Will human population and economic activity exceed the Planets carrying capacity?

[Politesse]

I know that. But you said 'in this conversation' and I replied on the same basis.

Okay, fair point.

 

[ruby sparks]

I know that. But you said 'in this conversation' and I replied on the same basis.

Okay, fair point.

I don't mean to understate your valid point. Thank you for bringing it to my attention. It does seem to show where a concern about overpopulation could go too far, and in some cases has. I admit I had not considered it properly.

 

[Jokodo]

To those who want to see a dramatic reduction in world population, I have just one message: "Great idea. You first".

There are other ways, voluntarily opting for smaller families, no more than one or two children. Not enforced, just a smarter way of living, given our predicament.

It's what people, by and large, are doing. The fact that you heard in school about India's total fertility rate of 5.7 doesn't mean India has a fertility rate of 5.7. It had one 50 years ago, so either you're old, or your teacher didn't bother to fact-check whether what he learnt decades earlier still holds. India's TFR today is at 2.3 children per woman, and 1.8 among the urban population. In many large states even (Tamil Nadu, Jammu and Kashmir, Kerala, West Bengal, Punjab...) it is in the region of 1.6- 1.8.

And the same is true for many other countries.

- - - Updated - - -

And about that 'overcrowding' business... (over)crowding is pretty much the best thing that can happen to the environment (ever since most people stopped to be subsistence farmers)!

When I got a new job earlier this year, my new workplace was about a 10 minutes bike ride from the old one (and 15 from home). In the countryside, it would likely have been a 1hour+ commute by car. And I don't turn on the heating for half of the winter - my neighbours above and below apparently prefer 3 degrees more than I do, and their residual heat is enough to keep my flat at a comfortable temperature.

It might be true that if population was stable, concentrating that population together could have net benefits, yes, but urbanisation has in reality been happening in conjunction with dramatic and rapid increases in world population, so whatever benefits there have been (and there are benefits as you say) these have been outweighed in overall terms.

And it also depends where you live, apparently. In colder regions, 'urban heat island' effects can reduce the need for heating. In hotter regions, they can increase the need for cooling via air conditioning.

I'm not talking about heat island effects. In a hot region, my neighbours putting their AC at 17° C would similarly help me keep the temperature at a comfortable 24 without turning on mine.

 

[steve_bank]

The points the view from your comfortable window is misleading, overpopulation is already an issue. It is something bery different than homeless people in the industrialized west. There are families that literally live on the street.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_children_in_India

A street child is someone "for whom the street (in the widest sense of the word, including unoccupied dwellings, wasteland, etc.) has become his or her habitual abode and/or source of livelihood; and who is inadequately protected, supervised, or directed by responsible adults".[1]

India has an estimated one million or more street children in each of the following cities: New Delhi, Kolkata, and Mumbai.[2] Mainly because of family conflict, they come to live on the streets and take on the full responsibilities of caring for themselves, including working to provide for and protecting themselves. Though street children do sometimes band together for greater security, they are often exploited by employers and the police

https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs...en-early-ages-often-56606553.jpg&action=click

 

[Jokodo]

Mainly because of family conflict, they come to live on the streets and take on the full responsibilities of caring for themselves, including working to provide for and protecting themselves.

In what sense is family conflict a consequence of population numbers?

 

[Jokodo]

If we are allowed to make random hypotheticals (like "if our world population had stabilised"), how about this one: The world population stabilizes, prosperity grows as it does, but the delinking of wealth generated and carbon emissions doesn't happen: We'd be emitting just as much carbon as we are, or possibly more (aren't you overpopulation advocates also constantly claiming that overpopulation is the main reason poor countries stay poor?)

That seems to be one possible scenario, yes. I've not said that wealth and emissions are not related or that there isn't an uneven distribution. That the wealthiest contribute disproportionately to emissions is quite well accepted and if their relative contribution could be reduced, that would help, yes.

That aside, we have to work with what we have. What we have is a situation where, short of killing 5 billions of healthy individuals, there is no way to get us down to two billion within a reasonable time frame. Even if birth's dropped to 0 today and stayed at 0 indefinitely, it'd take at least 50 and more likely over 60 years before we reached that number: There's in the order of 2 billion people under the age of 15 alive today. So unless you're willing to commit the largest genocide in human history with a victim count two orders of magnitude above the runner-up, this is not a viable corner from which to tackle the problem.

On the other hand, the technology to replace fossil fuels with other energy sources and/or extract carbon from the atmosphere to balance the emissions is available today. Unless genocide is an option for you, worrying about "over"population is thus simply a massive waste of time.

