita" number, I reiterate my claim that your assumption that it should be constant (or nearly constant) is absurd.

I invite you to provide reasoning why your claim

The problem of poisonous lead in the atmosphere was about ten times worse than it would have been with only one-tenth the population.

is NOT absurd; However I will completely understand if you reject my invitation, as it seems to me that to do so would be impossible, unless you are suggesting that a sharply lower world population would have roughly the same resource use per capita as today's population.

By what mechanism would such resource poverty be achieved? If there are a tenth of the people, each has potential access to ten times as much stuff. If there were ten times as much oil, steel, rubber, etc., why would those things NOT be cheaper, leading to much higher per capita car ownership?

Fewer people => More stuff exists per person => Cheaper stuff => More stuff used per person => Amount of stuff used is NOT (even approximately) proportional to total population.

The amount of lead pollution is closely linked not to the number of people alive, but to the number of people wealthy enough to own a car. Population reductions would therefore lead to lower lead pollution if AND ONLY IF population reduction has no benefit to (or is detrimental to) per capita wealth - which seems to be the OPPOSITE of what the advocates of low population are arguing is the case.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Crime peaked in 1993. A popular hypothesis -- touted by Freakonomics -- is that there were fewer young criminals after 1993 BECAUSE it was 20 years after the birth-control pill became available. (But note that the shape of the crime-rate curve doesn't match that hypothesis.) Was it really the rise of birth-control that reduced crime a generation later?

I just watched an interesting YouTube from Veritasium. It discusses LEAD, a horrid poison, especially for infants, which among other bad aspects correlates strongly with eventual criminality. The crime decline may have been PARTLY due to birth control, but a big part of it seems to be the removal of tetraethyl-lead from gasoline.

Yeah, I doubt we will ever be able to separate the effects of lead from the effects of good contraception/abortion.

I think Infidels will be interested in this, but wasn't sure where to post it. This seemed to be the appropriate thread. The problem of poisonous lead in the atmosphere was about ten times worse than it would have been with only one-tenth the population. The same thing is true of other long-term poisons, and even problems we now know nothing about. Overpopulation is bad, especially with the huge "footprint" technological man insists on.

But why would you expect it not to have taken 10x as long to figure out lead was bad?

 

[Swammerdami]

I think Infidels will be interested in this, but wasn't sure where to post it. This seemed to be the appropriate thread. The problem of poisonous lead in the atmosphere was about ten times worse than it would have been with only one-tenth the population. The same thing is true of other long-term poisons, and even problems we now know nothing about. Overpopulation is bad, especially with the huge "footprint" technological man insists on.

But why would you expect it not to have taken 10x as long to figure out lead was bad?

Et tu, Loren?

As for "figuring out that lead was bad", I forget: During which part of the 20th century did the ancient Roman Vitrivius live?

Water conducted through earthen pipes is more wholesome than that through lead; indeed that conveyed in lead must be injurious, because from it white lead [PbCO3, lead carbonate] is obtained, and this is said to be injurious to the human system. Hence, if what is generated from it is pernicious, there can be no doubt that itself cannot be a wholesome body. This may be verified by observing the workers in lead, who are of a pallid colour; for in casting lead, the fumes from it fixing on the different members, and daily burning them, destroy the vigour of the blood; water should therefore on no account be conducted in leaden pipes if we are desirous that it should be wholesome. That the flavour of that conveyed in earthen pipes is better, is shewn at our daily meals, for all those whose tables are furnished with silver vessels, nevertheless use those made of earth, from the purity of the flavour being preserved in them.

 

[Swammerdami]

Pay attention.

I assume that everything in the following paragraph is well known to Members of IIDB.

The world environment -- which I will take to include societies, economies, ecology throughout the world, food usage, etc. etc. and so on -- is changing rapidly in various ways, often for the worse. Extinctions and loss of habitat are major concerns. One specific source of climate change correlates strongly with total human usage of carbon fuels. Nobody thinks that the function ClimChange(pop_size) is linear. But common-sense suggests that this function is increasing almost everywhere. Similarly, mankind's per capita "footprint" on real estate MAY decrease as technology advances agricultural efficiency. (On the other hand, procuring fertilizer for "efficient" agricultural has its own costs.) We don't have time to cover the entire topic in this paragraph -- hundreds of peer-reviewed papers would be needed -- but evaluating threats like climate change, large-scale extinctions, depletion of natural resources, past and future pollutants, and so on may become complicated. Still the net relationship between population and change will often be what's called a non-decreasing function

Am I right? Is that paragraph reasonable and valid? Or am I "off base"?
I do HOPE Infidels will weight-in PLEASE. Is the paragraph TRUE or FALSE?
If I'm right and the above summary is valid, then posts here can be abbreviated, incorporating fcats that are well known.

Now, DIFFERENT segments of the population may be the source of different problems. If it is true that airplane's piston engine are a major source of atmospheric lead today, then the culprits might be a rather small set of mostly affluent people. Plastic pollution in the ocean circa 2020 may have the population of Southeast Asia and China as the major source.

When the relationship between population size and some effect -- say deforestation -- is linear it still may not cross the (0,0) point. For example a small population's tiny harvesting may actually do a pruning SERVICE for the forest. Similarly, when a water aquifer is being used at a rate that allows renewability, rainfall will restore the level.

If I scoured the thread I think I'd find more than a dozen instances of a facile claim such as

what 8 billion do, 1 billion would have done if we waited 8 times as long.​

(In the latest instance we're looking at the claim that a poison like lead would have killed just as many, because it would have taken 8 times as long to notice the problem! Was that intended as a joke? Should I click the Ha-Ha button?)

The present human population of 8 billion is taxing the planet's resources in a way which 1 billion people would not. If we can't even agree on that, I think Mods should close the thread.

It is the Deniers that persist in the repeated claim that one-eighth would do as much damage but in eight times the time. This is patently absurd on several grounds. And then they claim (pretend?) that it is Swammi's post which makes that sort of counterfactual oversimplification.

 

[bilby]

But common-sense suggests that this function is increasing almost everywhere.

Common sense is not a useful guide to reality.

Common sense led you to imply that the overall amount of tetraethyl lead burned in fuel has "population" as an important factor. That is, it led you to an hypothesis that the slope of a graph of population and that of a graph of tetraethyl lead use would have, if not the same slope, at least the same direction of slope; ie, for lower population, we should predict lower volumes of "ethyl".

That's a testable hypothesis; We needn't depend on "common sense", because we can instead observe reality:

Population:

(source)

World production of tetraethyl lead:

(source)

Clearly the people at Our World in Data are engaged in a conspiracy to cover up the collapse in world population after the mid-1970s.

Or, just possibly, population is NOT a significant predictor of lead pollution levels, despite what "common sense" told you.

The present human population of 8 billion is taxing the planet's resources in a way which 1 billion people would not.

That is true; But it's not important, because the solutions to the varied consequences of that fact are themselves varied, and as we see with the example of tetraethyl lead (an example you chose), population reduction is not necessary or even helpful to resolve many, perhaps most, maybe even all, of these.

Population is irrelevant as regards solutions. It is, arguably, relevant as a cause, but when your house is on fire, you should spray it with water, without worrying whether the cause was an unattended candle or an electrical fault.

We have the population that we have. Things might have been better if we hadn't increased it to begin with, but that doesn't mean that striving to reduce it is the best option to solve the problems we now have.

We largely eliminated tetraethyl lead while world population not only didn't fall, but continued to rise. That makes your "common sense" hypothesis that population is an important factor in lead pollution demonstrably and unavoidably WRONG.