In the post you linked to it was suggested that increased family planning initiatives alone could achieve a 16-29% cut in emissions by 2050 and 37-41% by the end of the century. That surely cannot be a waste of time, even if those figures are optimistic and only lesser effects could be obtained.

What's their baseline? From their graph alone, it looks like the difference between the medium and low scenarions, by 2050, is at best 12-14%. And how it is possible for the range to get narrower further in the future (when the predictions are less precise) is beyond my understanding.

And, more importantly, as bilby has repeatedly pointed out, even a 29% reduction is nowhere near enough to achieve our goal. If limiting population growth (beyond the way it is already limiting itself) is, on the one
hand, not enough without also shifting away from fossil fuels in serious, and on the other hand, with shifting away from them, a larger somewhat population is entirely feasible, then why bother? A half-assed transition won't save as, and a full-blown transition makes the need for population reduction go away.

And could we stop with the genocide red herring too?

It's not a red herring. If you want emissions cut to a sustainable level by 2050, and want a population reduction to be a main driver of that reduction, you won't achieve your goal without a lot of bloodshed. that's plain math. That leaves 3 possibilities:

1. You don't actually want to cut emissions to a sustainable level.
2. You haven't the faintest idea how dire situation re: climate change is.
3. You're fine with killing billions to achieve the goal.

And, '"you overpopulation advocates"? I suppose soon we'll be hearing the word "overpopulationists" or something. Always has to be 'us' and 'them', is that it?

Even though no one has yet shown that there are people saying population or overpopulation is the only problem or the main solution and ignoring other issues, let alone that such a position is widely acceptable or akin to a religion. Again, for about the 4th time, who are these people? Where is this supposed wide acceptance of that position? Should it even matter if some do exist who say that? Shouldn't reasonable people be eschewing extreme and simplistic positions in either direction?

And the OP is demonstrably not an example of it just for including population alongside several other factors.

It is demonstrably not by not even allowing an option to say "We're pretty fucked up, but can you please leave population out of this? It's neither the main driver nor pragmatically a feasible way to tackle the problem at hand"?

And I myself have repeatedly said that I have mainly been doing population in the thread specifically in order to make the case that it is a part of the problem, since it was suggested otherwise.

It may or may not be part of the problem, but it's not part of any solution that is to happen fast and without unprecedented bloodshed. You know what's also part of the problem: 70 percent of the earth being covered in water; the continents being aranged in a manner that, mediated by predominant winds, leaves much of the remaining 30 percent in an arid state. The lack of an equivalent to the gulf stream along the Argentinian east coast, which would make Patagonia as hospitable as Central Europe; too much sunlight reaching the tropics, and not enough the poles. If we want to avert the worst consequences of climate change, we shouldn't exactly bother about those.

I have said I'm quite happy to agree that dramatic and rapid increases in world population are not the only cause and that population growth reduction initiatives not necessarily the most pragmatic parts of the solution, albeit they could be incorporated as part of a multi-pronged approach with stronger focuses elsewhere.

Sure, we could. Or we could just acknowledge that, in light of the amount of reduction that's actually needed to change a thing, population is a rather minor factor indeed, definitely on the timescales at which action is required (short of a genocide, sorry to repeat myself). On longer timescales, it sure will be relevant. But on longer timescales, it will probably sort itself out anyway - the total fertility rate has fallen from over 5 to under 2.5 in the last 45-ish years, still trending downwards. Most of the population growth we still have isn't because oh so many children are born, but because few people are dying (and that isn't so much a feat of modern medicine as it is the consequence of the fact that the people supposed to die weren't born in the first place).

So, if 80% of the change will have to come from moving away from fossil fuels, it seems more pertinent to aim a bit higher in that domain than to worry about a problem whose contribution in the short term is relatively minor, and which is likely to sort itself out in the long term anyway.

tl;dr: No one is denying that, all else equal, 10 billion people do more harm than 5 billion - but if all else is equal, we're fucked one way or the other.

 

[ruby sparks]

And, more importantly, as bilby has repeatedly pointed out, even a 29% reduction is nowhere near enough to achieve our goal. If limiting population growth (beyond the way it is already limiting itself) is, on the one
hand, not enough without also shifting away from fossil fuels in serious, and on the other hand, with shifting away from them, a larger somewhat population is entirely feasible, then why bother? A half-assed transition won't save as, and a full-blown transition makes the need for population reduction go away.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Of course 29% is nowhere near enough to achieve the goal. That's obvious. But I'm only suggesting it could be part of achieving a goal. Even the lower figure of 16% would not be insignificant, as a contribution, along with other measures.

And also, this hypothetical 'shifting away from fossil fuels' is just one of a number of things that if we did them would then make a big difference. But it's an 'if then', not something that's 'going to happen' in time. So the weight of citing it is contingent, not actual, unless and until it actually happens. So you can't say 'we don't need any population reduction measures because we could in theory do without them'. You might better say that it is better to include all countermeasures, because their aggregate total effect will be greater and we can't be sure that any one of them will actually come to fulfilment (or more to the point, come to fulfilment in time).

It's not a red herring. If you want emissions cut to a sustainable level by 2050, and want a population reduction to be a main driver of that reduction, you won't achieve your goal without a lot of bloodshed. that's plain math.

It's also a plain red (or maybe I should say green) herring precisely because I never said that (non-forced) population growth reduction can be the main driver or that it can be sudden, or anything close to either of those!

Or we could just acknowledge that, in light of the amount of reduction that's actually needed to change a thing, population is a rather minor factor indeed..

Some analyses suggest that it is not as minor as may have been suggested.

So, if 80% of the change will have to come from moving away from fossil fuels, it seems more pertinent to aim a bit higher in that domain than to worry about a problem whose contribution in the short term is relatively minor, and which is likely to sort itself out in the long term anyway.

That it will sort itself out is at least somewhat uncertain. That it will sort itself out in time (ie before major, irreversible damage) is more uncertain. Why risk leaving out one possible countermeasure (among many)?

tl;dr: No one is denying that, all else equal, 10 billion people do more harm than 5 billion - but if all else is equal, we're fucked one way or the other.

But all else is not equal. In reality there are many, many interacting factors and many, many measures on many combined fronts that could be pursued. It makes no sense to leave one out. Surely we should take measures on as many fronts as possible.

Look, how about if, for the sake of argument, I go back to the list of 15 countermeasures ('wedges') suggested earlier in the article I linked to. Population growth reduction wasn't one of them. But if it was added to the list as no.16 it would then be a 16th wedge. That's all. Just one of 16. Not the main one. That's sort of all I'm saying. As the authors say, no one wedge has the potential of itself to achieve the necessary results. The combined effect from having a portfolio of measures is what can matter.

Not all the wedges will have equal weight of course. Population reduction might have more weight than some and less than others. And I don't think we can even know in advance what weights to allocate, because degree or ease of implementation will affect actual weight versus potential or theoretical weight, so it'll depend on the performances achieved by each wedge in practice as time goes along. If one works well in practice (and perhaps voluntary Family Planning could be one of those) and another doesn't (and perhaps delinking from fossil fuels, or reduced deforestation, for example, will be one of those) then the effective (outcome) weights may not be what is predicted by potentials.


By the way, I'm only using the '15 wedges' model as an illustration. I'm not saying it's the definitive list of countermeasures or the best model.

 

[Jokodo]

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Of course 29% is nowhere near enough to achieve the goal. That's obvious. But I'm only suggesting it could be part of achieving a goal. Even the lower figure of 16% is not insignificant. Even 10% would not be insignificant, as a contribution, along with other measures.

And also, this hypothetical 'shifting away from fossil fuels' is just one of a number of things that if we did them would then make a big difference. But it's an 'if then', not something that's 'going to happen' in time.

No, it isn't. It's the one without which we're fucked, one way or the other. Unless you consider genocide an option.

Whether or not we'll achieve it is another question altogether, but one that's fairly impertinent to whether we should throw all our efforts at it.

 

[ruby sparks]

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Of course 29% is nowhere near enough to achieve the goal. That's obvious. But I'm only suggesting it could be part of achieving a goal. Even the lower figure of 16% is not insignificant. Even 10% would not be insignificant, as a contribution, along with other measures.

And also, this hypothetical 'shifting away from fossil fuels' is just one of a number of things that if we did them would then make a big difference. But it's an 'if then', not something that's 'going to happen' in time.

No, it isn't. It's the one without which we're fucked, one way or the other. Unless you consider genocide an option.

Whether or not we'll achieve it is another question altogether, but one that's fairly impertinent to whether we should throw all our efforts at it.

It's not an either or.

And, because it is unlikely or at least difficult and challenging, in the real world, that we will actually reduce reliance on fossil fuels as fast as we need to, that is all the more reason to supplement with other measures too. Because it's not an either or.

And the bottom line is not shifting away from fossil fuels, it's reducing emissions (or increasing uptake of them, which is where reducing deforestation comes in, along with non-natural sequestration).







By the way, let's say someone (a) goes car-free. No more filling their gas tank with nasty fossil fuels. That'd be a contribution to shifting away from fossil fuels. Or, (b) they could have one fewer child. I read that the latter (b) is about 25 times more effective than (a) in terms of reduced CO2 emissions per annum.

"Having one fewer child (an average for developed countries of 58.6 tonnes CO2-equivalent (tCO2e) emission reductions per year), living car-free (2.4 tCO2e saved per year)."
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541/meta

And apparently (c) comprehensive recycling, is 300 times less effective, per annum, than (b) one fewer child.

 

[ruby sparks]

One more thing. Given that the thread title is not about climate change per se, but carrying capacity, the issue of (fresh)water scarcity could be brought in, and represents an increasing problem, technological solutions and mitigating practices notwithstanding. More people on the planet = more demand for freshwater, which is a limited natural resource, And as with carbon footprints and emissions, per capita amounts for usage of freshwater increase with level of development and wealth.

 

[skepticalbip]

One more thing. Given that the thread title is not about climate change per se, but carrying capacity, the issue of water scarcity could be brought in. Carbon footprints and emissions per capita may vary greatly between fully developed/wealthy countries and underdeveloped/poor ones, but population effects on water per capita do not vary so much. More people = more demand for water.

"Water scarcity" is another term like "overpopulation" intended to poison the well before the debate begins.

There is no scarcity of water. There is only the cost of the water to be considered. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Israel, etc. all have massive desalination systems to provide potable water for the these arid regions. Rather than essentially free water, it is a couple cents per gallon. Australia is doing it and so could areas that use a lot of water like California.

 

[steve_bank]

There is an upside. If you are young figure out the rising sea levels and buy what will become ocean property. Get in early.

 

[ruby sparks]

One more thing. Given that the thread title is not about climate change per se, but carrying capacity, the issue of water scarcity could be brought in. Carbon footprints and emissions per capita may vary greatly between fully developed/wealthy countries and underdeveloped/poor ones, but population effects on water per capita do not vary so much. More people = more demand for water.

"Water scarcity" is another term like "overpopulation" intended to poison the well before the debate begins.

There is no scarcity of water. There is only the cost of the water to be considered. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Israel, etc. all have massive desalination systems to provide potable water for the these arid regions. Rather than essentially free water, it is a couple cents per gallon. Australia is doing it and so could areas that use a lot of water like California.

No, there is water scarcity. For about 3 billion people.

You are talking about a technological solution for it. Fine. Even if that could work or be afforded in enough places to address the problem, it does not take away from the fact that there are (increasing) shortages and that population growth, consumption patterns and economic activity are causal factors.

And in any case, does desalination not generally consume energy, add gaseous emissions and other liquid and solid pollutants to the environment? Not just the building and running of plants themselves, including their waste products, but in the distribution and transportation of the water to consumers. And as to financial costs, I read that Saudi Arabia is paying US$3.2 billion in subsidies annually. And there are still water shortages (and restrictions) in Saudi Arabia, disproportionately affecting the poor majority. And much of the eventual distribution is done in heavy lorries, which cost energy and materials to manufacture, and use fossil fuels to run (and at least to some extent add to the need for roads to run on, that are built and maintained with materials from fossil fuels, by road construction machines that use fossil fuels..........)

 

[ruby sparks]

There is an upside. If you are young figure out the rising sea levels and buy what will become ocean property. Get in early.

Lol.

But on a less frivolous note, there is, in reality, no rising sea levels problem, just a sea wall building problem.



Or to put it another way, perhaps the world merely needs more dykes?

 

[skepticalbip]

One more thing. Given that the thread title is not about climate change per se, but carrying capacity, the issue of water scarcity could be brought in. Carbon footprints and emissions per capita may vary greatly between fully developed/wealthy countries and underdeveloped/poor ones, but population effects on water per capita do not vary so much. More people = more demand for water.

"Water scarcity" is another term like "overpopulation" intended to poison the well before the debate begins.

There is no scarcity of water. There is only the cost of the water to be considered. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Israel, etc. all have massive desalination systems to provide potable water for the these arid regions. Rather than essentially free water, it is a couple cents per gallon. Australia is doing it and so could areas that use a lot of water like California.

No, there is water scarcity. For about 3 billion people.

You are talking about a technological solution for it. Fine. Even if that could work or be afforded in enough places to address the problem, it does not take away from the fact that there are (increasing) shortages and that population growth, consumption patterns and economic activity are causal factors.

There is plenty of water. People have just chosen to live in areas where there is scant surface water available. The aridness of places like the Kalahari is not a new phenomenon. You being able to open a tap when you want water may find that there are people who don't have a tap, shocking. The "solution" would be to contribute to the charities that are drilling wells for those people rather than nail biting.

ETA:
For instance, people in the Kalahari have struggled with scant water availability for millennia. The problem is now being addressed. This is a great improvement over the scarcity of water their great, great, great .... forbearers had to endure.

 

[DBT]

Wrong thread?

It is, demonstrably, a dangerous cult that has led to the death or forced sterilization of millions. It's not unreasonable to call it a dangerous cult if it actually is.

I don't think that anyone here is suggesting such a thing.

 

[skepticalbip]

Wrong thread?

It is, demonstrably, a dangerous cult that has led to the death or forced sterilization of millions. It's not unreasonable to call it a dangerous cult if it actually is.

I don't think that anyone here is suggesting such a thing.

They haven't directly suggested it but, then again, they haven't seriously considered the options available to meet their goals such as enough decrease in population by 2050 to dramatically effect the co2 emissions.

 

[DBT]

It's what people, by and large, are doing. The fact that you heard in school about India's total fertility rate of 5.7 doesn't mean India has a fertility rate of 5.7. It had one 50 years ago, so either you're old, or your teacher didn't bother to fact-check whether what he learnt decades earlier still holds. India's TFR today is at 2.3 children per woman, and 1.8 among the urban population. In many large states even (Tamil Nadu, Jammu and Kashmir, Kerala, West Bengal, Punjab...) it is in the region of 1.6- 1.8.

And the same is true for many other countries.

Maybe too little, too late. Some nations still have high birth rates. And even in developed nations where birth rates are low, politicians try to stimulate growth through immigration and child endowment policies.


D-brief; population

''It’s no secret that the world’s population is growing. The 7.2 billion humans currently on Earth may represent only a fraction of what’s to come. And although previous studies have predicted that the world’s population will stabilize around 2050, a new study projects that the population may continue to grow, to the end of this century and beyond: to 9.6 billion in 2050 and 10.9 billion in 2100.

The Problem of Projections

One of the landmark studies on population projections came in 2001, in which researchers projected that the world’s population would stop growing before the century was out. In 2012, a report from the United Nations tempered that projection, pointing to a stabilization point sometime after the year 2100. But these UN projections have drawn criticism from other population researchers, mainly because they’re a little clunky. For example, the UN gets its “high” and “low” predictions by adding or subtracting half a child from the mean fertility rate it projects — not exactly a precise formula for predicting the probability of population growth in individual areas.

And according to Patrick Gerland, a senior analyst at the UN’s Department of Economic and Social Affairs, there’s an even more significant problem with these projections: They depend on the false assumption that fertility rates in Sub-Saharan Africa will decline as the continent’s growing population gets more and more densely packed together.''


For example;

''There were billboards and placards encouraging people to have children. A park in Moscow debuted special benches designed to gently slide couples closer together, all the better for canoodling. July 8 was designated “Family, Love, and Fidelity Day,” a new holiday created to encourage family formation. This was the third holiday Russia had created for such a purpose: In 2007, Sept. 12 was named “Family Contact Day,” a day on which workers were given time off and encouraged to, like, totally do it. Women having babies nine months later, on “Give Birth to a Patriot on Russia Day,” won fabulous prizes ranging from TVs to an SUV.

Russia has also instituted some more traditional natalist policies; for instance the government began a program that pays mothers $10,000 for the birth of a second child. Putin’s stated goal is that “the three-child family should become the norm in Russia.”

 

[DBT]

I don't think that anyone here is suggesting such a thing.

They haven't directly suggested it but, then again, they haven't seriously considered the options available to meet their goals such as enough decrease in population by 2050 to dramatically effect the co2 emissions.

Maybe it's impossible. Most probably is. Perhaps the best we can do is minimize the damage.... so that when the 'correction' comes, as it surely will, we'll come out of it in better shape than we otherwise would have.

 

[skepticalbip]

I don't think that anyone here is suggesting such a thing.

They haven't directly suggested it but, then again, they haven't seriously considered the options available to meet their goals such as enough decrease in population by 2050 to dramatically effect the co2 emissions.

Maybe it's impossible. Most probably is.

It is possible but only by the method that (i certainly hope) no one here would suggest. The other option is to drop the assertion that human overpopulation is THE problem and find another goal.